Note: Retrospective Review
This review is NOT based on a recent reading of the work. I will have read it sometime before 2022 but still want to express my thoughts and comments, or just record that I have actually read it.
These reviews are included in the list of works by this author but do not count towards any of my reading goals or annual statistics!
It was either this or “Use of Weapons” that were my first introduction to the Culture universe, I think I picked the paperback sometime after its release in the late 1980’s or early 1990, and to be I didn’t know what to make of it at first. There is no easy introduction to the culture, every novel in the series drops you right in the middle, as if the author had everything already in his head and just took things for granted. Indeed, based on the big notebook published posthomously this is pretty much the case.
Anyway, this is the interleaved story of the changer and the endangered Culture “Mind” fleeing from a lost battle and hiding out on a planet quarantined by god-like powers as a memorial to its dead civilization. There some great locations, the doomed orbital, the temple visited by the rather hopeless bunch of mercenaries, and the command system on the dead planet. There are some great battle scenes and we learn much about the conduct and the participants in the Idiran war.
This is not the Culture at its best, this is the culture falling back under heavy assault from an implacable enemy (there are even supplementary chapters, essentially very long footnotes that explain the back ground to the war and include statistics for armamentophiles as Iain calls them in a later book.
There are some great characters but as war often seems to mean there are no true heroes here - most of the main characters do questionable, if understandable things.
Read this one for the battle scenes and for completeness, not as an uplifting comfort read!