Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Recommended authors

jismulkstis · 02 Mar 2003, 13:21 · from urth-v0303.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jismulkstis at att.net
Subject: (urth) Recommended authors
Date: Sun, 02 Mar 2003 13:21:13 +0000
Message-ID: <urth-v0303-2998 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0303/2998.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


I strongly recommend Iain M. Banks Culture novels:


Consider Phlebas
Use of Weapons
Excession=20
Inversions=20
Look to Windward

While stylistically unlike Gene Wolfe, Iain M. Banks writes
novels about the moral ambiguity that comes with wielding=20
vast power.   He can also be very dry, sarcastic, and funny,=20
but these are in no way humorous novels.  The Culture is a=20
detailed, well thought out society and his books are better
at creating the old "sense of wonder" (especially Excession)
than anything I've read in many years.

You have to like a world where the spaceships are far more
intelligent than their passengers and give themselves names like=20
"Honest Mistake" and "Ethics Gradient".

Those who are hooked on a more medieval setting should=20
try "Inversions".

I'd like to know what others think of Banks, but this=20
may not be the appropriate forum.=20

Muskrat

--=20




An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net