A Few Notes

And we're off!

Well... first, a few notes. Literally even, in a moment. In order to write about Banks's fiction in a (hopefully) meaningful way, I'll care about spoilers and things like that about as much here as I do in general, which is to say not very much at all. I won't go out of my way to ruin some twist or other just for the hell of it, but I'll be writing this with some sort of familiarity with the texts in mind.

If you haven't read any of the Culture stories you are, of course, welcome to read on anyway, but (as I'll tell anyone who'll listen) they're very, very much worth the read. For a quick introduction to what this is all about, or for those who've started reading but gotten somewhat confused, I heartily recommend Banks's own A Few Notes on the Culture. As for where to start... well, the "series" isn't united by anything other than the common universe, themes, author, and so on; with only some few exceptions, there's no real chronology or continuity of characters or anything like that. I see The Player of Games recommended as a place to start quite often. My first one was Excession, and I loved it right off the bat.

Who am I? Just a Swedish twentysomething who's spent more time than is perhaps advisable in academia, with a focus on what they insist on calling Comparative Literature on our English thesis abstracts. I suppose "Literature Science", as it's called here, would cause some consternation among the, you know, actual sciences. My BA thesis was (naturally) on a Banks novel, though the text concerned was The Wasp Factory and not one of his Culture or even sci-fi novels.