The pair make an amusing duo ironically Skaffen-Amtiskaw displays some of the most human emotions to be found in the book, at least superficially - the drone is often flippant, petty, sarcastic or even heartlessly cruel, whereas Sma mostly just appears dispassionately amused by the antics of the lesser societies she shepherds - when she’s not sleeping with their more attractive citizens.
Special Circumstances is mainly represented in Use of Weapons by sex-bomb Culturite Diziet Sma and her robot (or using the book’s label, ‘drone’) Skaffen-Amtiskaw. Enter The Culture’s Special Circumstances branch an organisation that appears to specialise in stopping these less advanced civilisations - humanoid, machine or alien - from going postal. There are plenty of other less developed societies out there causing galactic stinks. In one memorable scene, a Culture citizen says she’s constructing a new starship just for fun, although machines could do it easier and faster.īut (surprise, surprise), not every galactic resident is as advanced and urbane the peace-loving Culturites. Gravitational and biological manipulation interstellar travel, advanced weaponry, artificial intelligences with full citizenship rights: The Culture has it all.Īnd its citizens can live forever most of them choose to die after only three or four hundred years pursuing whatever pleasures or more work-like endeavours they are interested in. The Culture, a mongrel society composed of many humanoid life-forms and their intermingled offspring, has perfected virtually any technology science fiction literature has been able to dream up over the past century. Like many of Banks’ succeeding sci-fi efforts, the book is set in the far future a time when our galaxy is dominated by a complex and highly evolved society known only as The Culture.
Banks when he writes sci-fi, and just plain Iain Banks when he’s not. (A note for confused readers: Banks writes under Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons is a thought-provoking, if flawed, meditation on the use of violence as a tool for political and societal development by future highly advanced cultures, and the disturbing personal implications for those doing the dirty work it consists of.īut be warned: Many readers will undoubtedly find the book’s construction extremely frustrating and find it hard to keep going to the final pages.įirst published in 1990, Use of Weapons represents one of Banks’ first incursions into the science fiction field after the Scottish author took the mainstream literary world somewhat by storm with his debut novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984.
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