Review: “Against a Dark Background” by Iain M. Banks

Thumbs up for Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks. Science fiction.

This book is stuffed with so many juicy ideas they drool out the sides. Ancient artifacts of earthshaking power, crazy relatives, Solipsists with bad dress sense, android lawyers and plant-planets, oh my! An enormously fun adventure with a strong heroine of the classic I’ve-got-a-troubled-past-but-I’ll-still-kick-your-ass type. I will say that it did suffer somewhat from writerly self-indulgence; on a grumpy day I will flatly tell you that flashbacks and dreams should be restricted to one or less of each, per book; on a happy day I will still want to go over the middle of this book with a big red pen, slashing out needless flashbacks and the four thousand endless descriptions of the mist/sun/sea. But don’t get me wrong. I’d much rather read a self-indulgent work of genius than a trim, taut work of mediocrity. This book rocked. It was my first foray into Banks’s sci-fi, but it won’t be my last.

“Any one of these possibilities was so mind-boggling in its implications and ramifications – provided that one could understand or ever harness the technology involved – that the fact a Lazy Gun was light but massy, and weighed exactly three times as much turned upside down as it did the right way up, was almost trivial by comparison.”