Human Friendly

My new security light looks awfully familiar...

I started 2019 off with a brilliant wander round Tatton Park. It’s beautiful all year round but the mid-winter light really sets off all the thousands of undulations of the hills.

DAY 7 of 7: In which I claim an authors' entire lifetime output is one of my favourite books.

IAIN (M) BANKS. I struggled and utterly failed to decide which of his books is my favourite because they are all incredible. Even his duff ones are still incredible (I haven't actually read Canal Dreams, which he wrote off as a bit crap). He is the third member of my triumvirate of favourite authors, the other two being Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams; the work of these three authors forms a very large part of the basis of my outlook and personal philosophy. They're the giants of my world.

His non-scifi books, published as Iain Banks, fall into three main camps: 1) The exploration of real life from the perspective of someone who has lived through some very weird stuff and made dreadful choices, such as The Crow Road, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, Stonemouth. These are bracing poetic scrambling hikes through crazier lives than your own and they're hypnotic. 2) I'm a cult, he's a cult, everyone here's a cult. This is a cult, you're in a cult. Everything is a cult. The Business, Whit, (kind-of) Song of Stone. These are pretty much dissections of society and they're intense. Everything is religion and rational social behaviour is being in denial about insane rules and the only way to escape is to die or to control the rules. 3) Iain have you been partying with Philip K Dick? Walking on Glass, The Bridge, Transitions etc. The Bridge might be my actual favourite of Banks' because it is bonkers. It's the most perfect dreamscape I ever read.

His scifi books are published as Iain M Banks and I want to live in them. His fictional pan-human civilisation, "The Culture", is a post-scarcity civilisation far beyond current political definition (I've read them described as anarchist but this is unhelpfully reductive). These books involve huge space habitats, godlike intelligence, wars in heaven and hell, incursions by artefacts from other universes, big tripodal cat people, big tripodal cone people, big tripodal saddle people, horrifying cannibalistic octopuses, AI pals, galactic wars, the after-effects of said wars and, in one beautiful story, an effectively immortal man choosing to die in 1977 New York. His other non-Culture scifi is just as brilliant and mental - Feersum Endjinn is to Iain M Banks what The Bridge was to Iain Banks.

I could literally talk enthusiastically for days about Iain Banks. I hope he's collaborating on something really epic with Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut up in atheist heaven.

Also he wrote a lovely book about whisky.

DAY 6: Cheat day number 1: I classify three books as one, which is still more reasonable than what I've got planned for tomorrow.

Also there are a couple of spoilers below, but I regret nothing considering these books are fifty years old. In fact they're older than that.

Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, Foundation & Empire, Second Foundation) is the Lord of the Rings of sci-fi. Asimov isn't an elegant writer - his prose is the definition of functional - but good grief the scale of all this along with the craftsmanship of the story and the world building is staggering.

Quick summary: galactic empire, awesome capital city planet (Trantor), super-genius with method of predicting the future of civilisation (Hari Seldon), empire going to fail, need to shorten gap between fall of empire and start of next, solution? FOUNDATION PROTECTING SEEDS OF CIVILISATION

And then it all goes fine and it's incredibly straight forw-NO ACTUALLY it's an incredibly complex process which takes many generations and layers upon layers of contingency and secret planning.