SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

I love this ending. But I know I am in the minority.

Not much of a chapter, really. Very short. Shorter even, I think, than the prologue.

I had thought of making this thread about the entire ending. Do you think I should, Jon?

To include the Appendices and whatever comes next? (I can't remember since I've been wracking my brain over in the Dream Casting thread. :)

Yeah.

So I expanded this section to take us right through to the end of the book. It includes

14. Consider Phlebas
Appendices: the Idiran-Culture War
Reasons: the Culture
Reasons: the Idirans
The war, briefly (abstract of main text)
Dramatis personae
Epilogue

So there we go. We're finished the chapter a day, thingee.

I was so bummed to read that all the Changers died in the war. I was really hoping the Changers would appear in more Culture books. Like a flip-side Horza Changer character.

Also: I loved this line "Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion (+/- .3%)"

I was sad for the Changers, but it sounded about right to me too. That was a great line in the history. I liked the entire history, actually it was a nice touch, and I don't usually like those sorts of things. I figure Banks must have done it, though, because he knew he was never coming back to that war. I haven't finished all the Culture books yet, but I haven't seen that war pop up again.

Yeah, as soon as I finished the epilogue, I had to pepper my husband (who's a crazy Banks fan) with questions.

I wish we could put humans on a logarithmic sentience scale.

I really didn't understand the purpose of the "where are they now" bits, unless it was to put the characters and concepts completely to bed, like Banks was just plain done with them.

Yeah, probably just closure.

I understand that all of the other culture novels are pretty much stand-alone, I.e., they don't revisit these same characters. so I assume that the follow up bits are because he's done. or maybe just because horza, being off on his own little quest, was fully unaware of the bigger picture, and banks just wanted to share.

That's a good point, Michelle. It's a Lawrence of Arabia style "sideshow of a sideshow," but the players are interesting enough to fill us in about.

I thought the Dramatis Personae helped add realism and just a little more characterization. There were also some nice tragic touches with Balveda (now we know only the machines survived the incident on Schar's World in the long run) and the source of "The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two. . ."

What surprises and confuses me is the dating of the war. Here I was picturing this as hundreds of thousands of years in the future, and now we find out it all happened in the fourteenth century! So what are all these human species doing in space? Way to spring something weird on you in the last pages.

Balveda actually visits Earth in the seventies or eighties when the Culture comes calling on us. It's in his book of short fiction, The State of the Art

But she died in 1813. . . Should be interesting to see how that works.