Like most utopias, it’s discovered and explored by a stranger, an outsider, the man the Culture knows as Zakalwe. It’s a utopia perhaps unique in literature: almost every reader would like to live there. In it, the Culture-a Galaxy-spanning post-scarcity civilization-is exuberantly explored with the joy of a new discovery.

It wasn’t the first published, but it was the first written. Use of Weapons is the first Culture novel. Limited: 400 numbered cloth bound copies signed by Ken MacLeod Lettered: 26 leatherbound copies, signed by Ken MacLeod, housed in a custom traycase It is the clear product of a master storyteller who died too soon, leaving a vast, indelible impression behind. This is science fiction as it should be written: flamboyant, endlessly inventive, and constantly, compulsively readable.

Eventually, the two narratives will intersect, culminating in a revelation both surprising and inevitable.ĭespite its place in an ongoing series of thematically related books, Use of Weapons is an independent novel that can be read and enjoyed both by newcomers and by the author’s many longtime fans. A second, complementary narrative proceeds in reverse order, moving backward in time to encompass the origin and history of Zakalwe’s involvement with the Culture. Zakalwe’s quest is told in straightforward chronological order. His job: to travel to a remote star system currently drifting into political instability and make contact with a former colleague named Beychae. The first of these tells the story of Zakalwe’s latest mission on behalf of the Culture. His story, which dominates the novel, proceeds along two narrative paths. The protagonist of Use of Weapons is Cheradenine Zakalwe, an “outsider” recruited by the Culture’s Special Circumstances division to serve, wherever needed, as a roving galactic operative.

Its purpose: to intervene, often with unintended consequences, in the affairs of less developed civilizations. The Culture is the designation for a vast conglomerate of advanced races populated by human, humanoid, and artificially intelligent entities. First published in 1990, Use of Weapons was the third novel in the series, and it remains one of Banks’s most astonishing – and complex – accomplishments. The heart of his achievement was a sequence of novels featuring his signature creation: The Culture. Banks produced some of the most memorable science fiction of the 20 thcentury. In the course of a varied and prolific career, the late Iain M.

Muse of Fire by Dan Simmons