tl;dr

A middling collection elevated by the novella ‘The State of The Art’.

opening remarks

The internet tells me that The State of The Art by Iain M. Bank’s isn’t a novel but a collection of short stories, two of which are set in the Culture Universe.  The edition I’m reading sports a very dull cover.  The one from Nightshade Press is much better.

knee-jerk observations

‘The Road of Skulls’, the opening story, isn’t the most thrilling of starts.  It’s about two men on a horse and carriage (the driver fast asleep) travelling across the eponymous skull road.  In the distance is the City, a destination they never seem to reach, a destination that seems to be producing an endless supply of skulls.  I suppose it’s a metaphor for imperialism and conquest.  Anyway, it has this neat bit:

‘In ‘A Gift From The Culture’ (the first of two Culture tales) Wrobik Sennkil, owing a significant chunk of cash to the wrong sort of people, is given the choice of shooting down a starship, due to land shortly on the planet Vreccis, or suffer the consequences.  Usually blasting a ship out of the sky wouldn’t be possible but Wrobik is an ex-citizen of the Culture.  He’s handed a weapon, keyed to culture DNA, that his society would view as obsolete (or outdated) but still has enough firepower to destroy a ship. It’s a fine enough story, with a downbeat, albeit predictable, ending.  What I do find interesting, something I noted in the previous Culture novels, is that Banks isn’t frightened to deal with the complexity of gender identity, even if I’m not convinced he gets it right.

I laughed out loud reading ‘Odd Attachment’, a first contact story that goes violently wrong and involves a smidge of toilet humour.  It’s also a story of unrequited love… just not in the way you expect.

‘Descendant’* is a tale of survival – a man and his smart suit.  They were both on an orbital before it was attacked and destroyed.  The suit got them both down safely on the featureless, rocky planet below.  The man injured, the suit damaged they have to walk 100 days to reach a base where they should find help, assuming the base still exists.  It’s a tense, claustrophobic story that, aside from survival, also explores sentience and machine intelligence.  The ending has a nasty bite to it as well.

*’Descendant’ might also be a Culture story, which would make it the third in the collection.  I’m sure the Bank’s experts reading this blog can confirm or deny its provenance.

Aliens looking to use our sun as a dumping site for their less than perfect technology accidentally send that junk to Earth.  This is the premise for ‘Cleaning Up’ a comedy/satire about corporate greed, with a touch of the absurd, where one alien’s rubbish is cutting edge technology to us earthlings.  Not as funny as ‘Odd Attachment’ but still entertaining.

‘Piece’ is Banks take on religious fundamentalism that references Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and ends with the Lockerbie disaster.   While I have clear memories of the tragedy, I can’t recall whether the bombing was initially attributed to Islamic terrorism.  Since then things have become clearer and muddier – in 2003 Gaddafi accepted blame though he never admitted to ordering the attack and in 2014 an Iranian spy, who defected to Germany, pointed the finger at Ayatollah Khomeini.

The overall sentiment, though, is that the attack was politically rather than religiously motivated which does somewhat undermine the ending of Banks’ story, which links Lockerbie to Muslim extremism.  There’s also a whiff of the strawman to the piece when our narrator argues with one of his Muslim students about Rushdie’s controversial novel.  The story has not aged well.

Although it’s the penultimate story, ‘The State of the Art’ is the centrepiece of the collection, a 30,000-word novella which sees the Culture visit Earth to assess whether they should make first contact.  Our narrator is Diziet Sma (you may recall her from such Culture novels as The Use of Weapons) who, like some others on board The Arbitrary, has been tasked to travel down to the planet to live amongst the locals.  One of Sma’s friends, Dervley Linter, also goes planetside, but unlike Sma who finds Earth equally repulsive and fascinating, Dervley has fallen in love with the planet.  A good deal of the plot is, therefore, a discussion between Sma and Dervley, with Sma trying to convince her mate to come back to The Arbitrary and Dervley defending the beauty of Earth.  The novella is an opportunity for Banks to work through those things he loves and hates about humanity, but also juxtapose the Culture’s stale perfection against Earth’s messy vibrancy.

It’s more than just the typical alien comes to Earth and laughs out our bizarre customs narrative, Banks genuinely shines a light on the pros and cons of both societies.

The final story, ‘Scratch’ is a mostly incoherent stream of consciousness about nuclear devastation (I think).  Odd way to end the collection.

The Gist Of It

The State of The Art is a middling assortment of Bank’s short fiction, elevated by the title novella.  Aside from ‘Scratch’ which is an experimental mood piece rather than a narrative, none of the stories are outright terrible; they’re just not very memorable. Even the comedic ones, which I did find funny, have the lasting quality of a throwaway gag.  The one stand-out amongst the shorter pieces is ‘Descendant’ which might also be a Culture story, it’s not clear, and is very good indeed.  Still, it’s ‘The State of The Art’, the novella, that shines brightly.  It continues the discussion raised in the previous novels, that is Banks exploration of the advantages and drawbacks of a true utopia.