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Title: State of the Art by Ian Banks ISBN: 1-85723-030-2 Publisher: Firebird Distributing Pub. Date: 01 January, 1991 Format: Paperback |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Simply the best sci-fi short story of the last 20 years.
Comment: Look at it this way - State of The Art is a great short story with some additional filler between the covers. But what a great short story it is. State of The Art finds the Culture arriving at Earth in 1978. By all accounts, the outlook is bleak for the human race. Contact, and our favorite Culture gal Dziet Sma, have to decide whether to get in touch with a world locked in a seemingly desperate arms race and the slow and painful destruction of the planet's ecosystem. Banks casts an ascerbic eye over the "state of the art" - both the Culture's and Earth's. By setting the story in the recent past, the reader knows that if the Culture had turned up just 10 years later the whole story would be different. Or would it? Sma and her crew-mates travel around the world sampling the delights and the horrors of Earth. Despite various cosmetic changes, is the planet in any better shape than it was 21 years ago? Is the Earth beyond hope? In a fitting gesture to the Culture's perverse tolerance for dissent, a crew member decides to stay. Why? And what, asks Banks, makes us human - and the Culture alien? A clever, philosophic and beautifully written story. Worth the price of the book alone.
Rating: 5
Summary: Execellent, thought-provoking.
Comment: In "State of the Art" Banks gives us an powerful insight into our own culture, its greed, politics, and notion of what it means to be "human."
As with the very best science fiction writing, Banks challenges the reader. His gritty writing style, coupled with the slick high-technology Culture clashing with 1960's Earth politics, sets the stage for a explosion of ideas. Many of these ideas fly directly in the face of common wisdom (at least for what *we* consider is wisdom) and forces the reader to reevaluate our own mind-set. Scary stuff indeed.
In one of the most telling passages, alien characters play a party game -- describe earthlings in one word. Replies include: industrious, curious and insane. One alien replies "MINE!" A very telling exclamation of modern Earth.
I'd rank "State of the Art" as Banks' best work to date - which is certainly a big complement. I'd recommend the book for any sci-fi fan, or - more importantly - any person who believes that capitalism is the only way for the future. You may not agree with Banks, but at least he gets you thinking
Rating: 5
Summary: Great sampling of his brilliance
Comment: There are a few versions of this floating around. The one pictured on top of this page is the one I'll be talking about and is a collection of short fiction. There's at least one other published earlier that only contains the title story. "The State of the Art" is probably what this book is best known for, it's over a hundred pages long and thus dominates by far all of the other stories in the volume. It's also by far the best, probably because the length allows Banks to really run with his ideas and themes. Basically his ultra-advanced Culture runs into Earth circa 1977 and decides to hang around and observe for a bit. This allows Banks to indulge in quite a bit of social commentary in the form of "aliens telling us what we do wrong" but he keeps it balanced,... some of the Culture think Earth is a great place and there are more than a few arguments that the Culture itself is stifling and stagnant (not that these are new arguments to anyone who has read the other Culture novels), all in all it feels like a complete novel as opposed to a novella, and just about everything works. The book is worth it just for that story. Fortunately the others are all pretty decent, most are pretty short and thus don't have as much impact either because they're just downright weird (the one with the sentinent tree or whatever was just odd) or experimental (the last story especially, I suspect I missed a wagon-load of comments on British society) but most of the others, such as the other Culture story or the guy stuck in the astronaut suit work just right and show the depth and extent of Banks' vision. He's not concerned with working in just SF or just genre fiction or "just" anything, his stories run the gamut and are unmistakeably his, in whatever genre or strange mix thereof. These new to Banks would be wise to sample this and see what he's capable of before moving onto the (hard as it is to believe) vastly better novels. I wish I could say he's underrated, but it wouldn't be true.
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Title: USE OF WEAPONS by Iain Banks ISBN: 0553292242 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 March, 1992 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: CONSIDER PHLEBAS by Iain Banks ISBN: 0553292811 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 September, 1991 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks ISBN: 0061053562 Publisher: HarperCollins (paper) Pub. Date: February, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND by Iain Banks ISBN: 0553292250 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 July, 1993 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Feersum Endjinn by Iain Banks ISBN: 0553374591 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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