Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

Paperback, 1995

Status

Available

Call number

813

Genres

Science Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Orbit (1995), Paperback

Description

Fiction. Science Fiction. HTML:From science fiction master Iain M. Banks comes a standalone adventure of one woman on the run in an isolated galaxy. Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the civilization based around the planet Golter. Now she is hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes that she is the last obstacle before the faith's apotheosis, and her only hope of escape is to find the last of the apocalyptically powerful Lazy Guns before the Huhsz find her. Her journey through the exotic Golterian system is a destructive and savage odyssey into her past, and that of her family and of the system itself.

User reviews

LibraryThing member Penforhire

Iain M. Banks has a sense of whimsy that tickles me. I couldn't find any direct reference to his Culture works but the Lazy Gun certainly makes one think of an, um, uncultured Culture technology.

The abrupt time shifts border on an experimental exposition. He gets right up to that edge of madness

but I felt he stayed just this side of the line. I could follow his plot but you do have to pay attention. He punishes the lazy reader, lol.

Okay, here's the thing. His individual scenes, worldbuilding, and character development of the protagonist are stellar. The ultimate antagonists are also well developed. I'd rate them higher than four stars out of five. But the story is strung together in such an improbable jumpy mess. It was as if the story was a thin excuse for Banks to write a bunch of clever scenes and expound about an amazing backwater (isolated) planet.

I greatly enjoy "lost technology" themes and this book has a doozy. Between embargoed technology and eons of cyclical rise and fall, Banks makes the combination of high and low tech just plausible enough to make a laser pistol versus crossbow confrontation go down without a mental hiccup.

And despite my "story is a mess" complaint, Banks manages to tell a many thousand year story through the eyes of one ordinary-but-of-nobility human character. That is extremely hard to do without resorting to boring infodumps. He avoids those, for the most part. The antagonists are ultimately developed through the protagonist's eyes. That was quite a feat as well.

Oh, and the ending chapters really knock the shine off the story too. To hugely paraphrase, "Heh, heh, heh. I am the ultimate power!" Twirls mustache. "No you're not. I am the ultimate power!" Swings light saber.

Ugh! What a hoary mess of an ending.

And who is tagging this work as "hard SF?" Give me a break. This is even more fantasy than SF. Do you think the story would change much if you substituted elf for android, magic wand for lazy gun. or geas spell for crystal virus?

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LibraryThing member iayork

Long live the Useless Kings: Definitely great vintage Banks SF, which is not set in the Culture universe.

Golter, the planet where the action takes place, is old and extremely isolated and has suffered many rises and collapses of civilizations, some so advanced that their technology now looks like

magic. The overall impression is a cross between Vance's Dying Earth and the Mote in God's Eye, liberally sprinled with cyberpunkish dystopia and Banks' tongue-in-cheek anti-capitalism.

The heroine, Sharrow, chases after the Lazy Gun, a long-lost military artifact of tremendous power, while being chased by a religious cult dedicated to killing her. She rounds up her old war buddies for one last hurrah and they are off to the races, punctuated with flashbacks about the war and Geis and Breyguhn, her cousin and half-sister, respectively.

Through the flashbacks it gradually becomes clear that guilt largely motivates Sharrow. Guilt about the previous time she found a Lazy Gun, and caused thousands to die, seems to be what separated her from Miz, her former lover. Sharrow is said to be a star cyberhacker, yet never does any hacking. Turns out that she killed her android butler as a teenager, doing a hacking prank. Yet all that guilt is only implied, never in the forefront.

The rest of Sharrow's team is pretty sketchily characterized, but that's OK as Sharrow, her family, and Golter are the only characters who really matter.

The plot rambles around somewhat and takes us on a tour of Golter's bizarre social/political/technological landscape, thus allowing Banks to pull out some truly bizarre societies to serve as a background to the main storyline.

It isn't too hard to guess how it will end, especially if you have read Banks before: it will end _BADLY_. But it is definitely a fun ride getting there.

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LibraryThing member ChrisRiesbeck

Not a Culture novel, and, according to Wikipedia, a rewrite of an earlier effort. It's space opera, long but solidly written, but without the nuanced cultural debate you might expect from Banks. There's one central character, female, whose story begins with a very traumatic childhood event. The

book then jumps many years ahead into a story line that is basically "hey, team, let's go on a quest."

This novel has my usual pet peeve with modern space opera: when things blow up, the body count always has to be in the 100s of millions. Near the end there's a nod to all the "spear carriers" who died along the way, but to me that's like characters in a bad movie saying "this is like a bad movie!" Saying there's cliche doesn't undo the cliche.

Probably the most interesting narrative technique is the gradual increasing occurrence of flashbacks as the book progresses, not only to fill in necessary references, but to highlight the character's gradual coming to term with her past. There's an unpublished epilogue that closes things off, but I think the book works better without it.

Recommended, as always, but not the best of Banks.

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LibraryThing member djfoobarmatt

I'm starting to cotton onto Iain Banks' morbid sense of humor. It must entertain him to create characters that you like and then kill them off. And then to have the hero of the book as someone quite unlikeable.

I found this book thought provoking, heart breaking in places, hilarious, well observed

and gripping.

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LibraryThing member wfzimmerman

A standalone novel by Banks describing the tragic plight of Thrale, a lonely inhabited planet surrounded by tens of millions of light-years of "dark background," with no neighbors. I never think that I've fully understood this book -- there are a lot of unexplained subtleties -- but I think it is

one of the most profound meditations I've ever read on the human condition. Here we are, on our own lonely planet, torn by war and suffering, against a dark background.

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LibraryThing member name99

Vicious stuff; the kind of thing you expect from Banks. The man is just amazing, an imagination more fecund than anything else I've ever encountered.

Like Use of Weapons we have the destructive sibling rivalry, like Consider Phlebas we have a grand tour, meeting strange and marvellous things along

the way.
But most important, in the background we have the *large* theme.
In the end, like the Culture novels, this is a book about the point of life.

The setting is a planetary system millions of light years from any other star and thus incapable of expanding beyond a very finite space. Given this limitation, civilizations have risen and fallen countless times. The current system is an extreme version of the 20th century west mixed with the medieval --- wealthy corporations as more powerful than states, excessive bureaucracy and legalism --- but the specific details are not that important.

The important issue is the question of should it be changed? And if so, too what? If it should be changed, how much suffering is justified in doing so? And what's the point of change, anyway; the new system will be just one more regime like countless regimes that have gone before.

What makes Banks so interesting (and so unpalatable to many readers) is that he has no answers to these questions, and that he doesn't have much faith in the stock answers society provides. IMHO, for the most part his SF books, including this one are arguments by example against the pat ways in which society answers these questions when they arise.

This book is especially upsetting in that he doesn't even offer up the hedonistic comfort of the Culture books, the idea that man is optimized for pleasure and might as well concentrate on that. All we get is a very Buddhist endless cycle of suffering with no escape.

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LibraryThing member bragan

A sprawling, imaginative science fiction action-adventure story full of fun stuff: bizarre cults, ancient artifacts, explosions, heists, daring escapes, treasure hunts, manhunts, mysteries of the past, surprise revelations, quirky ideas, life, death, and a darkly whimsical sense of humor. I will

admit that the narrative's habit of jumping rapidly back and forth in time on a scale of anything from hours to decades and of not always explaining key plot points immediately sometimes had me feeling briefly confused, but I think that's likely to be more my fault than Banks', as I read much of it in a state of serious sleep-deprivation. This is definitely a book you want to be awake for.

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LibraryThing member RobertDay

Banks' first science-fictional excursion outside the Culture, but we are on familiar territory here. It is his trademark mix of exotic environments, intrigue, extreme violence, clever technology, strange societies, governments and cults and lots of whizzing around in oddball transport. The

characters are fairly well fleshed out, and the whole thing races along at a fair pace.

Some commentators have said that the Culture is somewhere in the background, though I couldn't see any sign of it. Banks gives a very good sense of the age of the civilisation of Golter, with its periodic rises and falls of societies; and he hides a few interesting clues about how this world and its inhabitants differs from ours. The 'dark background' of the title refers to Golter's isolation in a region of space with no other star systems within easy reach.

Overall, a fun read (until the end - [nearly] All Die. O the embarrassment), though it might as well have been a Culture novel for all the difference not setting it within the Culture made.

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LibraryThing member ragwaine

Great writing, great ideas, harsh, relateable characters. Slow at times, plot not great.

LibraryThing member isabelx

They could see the nebulae, beautiful and distant and beckoning, and could tell that those faraway galaxies were composed of suns, other stars like Thrial, and could even guess that some of those suns too might have planets around them . . . but they looked in vain for stars anywhere near their

own.

The sky was full of darkness. There were planets and moons and the tiny feathery whorls of the dim nebulae, and they had themselves filled it with junk and traffic and the emblems of a thousand different languages, but they could not create the skies of a planet within a galaxy, and they could not ever hope, within any frame of likelihood they could envisage existing, to travel to anywhere beyond their own system, or the everywhere-meaningless gulf of space surrounding their own isolated and freakish star.
For a distance that was never less than a million light years in any direction around it, Thrial -- for all its flamboyant dispersion of vivifying power and its richly fertile crop of children planets -- was an orphan.

This book is a stand-alone, and not part of the Culture series, although I suppose it's possible that it takes place in the same universe, and that the isolated position of this star means that the Culture has never come calling.

As the book starts, Lady Sharrow is preparing to go on the run, as the Huhsz, a religious cult who murdered her mother and are determined to destroy the female line of her family, are about to be granted a year-long passport to track her down and kill her. Rather than going into hiding, Sharrow decides to go on the offensive, and track down the Lazy Gun that her ancestor stole form the cult, as its return will end the hunt. It's a strange idea, that giving people carte blanche to kill someone legally for a limited period would prevent assassinations. I can't see it working in reality, especially with a religiously motivated group like the Huhsz. Would they really just give up once the year was up?

But there are some really interesting concepts; a prison without locks, a tree that covers half a planet, and the city that was abandoned due to radiation which is now a city of androids, And of course the Lazy Guns. Lazy Guns are cool. So although I am a huge Culture fan, "Against a Dark Bacjkground" as equally good, just different.

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LibraryThing member imyril

Ironically, not as dark as I recall, which I think probably goes to show how dark modern fiction can be. However, this remains a nasty tale of family feuding and religious war against a backdrop of petty-minded galactic commercial interest. Peppered with throwaway references to technologies and

political structures that will never be explored, this is a journey into the shadowy past of heroine Sharrow's memory as she seeks the fabled artefact that will protect her from the Huhsz. More whimsical than much of the Culture novels, it's unclear whether this may be some pre-Contact civilisation sufficiently trapped in its own backwater to be left alone.

I enjoy this, although your mileage may vary - the structure of interlaced past/present can be confusing; the descriptions re overpowering; the characters wobble between caricature (Zefla - really? Geis - really?!) and variably likeable (Sharrow herself - perhaps best described as having poor impulse control and a vindictive streak); and the climax is... well, both a bit silly and rather heavy on Basil Exposition from all sides.

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LibraryThing member macha

this is the only Banks sf novel that lacks a Culture setting, and he wrote it more or less to prove he could. and he can. but it lacks something just the same - edge, maybe? those gorgeous displays of style? the usual layering? it's a fairly straightforward chronological narrative, with

establishing flashbacks. although it's sf, it has the sort of medievalist look and feel one might expect in a fantasy novel, and some of the robotic aspects aren't well folded in. also the protagonist never quite comes alive or engages enough to give the story the emotional weight it needs, although she gets plenty of air time: the undercurrents of her more intimate war with her sister, and her interactions with her own peers, suggest that she is rather more cold and calculating that she sees herself, or perhaps even wants to be (because it feels like she's writing her own eulogy on the ground), and uses people without regard for consequences, to get what she wants. this is probably the way her character is intended to be read, but somehow it doesn't really come off exactly right within the subgenre in which it is written - the sense in which she is broken is self-engineered, so we follow in her path with reservations that grow until we are viewing her with an enemy's eyes, at which point it becomes a subtle psychological study that doesn't shoehorn well into a space-opera mold. therefore not the best example of his work, though accessibly written, with some lovely descriptive passages and a lot of interesting different locales and political structures to explore on a single world. recommendable, and good as Banks is always good, but nevertheless a minor work, and from the author's PoV perhaps a failed experiment he did not repeat in a subgenre - though he adds a lot to it, since he's there - to which his considerable talents weren't best suited. the genre limits his options, and he writes at his best without limits.

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LibraryThing member AZ_Dude

To elude the Huhsz cult hunting to assasinate Lady Sharrow, she and her friends must find the Lazy Gun.

LibraryThing member clong

Against a Dark Background was my first Banks, and I came to it with high expectations (because of glowing praise for Banks on another book site which I follow). I would have to say that this book was a pretty big disappointment. Sharrow is one of the least sympathetic protagonists I can remember;

in fact of all the characters only the android is mildly interesting. The plot meanders with little rhyme or reason; people do stupid things with little reason but to move the plot from one dead-end to a new tableaux. The final confrontations of the last 100 pages or so are reasonably entertaining, but hardly sufficient payoff to compensate for the rest of the novel. All in all, I'd say skip this one. Fortunately, I have gone on to other Banks' books, and found them generally quite a bit better.

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LibraryThing member duhrer

"Against a Dark Background" is the first of Iain M. Banks' novels I've read that is not set in the "Culture" universe. If nothing else, he easily demonstrates that he doesn't need to fall back on the established conventions from those novels to spin a good yarn. This is a book with invention and

narrative detail to burn. Ideas that would have been the central premise of a science fiction novel written in the 1950s are tossed around like confetti.

As the title suggests, this is a darker work than "Player of Games" or "State of the Art" (I'd say it's on par with "Use of Weapons"). Sharrow, the central character is haunted and hunted by her past, and pursues her destiny as everything and everyone she loves is methodically stripped from her. In this sense, it is a punishing novel, establishing a raft of characters at length only to make their absence that much more painful.

The culture in which she and her team travel is space-faring and has progressed to peaks of scientific achievement and then descended into relative savagery. The star system in which the story is set has been shaped by conflict bred of isolation, similar to "The Mote in God's Eye". There is advanced science left over from earlier ages, which includes the "Lazy Gun", the MacGuffin for this particular journey. The "Lazy Gun" is a weapon that is almost cartoonish in its effects, I'm surprised the author stopped short of having it drop anvils on its victims. This makes a nice change from the usual doomsday device, all deus and machina, with very little humor.

I finally found a copy of "Trillion Year Spree", the sweeping history of Science Fiction by Brian Aldiss, and even in the first few pages, it's provided some relevant insights regarding gothic novels as the forerunners of Science Fiction novels:

"Other planets make ideal settings for brooding landscapes, isolated castles, dismal towns, and mysterious alien figures; often, indeed, the villians may be monks, exploiting a local population under the guise of religion."
-- "Trillion Year Spree" by Brian Aldiss (with David Wingrove)

This is indeed a gothic novel, full of moody environs, steeped in protracted mysteries and eventual revelations. On that level, it's straightforward enough, and in fact just a little disappointingly so. Where the novel really shines are in the details, the set pieces established along the way. Parts of the novel, such as the boat heist, the android city, and the train heist are compelling and enjoyable. The overarching plot is just the excuse the author gives himself to progress from set piece to set piece. I would urge anyone who enjoys compelling ideas and descriptive detail to just enjoy the individual squares in the quilt, and not to think too much about the overall design.

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LibraryThing member Frozeninja

This was the second of Banks' novels that I read, with the first being "Consider Phleblas" which I thoroughly enjoyed. That said I came to this book with high hopes, and for the most part they were thoroughly fulfilled.

I was hooked from the first six pages by the rather horrifying and gripping

prologue and from then on the book never lost my attention. It's the story of Sharrow, a rather whimsical woman who was the leader of an 8-man squad back in the much alluded to but never explained war. After the war ended she made her way with what was left of her squad, until several years later when they all went separate ways. Now she is hunted and tries to reuntie her squad to help her find the last "Lazy Gun", which she can exchange for her life. The Lazy Gun's being 8 intensely powerful weapons that for one reason or another had disappeared over the millenia until only one remained.

The story is told in the present, though there are flashbacks throughout the book which help to show the characters in another light, before the horrors that they faced at the end of the war. Overall I enjoyed this book, though I wasn't a huge fan of the ending, but that was only a slight niggle with what was a solid read.

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LibraryThing member readsallnight

"Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the civilisation based around the planet Golter. Now she is hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes that she is the last obstacle before the faith's apotheosis, and her

only hope of escape is to find the last of the apocalyptically powerful Lazy Guns before the Huhsz find her. Her journey through the exotic Golterian system is a destructive and savage odyssey into her past, and that of her family and of the system itself. "

This is the first of Iain Bank's sci fi's that I've read, and I've got to come straight out and say it was Bloody Brilliant :) Definitely makes me want to read more of his, and I'm excited to have found a sci fi writer I enjoy.

Having read one of his 'normal' fictions first, and not getting on well with it, I didn't have high hopes for this at all, but I found it completely unputdownable. I'm a huge fan of sci fi when it comes to TV and film, but up until now I've not found an actual author I've really liked in the genre. Thinking about it more carefully, there's one legendary exception to that statement, and that's "Ender's Game", which still rates up in my top 5 Best Books Ever.

As ever, I digress! back to AADB. It's set within a single solar system, completely isolated from the rest of the universe. It's a fascinating world, pretty dark as the title suggests, but there's also humour and love to be found amongst the harshness of the religious persecution faced by the heroine and her friends. The concept of the 'lazy gun' is both fascinating and terrifying, and for all the alienation felt from reading the antics of characters in a world so far removed from our own, there remain enough recognisable elements to keep the tale both relevant and indeed a little frightening to the earth-bound reader.

I'm not sure yet about working out a proper rating system for here, but for now I'll give this a "Damn Good Read".

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LibraryThing member closedmouth

Kinda disappointing, I didn't think Banks managed to make Sharrow a very interesting character, so I found I had a hard time caring about her reminiscences (and they don't really mean anything in the end anyway). I also found his handling of Sharrow's vulnerability to be rather unpleasent: for much

of the length, the main character is toyed with and tortured by two horribly sadistic characters and it almost feels like Banks is enjoying it. It's implied over and over that this character is weak and vulnerable, and that these men are able to dominate her physically in all situations (and delight in doing it), and then, when this theme appears to be moving towards a climax in a heavily guarded underground fortress, with some kind of payoff seemingly around the corner, her aggressors are suddenly wiped out indiscriminately through sheer dumb luck and she escapes unscathed using a magic car. I haven't seen an anti-climax like that in a long while.

There is some good in this (I felt the whole fjord debacle was well-executed), but the vignette-y, unfocused structure, long slow sections (ugh, that whole thing where they were trying to get the book from the monks or something, terrible), and especially the weak characterisation kinda killed it for me.

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LibraryThing member quondame

We aren't given much reason to give a damn about Sharrow, we aren't given any feeling for the connection between her and the remaining 4 of her original 7 virally bonded battle companions, and we have no sensory connection to the exotic landscapes they risk on the supposedly(because, really who

cares?) harrowing scavenger hunt of antiquities to find the one that will save Sharrow's life. If you like huge pointless body counts, gruesome dismemberment and think there is a point to saving a life by risking all the lives that matter, sure sink more hours than you can really spare in 644 pages of pleated plot that hides the near complete lack of ability to write more than isolated scenes. But that's only if you think that escaping after waking up in the custody of your enemies is a valid trope, because that happens repeatedly, past ad nauseam. Banks surely thinks well of himself, but no one else need bother.

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LibraryThing member Ma_Washigeri

3 and a half stars really... or maybe even 4 - I'm just being mean. There was quite a lot of torture in this one which I am never really comfortable with. Banks is one of the few writers that I can read with this level of violence. Early on with some of the Iain Banks novels I decided that it was

something Banks played with, but not something that he enjoyed. And that left me able to enjoy (although not quite the right word here) reading his books.

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LibraryThing member Anome

This is supposed to be a novel Banks wrote while still quite young, later published after the success of his other Science Fiction. Sad to say, it really shows. There are some clever ideas in here, but he hasn't really got the hang of it yet.

LibraryThing member dbsovereign

This is not a Culture novel, but still delivers. My only complaint is that there were times when the flashbacks were not always easily identifiable – perhaps a larger break in the text might have helped. Other than that, it’s one of Banks’ more cinematic forays with a strong female character

and a nice quest-driven plot.

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LibraryThing member AltheaAnn

Very, very good. It's less conceptual and more an adventure story than many of his other books - but it's a VERY good adventure story! Lots of action and violence, without neglecting depth of character & emotion.... very effective portrayal of a female protagonist by a male author too! (something I

find is rather rare...)

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LibraryThing member TheAmpersand

This one's exquisitely written and full of interesting ideas, which is more-or-less what you can expect from an Iain M. Banks book. But for whatever reason, "Against a Dark Background" failed to hold my attention like the Culture novels I've read, though I did manage to finish it. As usual, it's an

example of the shiny, widescreen version of SF. The impossibly skilled and sexy Lady Sharrow, a high-born noble in a universe that's a strange mix of the futuristic and the atavistic, must flee a religion that's made her death central to their belief system while she hunts amusingly strange artifacts for fun, for immense profits, and sometimes for her family's very survival. Fantasy tropes -- castles, hermits, swords, and mounts -- pop up here and there while the lady and her chemically-bonded band of adventures confront all manner of dangers. The author doesn't skip out on the blood and pain -- there are some simply excruciating deaths here -- and he constructs some lovely set pieces, most memorably the one that describes the minute-by-minute uncertainties of a crash-landing on a snowbound planet. To show that he's not the average paperback writer, Banks then seamlessly incorporates the long-term effects of this event into his character and narrative. And then there's also the curious pull of the artifacts themselves, specifically that of a lazy gun, a weapon that seems to fool the laws of physics while exerting an inexplicable psychological pull on those who seek it. There's a forest planet and a city built on barges and a nascent religion that hopes to conquer the entire system, just in case you needed more.

But I also thought that there was something missing here, among all the impeccably wrought sentences that drape themselves comfortably across the page. Maybe the fact that the world that Banks describes here isn't as cleanly futuristic as that of his Culture novels that got to me. Set on a star system located by unlucky chance thousands of light years from any others, this world seems to feel the weight of its own limitations. Sometimes the medieval throwbacks or anachronisms suggested that something had gotten stuck, both in the book and in the civilization it describes. Or it's the lack of the Culture itself, that protean, hard-to-define organism that provides a convenient thread through Banks's other works. Or maybe it's just that there's far too much of "Against a Dark Background": while it has its charms, any book, however charming, might struggle to sustain itself over nearly eight hundred pages. Or maybe it's just the fact that Lady Sharrow fulfils every science fiction's checklist a bit too perfectly. Lasers, castles, spaceships, motorcycles, and hot, chemically engineered sex? I'm glad nobody saw me reading this one on the bus.

If you're a big space opera fan, it's possible that none of this will really bother you. But I read Banks between literary novels, and so this one got a bit too purple for me at times, not to mention a bit too long. It's not bad book in its genre, and, for two lousy bucks at the Kindle Store, I certainly got my money's worth. But in my opinion, "Against a Dark Background" just isn't the strongest thing that this author ever wrote.

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LibraryThing member jkdavies

Fantastic... I love this one, it was the first of his sci-fi non Culture ones that I read and I resented it slightly to begin with for not being an extension of that universe, but grew to love it, especially in the monastery

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