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Amazon.co.uk Review
After a harrowing battle flashback, the scene shifts to one of the Culture's wonderfully landscaped, ring-shaped artificial worlds called Orbitals. A ghastly light is awaited in the sky from distant suns detonated in the war of Consider Phlebas eight centuries earlier; an occasion for sombre festivity, pyrotechnics, and a memorial symphony from exiled alien composer Ziller. Meanwhile another tortured member of Ziller's race--aggressors and victims in that more recent civil war--arrives on a mission whose dreadful nature emerges through fragments of slowly returning memory. Elsewhere, in the exuberantly imagined airsphere home of floating "behemothaurs" almost too huge to imagine, the clue to what's happening falls belatedly into inexperienced hands...
While scattering red herrings and building tension for his final burst of literal and moral fireworks, Banks shows us around the Orbital in sensuous, lyrical travelogues. Rich scenery, high living, low comedy and dangerous sports contrast with reflections on mortality and the lingering aftershock of both those wars, recalled by ravaged veterans. Look to Windward culminates with deft twists, inversions, parallels, and savage justice, as unexpected as we expect from this author. Recommended. --David Langford --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
A great book (NEW SCIENTIST )
Banks keeps ratcheting up the suspense (GUARDIAN )
A mordant wit, a certain savagery and a wild imagination (MAIL ON SUNDAY )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best stuff has an "M",
By A Customer
This review is from: Look to Windward (Hardcover)
I REALLY don't understand all those previous reviews which give this one or two stars. I think Look to Windward is a beautiful, subtle meditation on life, death, revenge, heaven, eternity, oblivion. The final dialogue between the Hub Mind and Quilan is just wonderful - I had tears in my eyes. The people who compare this to the previous Culture novels, don't really seem to get it (IMHO). Banks has written several Culture novels, but can anyone really say that any two are similar in style and content to each other. I don't think so. And that is part of Banks' genius - he can create a whole universal canvas which is entirely consistent from one novel to the next, but still have the ability to place individual stories within their own framework and context. Look to Windward contains some of the best imagery Banks has produced - I particularly like the idea of the light from the dying star arriving at the orbital millenia (in real time) after the war which caused it has ended, and being witnessed for a second time by those that took part in that war. I also wouldn't mind a go at lava-rafting (backed-up or not!). I read all of Iain Banks' books as soon as they come out, but I've got to admit that I think he writes his best stuff these days with an "M" in his name. Wasn't too taken with the Business (although that did seem to me to be an attempt to place the Culture in the context of the real world - how the Culture might have begun??), and Song of Stone was an interesting exercise in form, but not much else. Look to Windward (and Inversions before it) is fine writing though. I hope it isn't the case (as has been rumoured) that he wont be writing any books (of any kind) for a while.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A superb addition to the Culture saga,
By
This review is from: Look To Windward (Paperback)
Following the baffling (or intriguing, depending on your point of view) mediaeval shenanigans of Inversions, Iain M Banks has genuinely delivered the goods with this one, giving the Culture aficionados what they *really* wanted. "Look to Windward" is a staggeringly imaginative chunk of hard sci-fi, with some of the strongest characterization and mind-bogglingly grandiose scope since Banks' classic "Consider Phlebus". Who could not empathize with the battle-weary, bereaved Quilan whose tortured soul seeks oblivion, and yet who could not condemn him for the ghastly mission he agrees to undertake? Has absolute power begun to corrupt the Culture? Can they honestly still claim the moral high ground after their ill-judged and catastrophic intervention in the war? This novel touches on some pretty profound ethical dilemmas along the way. There is also much wise and possibly prophetic investigation into the nature of the soul, heaven and omnipotence. Please don't get the impression that this is all heavy stuff though; there is much amusing and witty dialogue between the chief protagonists. Some of Ziller's bon mots will have you in stitches! To the delight of the Culture anoraks, there is also a huge amount of information about Culture minds/hubs, personality backups, orbitals and (delightfully!) a roll call of some of the more eccentric Culture ship names. How I would love to visit Masaq' Orbital; I guarantee you will too!
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Go on, give yourself a treat!,
By vfhackenbacker (UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Look To Windward (Paperback)
Iain Banks has single-handedly re-invented the whole Space Opera genre, and this book is his best yet. He makes Foundation, Norstrilia and Known Space - and any other fictitious universe I have ventured into - look predictable, folksy and unimaginative. The only drawback to reading Banks is his penchant for putting at least one scene of stomach-churning nastiness into each book. Worrying about what horrors may lie in wait on the next page can make it hard for sensitive souls like me to enjoy reading him. Be reassured that in this one the scene in question comes only a few pages from the end, is very short, and is done with such a light touch that it almost fails to offend.
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