I dunno about you, but a party steeped in lies, infidelity, heartbreak, and despair — and ending in murder and, worse, a return to the midwest — just doesn’t seem all that fun.

I humbly suggest that market-droids and whatnot actually read the goddamn book first next time, lest we find ourselves invited, to, I dunno, a baby shower inspired by A Farewell to Arms.

It’s possible that you, like me, actually thought there were two well-received writers with minimally different names: the author of the much-lauded and long-running Culture series of hard-SF novels, called Iain M. Banks, and the literary novelist unconcerned with spaceships and robots and impossibly advanced spacefaring civilizations called Iain Banks.

Well, hold on to your hat, because if you’re as under a rock as I was about this, you’ll be shocked to hear that they’re the same guy. (The differentiating “M” probably says more about the degree to which science fiction is considered a ghetto than anything else I can think of.) Banks has written ten works in the Culture, plus some other non-Culture SF works, and in addition to 15 works of literary fiction, all since 1984. That’s a pretty solid output for either name, and a tremendous amount of output for one dude, but there you go. It’s little wonder the Times named him in their 2008 list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Anyway, I’d been curious about the Culture books for a while, and Googled around to see where I should start quite a while ago. The easy answer is to read them in publication order. If you do that, as I did, you’ll start with 1987’s Consider Phlebas. And you may well stop there, because Phlebas is a goddamn train wreck of a novel that really didn’t hold together well at all for me. It remains one of the few books I’ve simply abandoned despite being well over halfway done; I realized there was nothing that could happen that I would care about, and that I was wasting my time. Learn from my lesson.

I mentioned this reaction to some Culture-phile friends, and several of them said “Oh, gosh, yes, Phlebas is a terrible place to start. Try again with his second one, The Player of Games. It’s much, much better. You can ignore Phlebas completely.”

And so I did, and so it was. I really enjoyed it, and tore through it in a matter of days. Banks’ Culture is a phenomenally advanced spacefaring civilization spanning galaxies; they’ve solved the FTL problem thousands of years before, live predominately on enormous man-made orbital structures, and are mightier and more advanced than any civilization they encounter — not to mention considerably more enlightened. They exist in a post-scarcity state, where people may do more or less as they wish provided they don’t harm others. From Wikipedia:

The Culture stories are largely about problems and paradoxes that confront liberal societies. The Culture itself is an “ideal-typical” liberal society; that is, as pure an example as one can reasonably imagine. It is highly egalitarian; the liberty of the individual is its most important value; and all actions and decisions are expected to be determined according a standard of reasonability and sociability inculcated into all people through a progressive system of education. It is a society so beyond material scarcity that for almost all practical purposes its people can have and do what they want. If they do not like the behavior or opinions of others, they can easily move to a more congenial Culture population centre (or Culture subgroup), and hence there is little need to enforce codes of behavior.

In The Player of Games, Banks gives us Culture citizen Jernau Morat Gurgeh, a famous game player and scholar, who by hook and crook finds himself recruited by the Contact organization — responsible for finding, evaluating, and possibly contacting other cultures — to visit a far-away civilization called the Empire, steeped in power politics and (frankly) a sadistic glee in the suffering of others. The Empire is FTL-capable and includes several star systems, but like isolated central Asian tribes of the 19th century, cannot comprehend precisely how outclassed they are by the Culture — who, for their part, really have no interest in fighting at all. They mostly want to discourage or destabilize the existing retrograde, barbaric societal order in the hopes that something more reasonable will arise.

Their means are simple: the Empire is ordered entirely around a fiendishly complex game called Azad. Empire citizens learn it from childhood; performance in Azad tournaments determines one’s place in society. The winner of the periodic tournament becomes Emperor. Having made contact with these barbarians, the Culture send Gurgeh to enter this same tournament, figuring a “filthy alien” doing well at their holy game might be the push they need. Madcap hilarity ensues, obviously.

This whole setup may seem obvious — a game used as a metaphor for both state and the competition between states, and used to highlight the differences between modern egalitarian societies and repressive ones, etc. — but Banks handles it with a deft hand, so it doesn’t ever come close to collapsing under its own weight (which is, sadly, a common problem in the so-called “literature of ideas”). Plot and pacing are miles ahead of Phlebas. I’m intrigued by the Culture, by its interaction with other civilizations, and by the ways in which Banks explored those issues here. This is idea-SF done very, very well, and I’m no longer surprised about why Banks is so beloved.

It’s a certainty that I’ll read more Culture novels, and soon, but I do intend to savor them; the sad news this year — and what prompted me to finally go read Player — is that Banks announced about a month ago that he has terminal cancer, and is unlikely to live more than another year. There will be no more Culture novels; his literary novel The Quarry will be his last. In the Culture, one gets the idea that genofixing has long since done away with anything as banal as cancer; it’s a damn shame that the mind who gave us this fascinating far-future place cannot emigrate there instead of dying in Scotland.

I’ll make this brief: Oswalt is brilliant, and is a gifted writer, but he allows his comic sensibilities to get in the way here. The memoir portions of this collection of essays and assorted other bits are very strong, and I’d love to see more of that kind of thing from him — God knows he’s good at it, and it seems likely he’s got more such stories.

But what drags this book down are the filler bits where it feels like he’s trying to force standup material into essay form. He actually addresses this in the book, saying explicitly that he’s insecure about the personal essay portions and hopes to do more of them in the future as his comfort level increases; I hope so, too. I’d happily buy and read more. As for the rest, I found myself skimming rather than savoring those parts of this otherwise solid debut.

Zombie Spaceship Wasteland at Amazon.

Jesus, what tripe. This is a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person’s mystery is. It’s chock full of badly fleshed stock characters, entirely too many un-shocking developments that Flynn clearly sees as revelatory, and runs out of steam well before it runs out of pages. There is not a single “surprise” in the book that isn’t telegraphed WAY WAY WAY in advance, and that any halfway intelligent reader will see coming.

I’m reminded of something Dorothy Parker said: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

The only upside is that I now have a CLEAR CHOICE for “worst book read this year,” whereas before it was a tossup between The Night Circus and Empire State — neither are even in the same league of awfulness as Flynn, so congrats for that.

Look. I’m not quite sure what to say about this, other than it’s brilliant. There’s a lot going on here that has nothing to do with pencils, but also a shocking and unironic amount that is, clearly, 100% about pencils. It’s weird, and very hard to describe.

It’s short, fun, and perfectly apes the sort of mid-century trade guides that you may have encountered in your youth with something that’s not quite a wink and not quite sincerity while being a bit of both. I mostly read it because Rees was on the JoCo Cruise, and seemed remarkably funny — plus, possessed of a completely nonironic enjoyment and knowledge of pencils and pencil history. I’m still not sure what inspired him to do this book, but I can say it was fun to read.

Also, owing to a post-cruise email dialog with Rees and my own nerdery, I now have distinct preferences when it comes to pencils. Make of this what you will.