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Against a Dark Background
Iain M. Banks

A long journey during which humans gradually decrease in number, value, and importance while artificial intelligence assumes an ever-expanding role. A common theme in Banks' science fiction - the relationship between humans and technology.

The main character, Sharrow, becomes one of Banks' strongest but also darkest female depictions. Describing a personal condition she says, "Like certain exotic diseases, and unlike love, synchroneurobonding is for life."

Banks has a flair for creating memorable personality pictures. See the persona that develops from this convoluted way of saying "no" - "Ah, dear lady, it is with the greatest embarrassment that I have to confess that in this matter I must - with a degree of anguish you may well find hard to credit - relinquish my absolute commitment to the fulfilment of your every whim. Put plainly, I am not at liberty to divulge that information."

And as usual, vivid descriptions like "two metres of utter voluptuousness with a brain" and "bouts of gossip whose mind-boggling pettiness is rivalled only by its poisonous malevolence."

Lots of violence in this book but with a philosophical basis - "destruction can be a positive act, too; the clearing out of rot, the exicsing of diseased tissue, the brushing away of the old to make room for the new."

And lots of statements that encourage reflection: "Sometimes what appear to be utterly inconsequential actions have the most enormous results. Chance makes the casual momentous. It is the fulcrum upon which the levers of action rest."

The plot's not as intricate and engaging as Player of Games, more on the level of Consider Phelbas and Use of Weapons. But still fascinating, fun, and thought-provoking.

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