"Acts incompatible with chastity."

Iran has executed a sixteen year old girl for "acts incompatible with chastity," in the northern province of Mazandaran." There are suggestions from the press that the girl may have been mentally retarded, and the Iranian press can find no indication that the girl was competently advised by a lawyer at the hearing where she was condemned.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say, guiltlessly, that that's barbaric. I'm also pleased to see Amnesty International say that multiculturalism is bunk.

Iain Banks, Use Of Weapons

Few people are passive about Iain Banks. Some people love his work, some people hate it, some are confused by it, and then there are those of us who can't stop reading him even if we loathe the themes about which he writes. His stories rarely, if ever, have "endings." They merely come to a conclusion.

I just finished reading Use Of Weapons, and I have this horrible sinking feeling that I shall be reading it again very soon. To understand the story series, you kinda have to understand The Culture, the near-Singularity civilization that is at the height of its power and its vibrancy, and in a soft and subtle way it seeks to uplift the civilizations at the limits of its reach to its own enlightened state of being. Often, to do this it employs mercenaries. Our hero, Zakalwe Cheranadine, is one of those mercenaries.

The book has a very Bankian structure, with the prologue happening somewhere in the middle of his life, and then the chapters that advance the plot alternating with his mercenary adventures going backwards until they reach the moment with The Chair, and The Ship... and the moment when Zakalwe became Zakalwe.

I just realized-- the structure and pacing of this novel is quite similar to that of Banks' first book, The Wasp Factory. The ending twist is not as well handled, but the horror event that precipitates is every bit as disturbing, perhaps even more horrific, than the one in The Wasp Factory, and mercifully the twist in Use of Weapons is left doubly ambiguous. We may never know who was telling the truth. And that's probably for the best.

I understand why this books gets the praise it does. It is a literary masterpiece, Banks can draw pictures of misery, horror, indulgence and excess with a minimum of effort, and he succeeds somehow in making it all fit together. It's not the clockwork mastery of Bujold, but something more organic, more humane, even while you realize that his underlying themes are as ruthless, vicious, and inhuman as any you can imagine.

A lot of Banks's later works, like the almost irrelevant Excession, don't deserve much attention. But Use of Weapons is Banks at his best. The Wasp Factory had a happy ending, of a sort; I can't say that about Use of Weapons. The Wasp Factory stayed with me for a long time, though, and made me feel depressed and horrified at the state of the world, despite the discoveries its plucky and interesting protagonist went through. I highly recommend Use of Weapons for the same reason I recommend The Wasp Factory, but be prepared to be depressed for a long time afterwards.

When Characters Attack!

Why is there no mood, "schizophrenic"?

So, this afternoon at lunch, after finishing up the book I was reading, I settled down to write a little. I was feeling uninspired; the idea for the Janae series was fun to begin with, but now it starts to wear thin and make me wonder if I could pull it off, so I wandered through my directories looking for something interesting. And I stumbled upon a collection of old files-- and now that my Japanese is better I could follow them better-- and as I was re-reading them, Eshi started bugging me.

"All you ever write about these days is Misuko and Linia and Wish. Who's this Janae woman?" She peered at the screen. "And Chris? Who's she? Oh, it's a he."

"I'm trying to set Aaden up with somone who'll make Ken jealous."

"But... you never write about Kaede and me anymore!"

I tried to explain that I thought her story was mostly over. And they lived happily ever after, and all that. "But we lived in a time of great social upheaval," she complained. "Spacers were supposed to be weird. Kaede's marriage to me wasn't really legal in many places in those days. You remember. This is before there was a Corridor! This is back when llerkin was a backwater and nobody was sure what to do with them. There have to be a million stories you could tell about that time."

I sighed. "Do you have any idea how much I want to write, Eshi? Forget the current fads. There's Prospero's story over there, and Toby and Kasserine over there... and what about Polly? He's still waiting for me to write his story."

"It doesn't have to be 35 K-words again.. Just something, okay?"

"Okay. I'll think of something. No promises, though."

It's nice when they remember that I'm here, but do they always have to be so pushy about it?

New Journal Entry: A New

I've posted A New Home. Enjoy! Leave comments here.