Use of Weapons presents a hero with a highly conflicted relationship to the Culture, falling somewhere between Horza and Gurgeh in his loyalties and attitudes. Cheradenine Zakalwe, casualty of a devastating civil war on his home (non-Culture) planet and carrying a heavy burden of guilt because of the events of that war, is recruited into Special Circumstances at a point in his life when his existence has been completely shattered. He carries out a series of dangerous missions as an undercover SC agent and becomes, in his words, “a borrowed hero.” Never fully a part of the Culture, he accepts the benefits of its technology (he has his body ‘fixed’ at the biological age of 30 and has other biomodifications to enhance his performance as an agent/commando) and ethical values; he carries out his assignments in an attempt to ease his conscience by working for the benevolent-minded Culture.
Zakalwe’s various missions underline the ambiguous nature of the Culture’s interference in less developed civilizations. Like Gurgeh on his mission to Azad, Zakalwe more often than not works without full understanding of the Minds’ plans, which sometimes even require that he fail (although he doesn’t know this). The gap between the Culture’s highly principled justification for the activities of Contact and SC and the less than principled means these organizations employ is played out in the internal tension and pressures on Zakalwe. Although willing to work for the Culture, he maintains a wary attitude towards it. As he says to his SC recruiter, Diziet Sma:
“Yes; you saved me. But you’ve also lied to me; sent … me on damn fool missions where I was on the opposite side from the one I thought I was on, had me fight for incompetent aristos I’d gladly have strangled, in wars where I didn’t know you were backing both sides….”
Banks uses a disruptive narrative strategy to illustrate Zakalwe’s conflicted attitude towards the Culture. Use of Weapons interweaves two separate narrative lines, one in the present, one in the past—nothing unusual there. However, the “past” narrative line—which includes Zakalwe’s pre-SC history, the story of his recruitment into SC, and his early SC missions—are presented in reverse chronological order, which allows Banks to gradually reveal important turning points in Zakalwe’s history. As we learn more about Zakalwe’s past and his reasons for agreeing to work for SC, the guilt that drives Zakalwe becomes more and more clear. Even though his missions involve violence and deceit, he is able to assuage his conscience to some degree by the “good works” he performs for SC:
He stood back from his life and was not ashamed. All he’d ever done was because there was something to be done. You used those weapons, whatever they might happen to be. Given a goal, or having thought up a goal, you had to aim for it, no matter what stood in your way. Even the Culture recognized that.
All of these heroes, whether working for or against the Culture, experience some degree of dissatisfaction and skepticism with the disparity between the Culture’s outward face of rational, benevolent disinterest and the devious means routinely employed by SC. Furthermore, this tension between ends and means more than once causes a dedicated SC agent to turn away from the Culture after the completion of a difficult mission. In Consider Phlebas, Perosteck Balveda has her mind-state recorded in long-term storage for later revival; after her revival, she lives only a few months more before choosing to autoeuthenize. Diziet Sma, Zakalwe’s recruiter and control in Use of Weapons and the protagonist of the novella “The State of the Art,” eventually leaves Contact and retreats to an Uncontacted, less technologically advanced world, undertaking the occasional SC mission but otherwise living outside of the Culture in semi-retirement.
In the three novels considered above, the Culture manages to achieve its ends despite the less-than-idealistic means employed. In Banks’ most recent Culture novels, Excession and Look to Windward, we see the potentially damaging consequences of the Culture’s Contact/SC policies and lines of potential disunity within the Culture itself.
In Excession, the appearance of a mysterious, ultra-powerful alien artifact triggers an uncharacteristic round of treachery and deceit within the Culture, as a cabal of dissident Minds initiates a series of maneuvers in an attempt to subvert the main line of Culture policy. This conspiracy, though thwarted, almost leads to disaster for the Culture. In Look to Windward we see the consequences of one of Contact’s rare errors in judgement. Contact’s misreading of a less developed civilization has led to a disastrous intervention and left the affected civilization in the midst of a religious crisis and burning for revenge. Despite the Culture’s attempts to rectify its mistake, a complex plot of vengeance is put into motion, aimed at destroying an Orbital and its many billion inhabitants. Although SC manages to neutralize this threat, the entire incident shows that the Culture can make irredeemable mistakes on occasion despite the Minds’ stupendous powers of analysis.
The Culture is an ambiguous utopia. Although it enjoys a level of technology (in Clarke’s phrase) “virtually indistinguishable from magic,” a highly rational set of ethics, and an economy of abundance that saves it from becoming a dystopia akin to the classic dystopias such as those of We, Brave New World, and 1984, this quasi-paradise does not have universal appeal, either inside or outside the Culture. Within the Culture, there is an undoubted need for Contact and SC, both to provide an outlet for the ambitious or restless as well as to provide some rationale for the safe and secure existences of the majority of Culture citizens. Many other civilizations find the Culture anywhere from off-putting to repugnant, for a variety of reasons: dependence on the Minds, decadence and hedonism, smug self-satisfaction, and more. Banks seems to suggest that even almost complete control over the physical world and an advanced morality would not be enough to answer all the needs of humanity and human societies or to eliminate all forms of social and political conflict. Utopia lies always out of reach, an ideal to be striven after, but never to be achieved.
* * * *
David Horwich is Senior Articles Editor for Strange Horizons. David’s previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our archive.
Links
Iain M. Banks, “A Few Notes on the Culture”—highly recommended.
The Strange Horizons review of Look to Windward.
A useful Web site on Banks.
The Culture mailing list.
The Polynesian Voyagers
By Ramon Arjona
1/28/02
Other kids looked up to the astronauts: I looked up to Nainoa Thompson and the crew of the Hokule’a. This ship, whose name means “Star of Gladness” in Hawaiian, is a fiberglass reconstruction of the voyaging canoes the ancient Polynesians used in their transoceanic voyages. It, and the canoes upon which it was modeled, were built for the same reason as the space shuttle: to carry human beings and sustain them on a long journey in a hostile environment. The crew of the Hokule’a, like the astronauts, all had to possess specialized knowledge, courage, and a desire to look for answers in the unknown.
The first part of this article is going to deal with these transoceanic voyages and the people who undertook them. Using historical texts and Thompson’s work with traditional navigation technique, we’re going to see how the Polynesians colonized the Pacific from New Zealand to Easter Island, ultimately occupying an area larger than that of any other nation on Earth. We’re going to see how Polynesian technology evolved to cope with transoceanic travel thousands of years before the Europeans. In the second part of this article we’re going to see what happened to the Polynesians who settled in Hawai’i after the transoceanic voyages came to an end.
But first, a brief disclaimer: proper spelling of Hawaiian words requires the use of two characters that don’t appear in most standard Web fonts. These characters are the okina, or glottal stop, and the kahako, or bar indicating a long vowel. In this article, I substitute an apostrophe where an okina is called for and I omit the kahako altogether. While this is necessary because of the limits of technology, it means that some of the words in this article are misspelled. For the proper spellings of Hawaiian words that appear in this article, you should consult the latest edition of the New Pocket Hawaiian Dictionary, compiled by Pukui and Ebert.
The ancient Polynesians belonged to a stone age culture. They crossed the Pacific Ocean without compass or sextant. To the first Europeans to encounter Polynesian settlements, this seemed impossible. They were therefore forced to explain how a heathen, primitive group of people managed to spread throughout the Pacific islands, establishing colonies that were separated by thousands of miles of ocean—all before the first European had even laid eyes on the Pacific Ocean.
One early theory held that since the Polynesians themselves were not capable of making the transoceanic voyage, and reaching such far-removed locations as Samoa, Tahiti, Tonga, and Hawai’i by themselves, God must have put them there. Over time, the Europeans abandoned this theological hypothesis in favor of ones that seemed more rational. Popular views held that, since the Polynesians could not have made the transoceanic voyage on purpose, they must have reached new islands by accident. Some asserted that Polynesians reached new islands after being blown off course; others asserted that ocean currents haphazardly carried Polynesian mariners to new shores, sort of like Tom Hanks at the end of the movie Castaway. These ideas persisted until the mid-1970s, when the first voyage of the Hokule’a disproved them.