Paperback, 488 pages
Published April 17, 1994 by ORBIT.
Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the civilization based around the planet Golter. Now she is hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes that she is the last obstacle before the faith's apotheosis, and her only hope of escape is to find the last of the apocalyptically powerful Lazy Guns before the Huhsz find her.Her journey through the exotic Golterian system is a destructive and savage odyssey into her past, and that of her family and of the system itself.
I mean... really. What were you expecting me to say...? Is it up there with his best? Maybe not, but it's still better than 99% of what gets published these days.
Struggled. Plot, characters, style, just felt haphazard and confusing.
Far removed from my experience with his exemplary Culture series.
Banks' space opera take on the heist genre is everything I could have asked for. The descriptions. The world-building. The politics. The CHARACTERS. Incidentally, the protagonist is a woman and she's amazingly written. (The gender politics in this book especially are really good. There's even a scene where a shop owner tries to mansplain guns to her and it's SO GREAT. Honestly it's unbelievable how far ahead of his time Banks was.) Really, every character is solid and believable and complicated but also there are SO MANY WOMEN who feel like real people. And the relationships feel real, and the trauma. (There are a couple scenes that reminded me Banks is also a horror writer.)
The ending fucked me up. I mean the entire last 10% of the book really but the way it ended.
This book paired so well with the Machineries of Empire trilogy ([b:Ninefox Gambit|26118426|Ninefox Gambit (The …
Banks' space opera take on the heist genre is everything I could have asked for. The descriptions. The world-building. The politics. The CHARACTERS. Incidentally, the protagonist is a woman and she's amazingly written. (The gender politics in this book especially are really good. There's even a scene where a shop owner tries to mansplain guns to her and it's SO GREAT. Honestly it's unbelievable how far ahead of his time Banks was.) Really, every character is solid and believable and complicated but also there are SO MANY WOMEN who feel like real people. And the relationships feel real, and the trauma. (There are a couple scenes that reminded me Banks is also a horror writer.)
The ending fucked me up. I mean the entire last 10% of the book really but the way it ended.
This book paired so well with the Machineries of Empire trilogy ([b:Ninefox Gambit|26118426|Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire #1)|Yoon Ha Lee|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1446557461s/26118426.jpg|46065520]).
I guess emotionally-intense post-modern space opera is extremely my jam these days.
I can't find fault with this book. It was a kind of sci-fi-ish adventure, but it wasn't all just flashy action. It wasn't overly sweet or happily ever after, just my kind of a little dark. Yet I don't feel as engaged with this book as I would have liked to feel. The book even asked some nice questions, that I'd like to think about. I feel like I as a reader have betrayed it somehow, by not being in the right mood for it.
As ever, a great story line. Imaginative with great twists. Very dark. But i found it rather endless with too many battle scenes
