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| | Excessive Candour |
 | | In Britain, where Iain Banks has been extremely popular since the beginning of his career 16 years ago, Look to Windward will read as a kind of recessional to the world of the Culture, a recessional laced with joy. |
 | | The burden of meaning of The Waste Land is famously complex, and it may be that Banks means to test our knowledge of the last century of human life on the planet through his intricate use of the quote, from which he has extracted two book titles. |
 | | Very briefly, the Culture is a vast, galaxy-spanning compact between the Minds (hugely evolved Artificial Intelligences who govern the vast ships and vaster Orbitals that comprise the Culture's home territories) and the Involved (species sufficiently evolved to interact with one another; Homo sapiens, by the skin of its teeth, is one of these). |
| www.scifi.com /sfw/issue193/excess.html (912 words) |
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