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In a distant-future, highly advanced society of seemingly unlimited technological capability, a crime is committed within a war. For one brother it means a desperate flight, and a search for the one--maybe two--people who could clear his name. For his brother it means a life lived under constant threat of treachery and murder. And for their sister, it means returning to a place she'd thought abandoned forever. Only the sister is not what she once was; Djan Seriy Anaplian has become an agent of the Culture's Special Circumstances section, charged with high-level interference in civilizations throughout the greater galaxy. Concealing her new identity--and her particular set of abilities--might be a dangerous strategy. In the world to which Anaplian returns, nothing is quite as it seems; and determining the appropriate level of interference in someone else's war is never a simple matter.… (más)
En uno de los mundos más célebres de una galaxia llena de prodigios se produce un crimen en plena guerra. Para un hombre significa una huida desesperada y la búsqueda de la única persona (o quizá sean dos) que podría limpiar su nombre. Para su hermano significa una vida bajo la amenaza constante de la traición y el asesinato. Y para la hermana de ambos, incluso sin saber toda la verdad, significa el regreso a un lugar que creía haber abandonado para siempre. El problema radica en que la hermana no es lo que en otro tiempo había sido: ha cambiado tanto ya nadie la reconocería y se ha convertido en agente de la sección de Circunstancias Especiales de la Cultura, encargada de realizar intervenciones de alto nivel en civilizaciones de toda la galaxia.
En uno de los mundos más célebres de una galaxia llena de prodigios se produce un crimen en plena guerra. Para un hombre significa una huida desesperada y la búsqueda de la única persona (o quizá sean dos) que podría limpiar su nombre. Para su hermano significa una vida bajo la amenaza constante de la traición y el asesinato. Y para la hermana de ambos, incluso sin saber toda la verdad, significa el regreso a un lugar que creía haber abandonado para siempre. El problema radica en que la hermana no es lo que en otro tiempo había sido: ha cambiado tanto ya nadie la reconocería y se ha convertido en agente de la sección de Circunstancias Especiales de la Cultura, encargada de realizar intervenciones de alto nivel en civilizaciones de toda la galaxia.
[...] it rapidly becomes heart-sinkingly clear that here, the particular society in which the Culture might or might not intervene is one of faux-medieval fantasy fiction. The uniquely hopeless odour of leather, horse-like animals, stale sweat and tortured syntax wafts from the pages, and there is a tedious drizzle of invented proper names. [...] The story's highly intriguing last act could perhaps have been fruitfully expanded into a greater space, and the long setup could have been compressed. Having front-loaded the novel with so much talky scene-setting, Banks might have ended up relying slightly too much on his (and our) favourite gadgets.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
For Adèle
With thanks to everybody who helped: Adèle, Les, Mic, Simon, Tim, Roger, Gary, Lara and Dave le Taxi
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
A light breeze produced a dry rattling sound from some nearby bushes. (Prologue)
The place had to be some sort of old factory or workshop or something.
Senble Holse was hunched over a tub with a washboard, furiously scrubbing, when her husband walked in. (Epilogue)
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, for ever.
Djan Seriy's discomfiture was being caused by the fact that some of the Culture's more self-congratulatingly clever Minds (not in itself an underpopulated category), patently with far too much time on their platters, had come up with the shiny new theory that the Culture was not just in itself completely spiffing and marvellous and a credit to all concerned, it somehow represented a sort of climactic stage for all civilisations, or at least for all those which chose to avoid heading straight for Sublimation as soon as technologically possible (Sublimation meant your whole civilisation waved farewell to the matter-based universe pretty much altogether, opting for a sort of honorary godhood).
Avoid self-destruction, recognize -- and renounce -- money for the impoverishing ration system it really was, become a bunch of interfering, do-gooding busybodies, resist the siren call of self-promotion that was Subliming and free your conscious machines to do what they did best -- essentially, running everything -- and there you were; millenia of smug self-regard stretched before you, no matter what species you had started from.
Anaplian realised they had got rather rapidly to the point that all such conversations regarding the strategic intentions of the Culture tended to arrive at sooner or later, where it became clear that the issue boiled down to the question What Are The Minds Really Up To? This was always a good question, and it was usually only churls and determinedly diehard cynics who even bothered to point out that it rarely, if ever, arrived paired up with an equally good answer.
The normal, almost ingrained response of people at this point was to metaphorically throw their hands in the air and exclaim that if *that* was what it really all boiled down to then there was no point in even attempting to pursue the issue further because as soon as the motivations, analyses and stratagems of Minds become the defining factor in a matter, all bets were most profoundly off, for the simple reason that any and all efforts to second-guess such infinitely subtle and hideously devious devices were self-evidentally futile.
Anaplian was not so sure about this. It was her suspicion that it suited the purposes of the Minds rather too neatly that people believed this so unquestioningly. Such a reaction represented not so much the honest appraisal of further enquiry as being pointless as an unthinking rejection of the need to enquire at all.
Shoum: "As I say, news osmoses. And where news is concerned, the Culture is of a very low pressure." Ferbin: "I fail to understand you, ma'am." Shoum: "They tend to hear everything." [277]
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
This is a Culture novel by Banks-with-an-M released in 2008. "Matter" was also a working title of the "non-M" book "The Steep Approach to Garbadale", but this is not that book. Please do not combine this with Garbadale.
Editores de la editorial
Blurbistas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
In a distant-future, highly advanced society of seemingly unlimited technological capability, a crime is committed within a war. For one brother it means a desperate flight, and a search for the one--maybe two--people who could clear his name. For his brother it means a life lived under constant threat of treachery and murder. And for their sister, it means returning to a place she'd thought abandoned forever. Only the sister is not what she once was; Djan Seriy Anaplian has become an agent of the Culture's Special Circumstances section, charged with high-level interference in civilizations throughout the greater galaxy. Concealing her new identity--and her particular set of abilities--might be a dangerous strategy. In the world to which Anaplian returns, nothing is quite as it seems; and determining the appropriate level of interference in someone else's war is never a simple matter.
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MATTER discussion (The Culture group read)
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