Look to Windward

Culture Series, Book 7

By: Iain M. Banks

Narrated by: Peter Kenny

The novels of Iain M. Banks have forever changed the face of modern science fiction. His Culture books combine breathtaking imagination with exceptional storytelling, and have secured his reputation as one of the most extraordinary and influential writers in the genre.

It was one of the less glorious incidents of a long-ago war.

It led to atrocities on an extraordinary scale. To the destruction of two suns and the billions of lives they supported.

Now, eight hundred years later, the light from the first of those doomed stars has reached the Culture Orbital, Masaq', bathing its ­fifty billion inhabitants in the rays of their society's ancient mistake.

Amongst them is Major Quilan, sent on a mission so secret that not even he knows what it is, and determined to exact his revenge against the Culture at any cost.

The Culture series:
Consider Phlebas
The Player of Games
Use of Weapons
Excession
Inversions
Look to Windward
Matter
Surface Detail
The Hydrogen Sonata
The State of the Art

Other books by Iain M. Banks:
Against a Dark Background
Feersum Endjinn
The Algebraist

©2000 Iain M. Banks (P)2013 Hachette Digital

Critic reviews

'Banks keeps ratcheting up the suspense' Guardian

'Banks is a phenomenon' William Gibson

'A mordant wit, a certain savagery and a wild imagination' Mail On Sunday

Possibly his best culture story so far

Great story with all the culture twists you would expect leaving you in awe with the scale of dimension and time

...never ceases to surprise

The most entertaining culture novel so far. Nicely performed, wonderfully written, space-candy and alien drama.

Another fantastic Culture book

Amazing universe, excellent premesis, wonderful characters, dry wit - this installment is everything you want from Banks.

A masterpiece from one of sci fi's greatest Minds

This story is tapestry of grand scope and scale masterfully woven together by a mind brilliant enough that He might as well be a GSV in disguise

Slow and anticlimactic

I really liked Consider Phlebas and Player of Games which I’ve read previously but I never really got in to this. The plot moves really slow and is weighed down by too much conversation (even if it’s often quite funny).

Also I had such a hard time with identifying with—or even give physical form in my mind to—three-legged alien species! Especially hard in erotic scenes... How does a tiger-centaur slide up on her partner for sex when he is on his back? This might seem like a small problem, but it kept throwing me off the story.

The reading/“voice-acting” is excellent however!