Substantive: Look to Windward

"Donna Noble has left the library. Donna Noble has been saved."

When reading Look to Windward, these words kept rebounding and rebounding through my head. Anyone who has been exposed to Steven Moffat's writing (incidentally, another Scotsman, although his realm is mainly television) knows that he can do some scary things with very common ideas. One of the concepts he comes up with (in the Doctor Who episode Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead) is that people--their hopes, their dreams, their lives--can be preserved in technology. When the Library starts going to hell, the computer literally saves everyone in it--by placing them in its hard drive. It creates a weird kind of stinted immortality, preserved in the body of a large computer, who essentially coordinates scenarios for its various inhabitants in a way that is eerily Matrix-esque.

I thought about this during Look to Windward because of the Chel concept of an afterlife, which they have apparently made literal with the advent of the SoulKeepers, with the Sublimed Chelgrian-Puen as gatekeepers to a literal afterlife. And yet, there seems to be something in that that is...less than ideal. Someone in the book makes a comment about how nothing can happen in eternity as it would not therefore be eternity. Which means that this Chelgrian heaven is probably pretty boring. No wonder Quilan craves oblivion.

I've also been thinking about what Andrew posted above (I know this says Saturday, but that's because I started it last night). Having spent a semester in Scotland (and believe me, Iain Banks is everywhere in the University of Edinburgh bookstore) I thought Andrew's note about the Culture representing American imperialism was particularly apt, but not getting at the entire picture. I'm all for being wary of biographical fallacy but one of the general feelings one gets in Scotland is a sense of proud isolationism combined with a brutal wariness. It's very hard being treated as England's satellite nation, and it's something they've struggled with since the Acts of Union. There's a particular insistence in Scotland that what combining into a United Kingdom has essentially done is leave Scotland neglected in favor of English interests, to the extent that the group in power now in Scottish parliament is a secessionist group known as the SNP:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/8553367.stm

I'm wondering if maybe some of what Banks is showing us in the contrast between the humans of the Culture and the nature of the other species has something along these lines, or if it is merely a commentary on the horrific decadence of Western culture in general. While he does seem to criticize Chelgrian culture for being exceptionally caste-devoted, the one person (Ziller) who seems so adamantly against it isn't much of a hero and in fact turns out to be fairly annoying.