Note on Lemmy

Hello again! Doesn’t seem like a lot of people are interested in Lemmy, huh? You can’t really keep a community alive with this few members. Oh well. Things might change after June 30th, but I doubt it.

I was worried about modding issues, but since this place is receiving basically no traffic it seems like that won’t be a problem. There’s always an upside, I guess.

For now, I’ll just keep making posts about The Culture on occasion, because I am a major fan, and I might as well fill up this community I made myself with some content. I’d feel bad for taking the community name otherwise. Also, since almost no one’s looking at this, only a few people on the Internet will know how much of a kook I am.

When I get bored I’ll stop posting and this community will enter heat death until Reddit makes another awful mistake and everyone considers switching over again. But I’m getting off topic.

This post is about the landscape descriptions in Look to Windward. Banks does a great job with scene-setting in that one. He has to, since the whole book revolves around the setting. In each chapter there’s at least one moment that makes you think “I love this place and want to be there”. It’s like a tourist brochure that also has a plot. My favorite Culture book, and a beautiful one.

The last time I read it, I picked out the most impressive landscape descriptions from each chapter. These are the ones that capture the majesty of The Culture (and occasionally other parts of the galaxy) and spark that “Damn, I wish I lived there” feeling. A wonderful feeling. Or a horrible one if you go around like a total loser thinking “if only I lived in a perfect utopia” all the time. Don’t do that. Did I mention that I’m obsessed with this series? Anyway.

There are only minimal spoilers here. These excerpts are about setting and mood. But you’ll understand the context of them better if you’ve actually read the book. If you haven’t, maybe this will convince you to?

Prologue

A vast burst of blue-white light leapt across the sky, making an inverted landscape of the ragged clouds’ undersurface and revealing through the rain the destruction all around us: the shell of a distant building, its interior scooped out by some earlier cataclysm, the tangled remains of rail pylons near the crater’s lip, the fractured service pipes and tunnels the crater had exposed, and the massive, ruined body of the wrecked land destroyer lying half submerged in the pool of filthy water in the bottom of the hole. When the flare died it left only a memory in the eye and the dull flickering of the fire inside the destroyer’s body.

The Light of Ancient Mistakes

The barges lay on the darkness of the still canal, their lines softened by the snow heaped in pillows and hummocks on their decks. The horizontal surfaces of the canal’s paths, piers, bollards and lifting bridges bore the same full billowed weight of snow, and the tall buildings set back from the quaysides loomed over all, their windows, balconies and gutters each a line edged with white.

It was a quiet area of the city at almost any time, Kabe knew, but tonight it both seemed and was quieter still. He could hear his own footsteps as they sank into the untouched whiteness. Each step made a creaking noise. He stopped and lifted his head, sniffing at the air. Very still. He had never known the city so silent. The snow made it seem hushed, he supposed, muffling what little sound there was. Also tonight there was no appreciable wind at ground level, which meant that - in the absence of any traffic - the canal, though still free of ice, was perfectly still and soundless, with no slap of wave or gurgling surge.

There were no lights nearby positioned to reflect from the canal’s black surface, so that it seemed like nothing, like an absolute absence on which the barges appeared to be floating unsupported. That was unusual too. The lights were out across the whole city, across almost all this side of the world.

He looked up. The snow was easing now. Spinwards, over the city centre and the still more distant mountains, the clouds were parting, revealing a few of the brighter stars as the weather system cleared. A thin, dimly glowing line directly above - coming and going as the clouds moved slowly overhead - was far-side light. No aircraft or ships that he could see. Even the birds of the air seemed to have stayed in their roosts.

Infra Dawn

The sunlight was so red it almost looked brown. It shone from the vastly distant atmospheres above the Orbital’s trailing plates, over the escarpment’s edge, across the dark valley with its pale islands of mist and sank onwards to the low rolling hills and the distant plains on the far side. The cries of the forest’s nocturnal animals had slowly disappeared over the past twenty minutes or so, and the calls of birds were beginning to fill the night-chilled air above the low forest.

A Very Attractive System

Kabe and Ziller faced each other across a large, elegantly furnished room lit by golden sunlight that spilled through the opened balcony windows, already filtered through the gently waving branches of an everblue growing outside. A myriad of soft needle-shadows moved on the creamily tiled floor, lay across the ankle-deep, abstractly patterned carpets and fluttered silently on the sculpted surfaces of gleaming wooden sideboards, richly carved chests and plumply upholstered couches.

Peer Group

Masaq’ Great River was a single loop of water stretching unbroken right round the Orbital and flowing slowly as a result of nothing more than the huge spinning world’s coriolis effect.

Fed by tributary rivers and mountain streams throughout its length, it was depleted by evaporation where it ran through deserts, drained by overflow waterfalls and the run-offs into seas, swamps and irrigation networks, and absorbed into giant lakes, vast oceans and entire continent-wide river systems and networks of canals, only to reappear via great converse estuaries which eventually bundled it into a single gathered current once again.

It ran its unending course through labyrinths of caverns under raised continents, their depths lit sporadically by plunging holes and immense troughs deep as the roots of mountains. It traversed the slowly decreasing numbers of yet unformed Plate topographies within transparent tunnels which gave out onto landscapes still being moulded and inscribed by the manufactured vulcanologies of Orbital terraforming techniques.

It disappeared under Bulkhead Ranges in colossal watery mazes slung beneath those hollow ramparts and slipped -flooding sometimes for whole seasons - across entire horizon-wide plains before running through winding canyons kilometres deep and thousands long. It iced over from one end of a continent to another during the Orbital’s aphelion or within the local winters produced by a Plate group’s sun lenses set on disperse. Its course took in dozens of neatly circumscribed or lushly sprawling cities and - when it reached Plates like Osinorsi, whose median level was well below the stream’s steady elevation - the river was carried above the plains, savannas, deserts or swamps on single or braided massifs towering hundreds or thousands of metres above the surrounding ground; hoisted ribbons of land crowned with cloud, edged with falls, strewn with hanging vegetation and vertical towns, punctured by caves and tunnels and - as here - with artfully carved and soaring arches that turned the monumental massifs into a more precise image of exactly what they were: vast aqueducts on a water course ten million kilometres long.

The parapet of the massif here, just a few kilometres from the cliffs and the plains that marked the beginning of Xarawe, was a flower-strewn grassy bank less than ten metres wide. From his vantage point here, standing on a raised forecastle of the ceremonial barge Bariatricist, Quilan could look down through wisps of cloud to rolling hills and meandering rivers unwinding through misty forests two kilometres below.

(Continued in the comments because of Lemmy’s 10k character limit)

  • CerfeuilOPMEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Continued:

    The Retreat at Cadracet

    What he had earlier assumed were clouds in the far distance turned out to be the peaks of snow-covered mountains strung around the massif’s top. Deeply corrugated cliffs rose almost straight up, bannered with thin white veils that might be waterfalls. Some of these slender columns stretched all the way down to the base of the cliffs, while other, still thinner white threads faded and disappeared part-way down or vanished into and merged with layered clouds drifting slowly across the great serrated wall of rock.

    He stared at the great folded sweep of snow-settled cliff and mountain as it materialised out of the haze, becoming more real with each beat of his heart.

    The monastery sat on a rocky outcrop on the shoulder of a modest peak, within a small stand of sigh trees by a tumbling mountain stream. It looked across the forested gorge beneath to the crags, cliffs, snow and ice of the tallest peaks in the range. Behind it, crossing the stream by a modest but ancient stone bridge celebrated in songs and tales three thousand years old, passed the road from Oquoon to the central plateau, momentarily straightening from its series of precipitous hairpins.

    The Seastacks of Youmier

    Kabe and Quilan were walking along the cliff tops of the Vilster Peninsula on Fzan Plate. To their right, thirty metres below, Fzan Ocean beat against the rocks. The haze horizon swam with scattered islands. Closer in, a few sailboats and larger craft cut through the spreading patterns of the waves.

    A cool wind came off the sea. It whipped Kabe’s coat about his legs and Quilan’s robes snapped and fluttered about him as he led the way along the narrow path though the tall grass. To their left the ground sloped away to deep grassland and then a forest of tall cloudtrees. Ahead, the land rose to a modest headland and a ridge heading inland notched with a cleft for one branch of the path they were on. They were taking the more strenuous and exposed route along the cliff top.

    Quilan turned his head to look down towards the waves falling against tumbled rocks at the cliff’s base. The smell of brine was the same here.

    In the morning, waking to a thudding, not quite regular booming noise and the distant screeches of birds, he opened the shutters to look down over a sheer gulf of air at a blue-green sea streaked with foam and breaking waves boiling round a jagged coastline fifty metres away and a hundred down. A line of cliffs vanished into the distance on either side, and immediately opposite him there was a huge double bowl cut out of the cliffs, so that the drop from the bottom of the bowl to the sea was only thirty metres or so. Clouds of seabirds wheeled in the sunlight like scraps of foam blown up from the fretful sea.

    Absence of Gravitas

    The dunes were not normal dunes; they were titanic spills of sand forming a three-kilometre-high slope from one Plate to another, marking where the sands from one of the Great River’s sandbank spurnings were blown across towards the Plate’s spinward edge to slip down to the desert regions of the sunken continent below.

    People ran, rolled, boarded, ski’d, skiffed or boated down the dunes all the time, but on a dark night there was something special to be seen. Tiny creatures lived in the sands, arid cousins of the plankton that created bioluminescence at sea, and when it was very dark you could see the tracks left by people as they tumbled, twisted or carved their way down the vast slope.

    It had become a tradition that on such nights the freeform chaos of individuals pleasing only themselves and the occasional watching admirer was turned into something more organised, and so - once it was dark enough and sufficient numbers of spectators had turned up on the crawler-mounted viewing platforms, bars and restaurants - teams of boarders and skiers set off from the top of the dunes in choreographed waves, triggering sand-slip cascades in broad lines and vees of scintillating light descending like slow, ghostly surf and weaving gently sparkling trails of soft blue, green and crimson tracks across the sighing sands, myriad necklaces of enchanted dust glowing like linear galaxies in the night.

    A Defeat of Echoes

    Aquime’s altitude and consequently cold winters meant that a lot of the life of the city took place indoors rather than out, and as a result what would have been ordinary streets in a more temperate city, open to the sky, here were galleries, roofed-over streets vaulted with anything from antique glass to force fields. It was possible to walk from one end of the city to the other under cover and wearing summer clothes, even when, as now, there was a blizzard blowing.

    Free of the driving snow that was bringing visibility down to a few metres, the view from the apartment’s exterior was delicately impressive. The city had been built in a deliberately archaic style, mostly from stone. The buildings were red and blonde and grey and pink, and the slates covering the steeply pitched roofs were various shades of green and blue. Long tapering fingers of forest penetrated the city almost to its heart, bringing further greens and blues into play and - with the galleries - dicing the city into irregular blocks and shapes.

    A few kilometres in the distance, the docks and canals would glitter under a morning sun.

    Expiring Light

    Somewhere near the furious centre of the work, while the thunder played bass and the music rolled over it and around the auditorium like something wild and caged and desperate to escape, eight trails in the sky did not end in air bursts and did not fade away but slammed down into the lake all around the Bowl, creating eight tall and sudden geysers of lit white water that burst out of the still dark waters as though eight vast under-surface fingers had made a sudden grab at the sky itself.

    Quilan thought he heard people shriek. The entire Bowl, the whole kilometre-diameter of it, shook and quivered as the waves created by the lake-strikes smashed into the giant vessel. The music seemed to take the fear and terror and violence of the moment and run screaming away with it, pulling the audience behind like an unseated rider caught in the stirrup of their panic-stricken mount.

    A terrible calmness settled over Quilan as he sat there, half cowering, battered by the music, assailed by the washes and spikes of light. It was as though his eyes formed a sort of twin tunnel in his skull and his soul was gradually falling away from that shared window to the universe, falling on his back forever down a deep dark corridor while the world shrank to a little circle of light and dark somewhere in the shadows above. Like falling into a black hole, he thought to himself. Or maybe it was Huyler.

    He really did seem to be falling. He really did seem to be unable to stop. The universe, the world, the Bowl really did seem to be unreachably distant. He felt vaguely upset that he was missing the rest of the concert, the conclusion of the symphony. What price clarity and proximity, though, and where lay the relevance of being there and using or not using a magnification screen or amplification when everything he’d seen so far had been distorted by the tears in his eyes and all he’d heard had been drowned out by the clamour of his guilt at what he had done, what he had made possible and what was surely going to happen?

    …And that’s all. Every time I read those excerpts, or think about this setting in general, I’m filled with a horrible longing. It’s probably not mentally healthy. The setting is devastatingly beautiful, moreso because it’s a place that will never exist. You can dream about it (and I have, multiple times) but you’ll never go there. Which hurts. Is that cringe? I bet so.