Imagine a man who can win almost any war he is handed, and still cannot win the war inside his own name. Imagine a civilization so abundant it no longer needs soldiers of its own, so it borrows other people’s genius for violence and calls the arrangement morality. Imagine a chair that is not furniture. This is the cold thunder Iain M. Banks unleashes in Use of Weapons (https://amzn.to/4wmKNvq), the novel that asks the question The Player of Games only circled: after scarcity is solved, who gets used, and what does the using do to the user?

In Part 7 I walked with Bora Horza Gobuchul through the Idiran war and showed the Culture from the outside, a machine civilization that looked to an old warrior like the end of meaning. In Part 33 I stood with  ...