Victor Barros Barros itibaren Barwell C of E Junior School itibaren Barwell C of E Junior School

It's Frosted Mini-Wheats. Years ago, in the time before kids, we found ourselves in a hotel bar on the very edge of Scotland. After a few games of pool with the barmaid, whose unintelligibly thick accent had made me wonder at the quantity of Scotch I was drinking, I moved to the bar to settle the matter. There's not much I remember about the rest of that evening. The notable exceptions were an argument with the hotel manager about Iraq (I remember his avid insistence that it was all obviously about oil and that the oil really belonged to "the West") and the recommendation of Iain M. Banks as an author worth reading. This latter bit came from the bartender who had much to say about the foolishness of both war and his manager. It wasn't until we were heading up to the mountains for a week last year that I stumbled upon that memory and picked up a copy of Banks' novel, Consider Phlebas. Reading that book, I remembered how good science fiction could be. I mean not just in a summer blockbuster movie kind of way, the way that Avatar or Transformers can scratch that piew piew laser/big spaceship/green alien kind of itch despite the absence of an actual story. No, I mean as a true world building exercise in which whole philosophies and cultures become defined, challenged and destroyed. Where the questions raised aren't necessarily explicit and science actually has some sort of direct bearing on what is under consideration. Use of Weapons is good science fiction (as was Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games, the first two books in Banks' Culture series). It is well constructed, coherent, and well written. It has an interesting narrative structure in which the chapters alternate between a story moving forward in time and a story moving backward. And it explores questions of ideology and what happens to ethical principles after technology has fundamentally altered the basis from which we derive them. Use of Weapons is good science fiction, which also means I would be foolish to try and tell you what it's 'about.' Because in a very real sense, Use of Weapons is about spaceships and plasma cannons and immortality and interplanetary struggle. But it's also about the extent to which we are justified in acculturating others, what it means to be human when we no longer can die, the boundary between terror and war and a dozen other ideas that are available only in the full context of its story. Ultimately, Use of Weapons (and I would argue all science fiction) is Frosted Mini-Wheats. Because I don't always want a bowl of Kashi Go Lean Crunch—though I know it's good for me. Nope, though only some substance is going to keep me flying right, sometimes the kid in me wants interstellar spaceships to fill his appetite. (3.5/5)