LOOK TO WINDWARD was published in 2000
It is a Culture novel. The title is lifted from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; Part IV, Death by Water.
It was one of the less glorious incidents of a long-ago war. It led 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 ancient deaths has reached the Culture’s Orbital called Masaq’.
For the Hub Mind, overseer of the massive bracelet world, its arrival is particularly poignant. But it may still be eclipsed by events from the Culture’s more recent past.
When the Chelgrian – Ziller – a composer of galactic renown living in self-imposed exile on Masaq’, learns that an emissary from his home world is being sent to the Orbital, he fears what he assumes to be the worst: that the Chelgrians want him to return.
But the composer is far from being the only thing on the Chelgrian emissary’s mind. His mission has another purpose; one so secret he does not know it himself at first. Discovering its nature will take him on a journey into his past and the haunting memories of another terrible war whose legacy threatens to be much more than just an unfortunate diplomatic incident.
Iain said, “[My favourite bit in the book is] the sequence where Ziller and the avatar are in the module and they are stopping so that the stars appear still and the orbital is zapping past them. The Hub is talking to Ziller about his experiences in the war, knowing how it feels to kill and how it feels to die. I love that speech, it’s a bit melodramatic but to me that is one of the good bits. Also, it’s lightened at the end when Ziller says ‘Okay to smoke in here?’ and the avatar lights the pipe from a wee flame on the end of his finger. A Stan Laurel moment, basically.
“Many of the Culture stories are explicitly about how it gets things wrong. Look to Windward examines how the Culture causes a civil war that kills millions within the Chelgrian society. [Special Circumstances and Contact] fuck it up, basically they’ re trying to finesse it too much. The excuse they use is that the Chel are an evolved predator species, and they aren’t used to dealing with predators. I think Huyler says that, in one of his conversations, they know they can do it, once you can almost guarantee it, the art then becomes doing it with minimal resources, without it blowing up in your face. But here they carry it just a wee bit too far, and you can make the excuse that they’re a predator species and that unusually they are a caste species and normally that would hold you back. But in the end that’s not good enough. They got it wrong and the Culture knows it’s got it wrong.”