USE OF WEAPONS was published in 1990
It is a Culture novel, first drafted in 1974
The man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was one of Special Circumstances’ foremost agents, changing the destiny of planets to suit the Culture through intrigue, dirty tricks or military action.
The woman known as Diziet Sma had plucked him from obscurity and pushed him towards his present eminence, but despite all their dealings she did not know him as well as she thought.
The drone known as Skaffen-Amtiskaw knew both of these people. It had once saved the woman’s life by massacring her attackers in a particularly bloody manner. It believed the man to be a burnt-out case. But not even its machine intelligence could see the horrors in his past.
Iain said, “It’s very complicated the way [Use of Weapons] works out now, but nothing like as complex as the first draft which is unreadable, even I couldn’t read it, not to mention the acres of purple prose – I went a bit loopy at this point, I think. There were always two things going on in a chapter and there were sixty-four chapters. The book was in two halves, and it was absolutely vital according to the shape of the book that the emotional climax was in the middle – and therefore the second half of the book was an anti-climax. I just put the book aside and said it was unsaveable but Ken Macleod said, ‘I think there’s a good book in there trying to get out. Why don’t you try it this way?’ In a sense, the whole Culture came from the character Zakalwe in Use of Weapons. I wanted to write about some sort of ultimate mercenary but not in the sense that he was invincible or invulnerable: a flawed heroic type, the sort of person you’d be very dubious about because he’s a paid killer, but I tried to make it more interesting for him as a character, I wanted to have him fighting on the side of genuine good. I thought, ‘what sort of society do we need?’ and out of that came the Culture. That gave me the chance to answer all the questions I had about the right-wing American space opera I had been used to reading and which had been around since the 1930s.”
Iain added, “In Sma’s introductory letter in The State of the Art, she says that she’s been off-planet with her drone for a hundred days or so. It’s during that time that the events in Use of Weapons happen. There’s also a tiny reference to The State of the Art in Use of Weapons where Sma’s about to be lifted off the planet, she gives an instruction to ‘send a stalling letter to that Petrain guy’. ‘That Petrain guy’ is actually the person to whom the novella is addressed (Parharengyisa Listach Ja’andeesih Petrain dam Kotosklo). Another nuance is that Petrain is also the scholar who wrote the essays at the end of Consider Phlebas. He forms a sort of scholarly link between the books, but he doesn’t appear in any of them.
German cover
“There’s the whole thing about concentricity in Use of Weapons, about concentric layers of defence. And at the end of the book you have someone throwing stones in a pond with these ripples coming out. The whole book is actually based on a concentric framework. I like doing that because it’s like a conceit.”