The State of the Art
Tue 02 September 2008
Jacqueline Smith, Master of Communication
The State of the Art is a short story by Iain M Banks. It contemplates the sometimes violent nature of humanity without taking an extreme position to make a point.
Banks uses subtly of thought and a variety of viewpoints to persuade the reader to examine the opinions offered in this story and scrutinise their own prejudices and intolerances.
This short story is a revelation, like the first time I heard Rodriguez's music or read Frank Herbert's Dune or listened to Jose Ramos-Horta speaking about his beloved East Timor before its independence. If I was a young person reading this novel, it would change how I think about many things. But sadly, with cynical middle age creeping up, I am only tremendously impressed with Iain M Banks.
In The State of the Art, Earth is being covertly visited by aliens who are directed by a paternalistic, artificially intelligent spaceship. This lack of control has left the aliens immature and self-indulgent but not malicious or hateful. The aliens observe humans’ ability to reach the height of altruism and the depths of cruelty.
Banks uses Berlin, when it was still a divided city, as an analogy for much that is wrong with humanity, he sees it as the “crystallisation of everything these people had managed to produce, wreak, reinstate, venerate, condemn and worship in their history...a macabre Disneyworld.”
The State of the Art brilliant illuminates humanity's capacity for beauty and compassion and its ability to plummet to the depths of unspeakable atrocities.
Image(s) designed by N/A