This post is about the landscape descriptions in Look to Windward. Banks does a great job with scene-setting in that one. He has to, since the whole book revolves around the setting. In each chapter there’s at least one moment that makes you think “I love this place and want to be there”. It’s like a tourist brochure that also has a plot. My favorite Culture book, and a beautiful one.

The last time I read it, I picked out the most impressive landscape descriptions from each chapter. These are the ones that capture the majesty of The Culture (and occasionally other parts of the galaxy) and spark that “Damn, I wish I lived there” feeling. A wonderful feeling. Or a horrible one if you go around like a total loser thinking “if only I lived in a perfect utopia” all the time. Don’t do that. Did I mention that I’m obsessed with this series? Anyway.

There are only minimal spoilers here. These excerpts are about setting and mood. But you’ll understand the context of them better if you’ve actually read the book. If you haven’t, maybe this will convince you to?

Prologue

A vast burst of blue-white light leapt across the sky, making an inverted landscape of the ragged clouds’ undersurface and revealing through the rain the destruction all around us: the shell of a distant building, its interior scooped out by some earlier cataclysm, the tangled remains of rail pylons near the crater’s lip, the fractured service pipes and tunnels the crater had exposed, and the massive, ruined body of the wrecked land destroyer lying half submerged in the pool of filthy water in the bottom of the hole. When the flare died it left only a memory in the eye and the dull flickering of the fire inside the destroyer’s body.

The Light of Ancient Mistakes

The barges lay on the darkness of the still canal, their lines softened by the snow heaped in pillows and hummocks on their decks. The horizontal surfaces of the canal’s paths, piers, bollards and lifting bridges bore the same full billowed weight of snow, and the tall buildings set back from the quaysides loomed over all, their windows, balconies and gutters each a line edged with white.

It was a quiet area of the city at almost any time, Kabe knew, but tonight it both seemed and was quieter still. He could hear his own footsteps as they sank into the untouched whiteness. Each step made a creaking noise. He stopped and lifted his head, sniffing at the air. Very still. He had never known the city so silent. The snow made it seem hushed, he supposed, muffling what little sound there was. Also tonight there was no appreciable wind at ground level, which meant that - in the absence of any traffic - the canal, though still free of ice, was perfectly still and soundless, with no slap of wave or gurgling surge.

There were no lights nearby positioned to reflect from the canal’s black surface, so that it seemed like nothing, like an absolute absence on which the barges appeared to be floating unsupported. That was unusual too. The lights were out across the whole city, across almost all this side of the world.

He looked up. The snow was easing now. Spinwards, over the city centre and the still more distant mountains, the clouds were parting, revealing a few of the brighter stars as the weather system cleared. A thin, dimly glowing line directly above - coming and going as the clouds moved slowly overhead - was far-side light. No aircraft or ships that he could see. Even the birds of the air seemed to have stayed in their roosts.

Infra Dawn

The sunlight was so red it almost looked brown. It shone from the vastly distant atmospheres above the Orbital’s trailing plates, over the escarpment’s edge, across the dark valley with its pale islands of mist and sank onwards to the low rolling hills and the distant plains on the far side. The cries of the forest’s nocturnal animals had slowly disappeared over the past twenty minutes or so, and the calls of birds were beginning to fill the night-chilled air above the low forest.

A Very Attractive System

Kabe and Ziller faced each other across a large, elegantly furnished room lit by golden sunlight that spilled through the opened balcony windows, already filtered through the gently waving branches of an everblue growing outside. A myriad of soft needle-shadows moved on the creamily tiled floor, lay across the ankle-deep, abstractly patterned carpets and fluttered silently on the sculpted surfaces of gleaming wooden sideboards, richly carved chests and plumply upholstered couches.

Peer Group

Masaq’ Great River was a single loop of water stretching unbroken right round the Orbital and flowing slowly as a result of nothing more than the huge spinning world’s coriolis effect.

Fed by tributary rivers and mountain streams throughout its length, it was depleted by evaporation where it ran through deserts, drained by overflow waterfalls and the run-offs into seas, swamps and irrigation networks, and absorbed into giant lakes, vast oceans and entire continent-wide river systems and networks of canals, only to reappear via great converse estuaries which eventually bundled it into a single gathered current once again.

It ran its unending course through labyrinths of caverns under raised continents, their depths lit sporadically by plunging holes and immense troughs deep as the roots of mountains. It traversed the slowly decreasing numbers of yet unformed Plate topographies within transparent tunnels which gave out onto landscapes still being moulded and inscribed by the manufactured vulcanologies of Orbital terraforming techniques.

It disappeared under Bulkhead Ranges in colossal watery mazes slung beneath those hollow ramparts and slipped -flooding sometimes for whole seasons - across entire horizon-wide plains before running through winding canyons kilometres deep and thousands long. It iced over from one end of a continent to another during the Orbital’s aphelion or within the local winters produced by a Plate group’s sun lenses set on disperse. Its course took in dozens of neatly circumscribed or lushly sprawling cities and - when it reached Plates like Osinorsi, whose median level was well below the stream’s steady elevation - the river was carried above the plains, savannas, deserts or swamps on single or braided massifs towering hundreds or thousands of metres above the surrounding ground; hoisted ribbons of land crowned with cloud, edged with falls, strewn with hanging vegetation and vertical towns, punctured by caves and tunnels and - as here - with artfully carved and soaring arches that turned the monumental massifs into a more precise image of exactly what they were: vast aqueducts on a water course ten million kilometres long.

The parapet of the massif here, just a few kilometres from the cliffs and the plains that marked the beginning of Xarawe, was a flower-strewn grassy bank less than ten metres wide. From his vantage point here, standing on a raised forecastle of the ceremonial barge Bariatricist, Quilan could look down through wisps of cloud to rolling hills and meandering rivers unwinding through misty forests two kilometres below.

(Continued in the comments because of Lemmy’s 10k character limit)