#Reading log
2017-01-08: Almost a year ago I read a book by Iain M. Banks called 📚 The Player of Games. I liked it. It was interesting to read about his way of predicting how a highly technological society far off in the future would function. I was thirsty for another Sci-fi story so I looked to him again and found Look to Windward. This is another book in what’s called the Culture series and the story is set in the same universe as The Player of Games. It’s a bit hard to get into it at first. But after keeping to it for about two days; I was hooked.
2017-01-10: The story describes the life on Masaq’ Orbital. A place which is not a planet itself, but a constructed world of plates hosting around 50 billion people. In the middle of it, operating the day to day tasks and overseeing that business run smoothly, is a hub mind. This is some kind of machine that can take multiple physical shapes in form of avatars to communicate to its inhabitants. Everyone has their personal terminal with which they can ask the Mind for any type of information. This could take the shape of a pencil for instance, or a piece of jewelry. I see this much in the same way as we now use smartphones to get the information we need. But in this case it functions more like a centralized internet than from what we know. The story was great, both in describing this society and by the plot line that turns out to be really thrilling. I will definitely read more books of his in the future.