Against a Dark Background

Iain M. Banks spirits us away to a crumbling solar system where technological advancement and supremacy comes not in what its inhabitants can make for themselves, but in what they can pilfer from the ruins of the countless failed civilizations that came before. 

Come for the homicidal cultists and daring heists; stay for the existential dread!

(Minor "spoilers" between 1:09:24 and 1:13:40).

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Despite the fact that the topic of today's discussion, a book called Against the Dark Background, was written by an author who is generally considered in the science fiction community to be an absolute unparalleled genius, I reckon that this might actually be one of the most, if not the most, obscure thing I've talked about on the show thus far. So if you haven't heard of Against the Dark Background, and I reckon there's a lot of you, then buckle up. I'm about to introduce you to a wonderfully bleak solar system filled with insane religious cults and piles upon piles of ruined civilizations and weapons that defy every law of science you could possibly think of. It is an action-packed adventure filled with treasure hunters and heists and a particularly memorable science fiction protagonist. I don't talk about anything that I would necessarily classify as a major spoiler, but there is one particular topic that I go over at the very end of this episode that you may or may not want to experience for yourself, but don't worry because I will give you plenty of warning before I do so. I'd also like to disclaim that there is very poor French pronunciation in the near future, but you know what? I'm gonna keep it in, and there's nothing you can do to stop me. So without further ado, allow me to introduce you to the thrial system. I'm a massive fan of history. I think it's every bit as fascinating and twisty as the best fiction that's ever been written. I mean, there's a reason that saying, the truth is stranger than fiction exists, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the grand story of humanity. And I'm no expert, so I apologize if I say something that makes me sound like I'm making a fool of myself. But one of my favorite tropes, if we're still rolling with the story analogy for history, is this idea of people scurrying in the shadows of ancient achievements. It's that story you see over and over again of a bunch of self-important people stumbling upon these ancient ruins and just being utterly blown away by how advanced they were. Ancient ruins that, by the way, might be even more advanced than whatever the contemporary civilization is capable of. You know, in this day and age, technological progress is just on this steep and meteoric climb, right? It seems like every day we're coming out with new medicines and new gadgets and new, you know, instruments of war and ways to improve our lives and whatnot. But that wasn't always the case. I mean, for a really long time, for most of human history, technology wasn't an upward trend. It looked like one of those, you know, Wall Street graphs. It was, you know, up and down, up and down, all over the place. I mean, you could have a civilization that was capable of wondrous technological and architectural feats, I mean, the likes of which the rest of the world couldn't even fathom. And then that civilization would fall and the rest of the world would just be unable to replicate its feats for the next few centuries or even the next thousand years. That was not a rare occurrence throughout history. You see it all over the place. You know, you see it in Europe, with all the peoples that were living there during the Middle Ages who used Roman roads and Roman aqueducts as the backbones of their civilizations because they just didn't know how to make anything better. And mind you, these were peoples that existed two or three centuries after the Roman Empire fell, depending on your definition of the fall of the Roman Empire. Or you have the people who were living outside the ruins of Nineveh, which were comprised of these huge walls that were like tens of meters high and tens of meters wide. And when these people were questioned by travelers as to who built these giant walls, they couldn't give them an answer because the creators of the walls, the Assyrians, by the way, were just so thoroughly stamped out of history by their enemies. These folks were living in the shadows of a veritable wonder of the region, and they couldn't even ascribe a builder to it. And that's awesome. As a person living in the 21st century, I find that idea to be utterly fascinating. I mean that would be the equivalent of us with our computers and our internet, stumbling upon the ruins of some civilization who not only managed to build computers and internet like 300 years before we did, but also managed to colonize Mars. I feel like that's the level of smallness those peoples must have experienced at the time when they looked upon ancient Roman or Assyrian ruins. And wouldn't you know it, this idea is essentially the cornerstone of the world building of a novel called Against a Dark Background, which was written by Ian M. Banks. The same Ian M. Banks, by the way, that wrote the Culture series. Which an entire episode of Approaching Lightspeed is actually dedicated to covering, Wink Wink. Anyway, Against a Dark Background is one of those books where you feel like you could tell a thousand more stories within its setting, the Thrile System. It's a place that seems like it just has a absolutely massive capacity for storytelling, despite its very small and claustrophobic nature. You know, a part of me, despite my general hatred for unnecessary sequels, kind of welcomes the idea of Against the Dark Background 2 and Against the Dark Background 5, you know what I mean? But on the other hand, there's also a beauty in its transience, and this idea that maybe Against the Dark Background would be less special if we knew more about the Thrile system. There is always that risk of answering too many questions. Now, after Ian M. Banks had a few culture books under his belt and he had successfully established one of the most, if not the most, fascinating utopia in all of science fiction, he decided he wanted to shift gears a little bit. He wanted to try his hand at something a little more dystopian. And by a little, of course, I mean a lot. Now this isn't to imply that the culture series is all sunshine and rainbows, because while problems are solved basically on demand in the culture itself, and its denizens can live in a state of happiness and hedonism for centuries, that doesn't mean that the setting is exempt from some really messed up things happening within it. Just like in any action-packed space opera, death, destruction, and violence are all over the place in the culture books. And more than that, it really did feel like Ian M Banks had a particular disdain for the happy ending. Now I'm still working my way through the culture books, so I don't have a complete picture of things yet, but it really does feel like more often than not, these characters end these books in positions that are generally way worse off than when they began them. It feels like there was a really conscious decision to focus in on the tragedy that can occur within this setting. Which was probably the right move. I mean, how entertaining can ten books worth of everybody having a good time all the time truly be? We're humans, we want to have at least a little bit of awfulness in our stories. But despite all of the horrible things that can happen within the culture series, the culture's status as a utopia is never in doubt. The thrial system, on the other hand, is very different. From page one, you are under no illusions that this place is not one where you would want to live. It's a very bleak and oftentimes hopeless setting. Which is funny because despite its oppressive nature, Ian M. Banks still manages to squeeze all of his trademark humor and zaniness out of against a dark background. I mean, the guy must have been fun at parties if he could find joy even in the twisted spaces of the thrial system. It's a place that's ruled over by aristocrats and lawyers. It's a setting where religious cults of every shape and size have free reign to hunt down and murder non-believers or those that they consider to be a threat to their dogmas. Some of the most twisted individuals you can possibly imagine constantly vie for power over one another against this ever-cyclical background of warfare and suffering, all while the planets of the solar system descend ever deeper and deeper and deeper into this state of desolation. Against a dark background is essentially the violence and the tragedy of the culture, but placed within a more appropriate context, a way more appropriate context. The thrial system is oftentimes uncomfortably similar to our own world, both in its history and in its present state. It almost feels like a warning at times of where we can possibly end up if we keep on making the same mistakes as a species that we've been making. The story begins on the eve of the Decamillennium, where in the real world our common era began about 2,000 years ago. The common era in the Thrile system began 10,000 years ago. And because of this momentous occasion, there's a lot of celebration and antsiness and at times madness that pervades the setting. It kind of feels like the science fiction-y version of Y2K. The Decamillenum means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and this is actually the impetus behind the main conflict of the book, because some people's interpretations of this new Decamillennium means that certain people need to be dead before it happens. How can this glorious new age possibly be tainted by the breath of somebody they deem unworthy? We'll get a little more into that business later, but first I want to paint a picture of what these worlds are actually like. Against the Dark Background is a super dense book as far as the world building goes. It's just it's positively riddled with expository bombs. Like every other page is like one or two sentences that just totally recontextualizes the setting, and they're usually thrown at you rapid fire. And by the way, Ian M. Banks isn't the type of author to generally sit you down and explain to you that, you know, the first war was a nuclear conflict that was fought on planet Golter, and billions of people died, and these were the economic effects, and these were the countries that started it, and this is what they were fighting for, and blah blah blah. It's usually something along the lines of this artifact was from the first war when billions of people died. And that's all you get. Which naturally begs the questions of, oh well, what was the first war? How did billions of people die? Because Ian M. Banks never explains it, so he sort of leaves the audience to sort of connect those dots themselves. The only reason I'm assuming that it was fought with nukes is because of various little bits of context that he sprinkles throughout the book, such as there's a ton of radiation on Planet Golter and stuff like that. Not even the nature of the devastation that it wrought upon civilization is ever really elaborated upon. We just know it happened. And because of that, we can't really get too specific about this world because Ian M. Banks doesn't. Anything that's not lost to the tens of millennia worth of history of the Thrile system is stuff that's just not given a ton of fanfare and is just there in the same way that, you know, the Roman Empire is just there for us. The book, just like actual history, is very overwhelming. And it was probably made that way on purpose. I mean, a part of me thinks that Ian M. Banks wasn't really intending for his audience to truly compartmentalize everything he was throwing at them. The volume and grandiosity of Golter's and the Thrile System's history isn't there for trivia, it's there to give this atmosphere of utter ancientness. I guess he didn't really account for a lunatic like me who takes copious notes on his books and tries to make timelines out of the various tidbits of information he gives and peeks under every rock to see if there's a story underneath it. I feel like by looking so deeply into this, I'm kind of going against the general sentiment behind this book, but hopefully Ian wouldn't be too angry with me. I'm only doing it because I love his work so much, and maybe you can too. But in any case, civilization in the Thrile system, and particularly on the planet of Golter, has existed for a very, very, very long time. If you want to go to like the absolute beginning of what could be considered a civilization in the real world, that's about maybe twelve thousand years ago, when they first started developing agriculture and the like. We have reason to believe that advanced civilizations, more or less, have existed on the planet Golter for between 20 to 30,000 years, depending on how poor my reading comprehension skills are. I mean, the way it's worded, for whatever reason, I can't wrap my mind around it. But that figure, again, is just another one of those deliciously nondescript things that the book just throws at you and doesn't give any real explanation behind. I mean, for all we know, civilization could have existed here for way longer. Year zero of the Golteria calendar is marked by the end of the first war, which as I mockingly explained earlier, but am seriously going to explain now, was a presumably nuclear war that was fought almost 10,000 years ago in which billions of people died. It was this massive reset moment for all of civilization. A reset moment that, by the way, is probably not the first and certainly wasn't the last. But there's signs of the conflict, or at least signs that can reasonably be attributed to conflict all over the place on Golter. Like I said before, Golter has sort of a significant background radiation problem, and there are beaches on which instead of sand, it's just this vast expanse of glass, which kind of implies that a nuclear weapon or some other crazy weapon exploded nearby and superheated the sand until it turned into what it is today. Now, places like this could just as easily be attributed to some other conflict. I mean, the people of the Thrile system are way more trigger-happy with their nukes than we are, but I think we can reasonably assume that the glass shores of Issie, jeez, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, are a product of the first war. Now you would think, right, that after an event as calamitous as the first war, after something that was apparently so important to the people of Golter that they made its end the beginning of their calendar, which has been in effect for ten thousand years, that the people of Golter and later the people of the Thrile system would have taken the right lessons from it, right? Well, isn't that wistful thinking? Because the answer is no. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It's almost as if humanity's been emboldened by its survival of the first war. It's like we got a little too big for britches, because everybody seems to take such a light hand with things like nukes and lazy guns, you know, things that most definitely should never be trifled with. I mean you can only imagine the pervading attitude amongst leaders throughout the ages has probably been something along the lines of, well, if the nukes didn't wipe us out in the first war, then surely they won't wipe us out next time we use them, right? And use them they do, and frequently and for really stupid reasons at that. There's a scene in which our characters have been trespassing in this restricted zone, and they're kind of musing in a low in the action on whether or not somebody's just going to drop a nuke on them for it. The deployment of things like tactical nukes or nuclear warfare in general is no longer this thing that's relegated to international warfare. It's something that can be used on individuals you don't like, and nobody seems to have any qualms with it because it's just such a normal thing in this society. This whole civilization for the past 10,000 years and beyond has been in this continuous search for stability. They've tried every possible permutation of governance that you could possibly think of, and nothing has worked. Nothing has stuck around long enough to really exert a sense of order over Golter and the rest of the thrial system. I mean, the current ruling regime, the world court, has only existed for 700 of those 10,000 years, and that's a pretty good sign of its longevity, but there's a whole laundry list of problems with the world court and reasons to believe that it might not be around for much longer. The whole of the thrial system is embroiled in this never-ending loop of civilizations rising and falling and losing all of their knowledge. And because civilization is so ancient both in space and on Gulter itself, all of the real estate, both physical and psychological, has been taken up at this point, so the people don't really have any choice but to lay down whatever new ideas or societies they want to try out atop the ruins of those that have failed before. The entire system's just characterized by layer after layer of failed civilizations in the same way that layers of rock and sediment exist if you dig deep enough into the ground. And the really important thing to keep in mind is that the people of the thrial system are not at their technological apex the way that you and I are. Their ruins are not like the ruins on Earth where they're curiosities of civilizations that were really sophisticated for their time, but are nowadays just sort of quaint reminders of the places we came from. The ruins in the thrial system are way more advanced often than the things that they have access to now. That metaphor I was talking about earlier about us finding some ancient civilization that managed to invent internet and go to Mars, that's the reality in the thrial system. Half of the stuff that was invented and lost back in the day is like magic to the people that exist now. The present-day society of Against the Dark Background is this really fascinating and confusing mix of the passable technologies that people are able to make in the modern day, combined with the ridiculously advanced stuff they've been able to recover from centuries and millennia past. Civilization cannot make up its mind. Everybody keeps on adding these new Golterian cultures and societies and these new waves of technology as blocks to this great metaphorical Jenga Tower. But the thing is, this Jenga Tower has a way of falling more often than not. Thril system history, just like real life history, is this constant cycle of change, but the changes that the people of Golter and the rest of the system undergo are so much more radical in comparison. And all of this change and social upheaval brings with it a ton of wars, as you might imagine. And some of them are implied to have been almost as bad as the first war. I mean, you know, take the second war, which was fought in space. I mean, just from that name alone, you can imagine that it's at least adjacent to the awfulness that the first war was. Now, granted, the remains of multiple moons that were shattered during this war might also have a little something to do with this reputation, but who's keeping track? You know, it feels like every one or two thousand years, civilization just kind of has its counter reset back to zero, and all the knowledge that was attained over that one or two thousand years fades away as a result. And we're not talking about something like, you know, this civilization here in Europe faded away, but this civilization over in Asia or in the Middle East is experiencing a golden age. This is a solar system-wide phenomenon. Over and over again, the light of achievement and splendor gets to flicker for just the briefest, tiniest moment before everybody's once again plunged into this nigh endless dark age. Dark ages, by the way, that are unlike anything we here on Earth can imagine. And because civilization in this system is so unbelievably ancient, we've seen this happen over and over again on both large and small scales. And nowhere is this idea of the societal roller coaster and this endless procession of dark ages more apparent than in the Goltarians' relationship with space travel. Because 7,000 years ago, humanity reached for the stars, or at very least reached for the planets. But in the time since then, we've managed to lose space travel, regain it, lose it a second time, and regain it a second time. The Goltarians are on their third round of exploring the thrial system. And by the way, at least one of the versions of space travel that they had back then is better than what they have now. In 10,000 years, civilization has never managed to stabilize to a point to keep this knowledge from leaking out or to keep its people from killing each other to such a horrible degree that they actually manage to sort of set the technological clock back. Things are definitely scary here on Earth, and we've certainly had a few too many close calls for comfort, but I don't think that we as a modern society have ever had to really confront the reality of things being so catastrophic. That we actually regress technologically because of it. Meanwhile, the people of Against the Dark Background are routinely bombing each other into a time period that's one step above the Stone Age. So we've been talking a lot about the ever-accruing pile of ruins that is the thrial system, and its people's propensity for adding to that pile, but what does the current edition of civilization in this story look like? What is the modern world that our characters get to explore? Well, to put it succinctly, it is a jurisdictional nightmare. Because of the thousands of years' worth of laws that have been passed and treaties and agreements that have been signed, Planet Gulter alone is a chaotic mess of conflicting borders and territories. There are things like nations and city-states that exist, but a good portion of Planet Gulter's area is dedicated to things like corporations or other organizations or religious institutions or any other collective entity you could possibly think of. Things that aren't necessarily a product of a government. And all of it is regulated by this body known as the World Court, which is sort of the de facto ruling power over the thrial system. Although that's not to imply that the World Court is this ironclad authoritarian regime. I mean, true to their name, they really are just mostly a legal apparatus, a humongous legal apparatus, but a legal apparatus nonetheless. They're essentially there to lay down the ground rules by which all of these governments and corporations and organizations and religious institutions and whatever else get to play by. By the way, just as a side note, the reason that we've been mostly focusing on the planet Gulter throughout this show so far is because most of the story takes place there, and while we can assume that the situation is largely the same, or at least similar, throughout the rest of the solar system, we don't have too terribly much in the way of concrete facts as far as the government of the other planets. But as I was saying, the world court kind of differs from a lot of the prior overlords of the Thrile system, like, for example, the Ladiar dynasty, in that they allow a lot of these organizations and factions to exist in an autonomous way. The World Court can be a very meddlesome and bureaucratic organization, but a lot of the time they take a very hands-off, very laissez-faire approach to the various groups under their umbrella. The lawyers and the lawmakers and the counselors of the world court exhibit a pretty considerable influence over the setting, albeit in a pretty indirect way, but that influence is often seen to be a little on the arbitrary side. There's plenty of weapons and technologies and practices that are illegal by world court standards, but that's not to say that a party can't fill out some paperwork and make those things legal for them. There are things like cluster bombs or military viruses that are generally considered to be super forbidden technologies, but if a given war is intense enough, and if presumably the sides send enough appeals to the world court, you can very easily see those very forbidden technologies being deployed on the battlefield. And then you have these documents known as the hunting passports, which are a major element of the story. They're the big, inciting incident that gets our protagonist going on the adventure she goes on. But the hunting passports essentially are written permissions to conduct legal assassinations of people. And these aren't assassinations of enemies of the world court or anybody who poses a major threat, these are assassinations of individuals that a given organization doesn't like and wants dead. Say there's a person who whistleblows on a corporation. That corporation can easily go to the world court and request a hunting passport, and if they receive it, they have full legal reign to go out and kill this person. This all boils down to a world in which if one has enough influence with the world court, they can essentially kill with impunity, using any weapons they want, legal or illegal, for any reason that pops up in their brain. And by the way, if enabling these I guess they're not crimes because they're legal, if enabling these horrible acts isn't bad enough, the world court is not afraid of taking direct action against those who break its laws, or at very least, whatever laws that person hasn't exempted themselves from. And the punishments are usually pretty severe. We're talking about anything from the liquidation of your entire estate to permanent physical mutilation. 10,000 years is a long time, but apparently it's not long enough to weed out some pretty barbaric practices or some extreme top-level corruption. There's some pretty serious things that the thrial system still needs to work out. Although I guess I will extend an olive branch to the world court and point out that there are a ton of people in the upper echelons of society who complain over and over again about how stifling the world court is and how difficult it is to get anything done through them, so maybe they're not as at the disposal of the rich and powerful as I made them seem. In all fairness to what I was saying regarding the haunting passports, it does sound like it's a bit of a process to get one approved. So nobody likes the world court, whether rich or poor. I don't know how positive a spin that is to put on things, but it is what it is. Well that and they managed to exist as the premier power in the system for 700 years, so they have to be doing something right. What that something is, I don't know, but it's something. It might have a little something to do with that whole laissez-faire policy I was talking about earlier, in which the world court allows any faction to exist in pretty much whatever forms they desire. A part of this is wealth accrual, and as much as everybody whines about the world court, there are people and groups of people that have been able to attain insane amounts of power. There's a huge amount of wealth to be had under the way that the world court does things, and that alone might have been the factor that allowed the world court to exist for this long, because if people can get this rich, and if people can get this powerful under its system, then there's not really a lot of incentive to do away with that system, is there? At least not in the minds of the people who were able to use it to their advantage, at very least. In catering so well to the aristocracy, the world court has probably stayed its own execution, so to speak, for at least a few centuries. Although that's not to say that the world court doesn't make examples out of people every now and then. Take, for example, our protagonist's grandfather, Gorko. Now Gorko was a very powerful and very well respected aristocrat. He had this huge commercial empire that f just positively funneled wealth into his accounts. The thing is, the way he did it was very illegal, and when the World Court built a case against him, they came down on him hard and they took everything. And to this day, the Daskin family name is one that's immediately associated with shame. And it probably doesn't help that his son wasn't very responsible with what little wealth he was able to inherit. He was known for making a lot of bad investments and wasting his life away at the casinos. His daughter and our main character, Lady Sharrow, doesn't have the highest opinion of him, despite the fact that he seemed like a decently well-meaning man, at least in his dealings with his daughters. To the people he tried to cheat out of money, and to the people he owed debts to, it was probably a different story. He kind of reminds me of Patty Constantine's character in House of the Dragon, King Viserys. He seems like a sort of bumbling and likable guy, but at the same time one who's extremely unwise. At least that's the impression I got. Some people might get a completely different impression from him. So despite this being a spacefaring setting with cyberpunk corporations and androids and machine intelligences, the aristocracy still not only exists, but still holds a pretty fair amount of power. Family names and family histories can go a long way for you in this society. And throughout her travels, Lady Sharo receives both adoration and derision because of her association with Gorko. The world court and the aristocrats and the corporations aren't the only powerful entities in Against the Dark Background, though. There's still one other major, or I guess a collection of other movers and shakers that I haven't mentioned yet, and these to me are the most fascinating. These are the myriad of crazy and strange religions that inhabit the thrial system. Just like in real life, religions are a major facet of society, and they're even more powerful in the thrial system than they are on Earth. Just like the aristocrats, these religions and cults are very ancient and their names and their reputations carry a lot of weight. Throughout the story, we meet a ton of characters and they all hail from a wide range of belief systems. And one of these belief systems comes from the planet of Mykens, or Mikens. I'm again, I'm not really sure how to pronounce that, as is the case with a lot of things that Ian M. Banks names. But Mykens is interesting because it has its own biosphere, its own ecosystem. It's filled with creatures that would be alien to the people of Golter. And amongst this alien life is this gigantic plant-looking thing called the Intraxorone. And to be honest, I don't even know if Ian M. Banks knew how that thing was going to be pronounced, because it seems like he couldn't make up his mind because it's spelled differently in different sections of the book. In one place it's called the Intraxorone, and the other it's called the Extraxerone, so I'm assuming my pronunciation of this thing is as good as anyone else's. But anyway, the intraxerone is huge and it covers like three continents on planet Mykins. This thing has been a curiosity to the people of Golter from even before space travel was invented for the first time, because if you're looking at Mykens through a telescope, you can see the intraxterone clear as day. So people have colonized Mykins, and some of them have decided to live in the shade of the Intraxaron, including the people of a region called Farpec, which is also known as the Court of the Useless Kings. Now, the Court of the Useless Kings, as you might imagine from the name, is a monarchy, and their deal is that they're a bunch of Luddites who have outlawed all advanced technology because they think that the introduction of said technology will destabilize the realm, aka they won't be able to keep their power because their populace will be more technologically literate. And just like a lot of other places in the Thrile system, Farpec has its own religion. Although this one's a little peculiar because while its people acknowledge the existence of a great supreme being, they hate him. They hate his guts. Every morning these people wake up and they go straight to these ramshackle cathedrals and they just chant hatred towards this deity. It's a lot like the two-minute hate that you see against Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984. The whole religion of Farpec is just centered around this utmost vitriol the people have for the Creator. And this isn't even the only religion like this. There's another religion out there that refers to God as the great infernal wizard. One of the requirements of the coronation ceremony for a new useless king is that the new king be sitting upon a holy book upon the throne, and I apologize for how crude this is going to sound, but the reason for this is so that the king can, quote, bear his nether regions to the skin cover of the book, unquote. In other words, the king teabags a holy book in order to legitimize his rule. So needless to say, Farpec's not exactly the most enlightened locale that Lady Sharo and her companions visit in their travels. On the opposite end of the spectrum from the useless kings, but still pretty backwards in their own right, are the Sad Brothers of the kept weight on Golter. Now the Sad Brothers are way more of an institution in the traditional sense. They are a staple of Gultarian society, and they're very powerful, and their main claim to fame is that they are the current owners of this colossal and truly ancient building known as the Sea House, which is said to be as old as Gultarian civilization itself. The Sad Brothers claim that they've owned the Sea House for its entire history, but more likely they've just been recurring tenants. But either way, they've had dominion over it for the past 500 years and they've wasted no time truly making it their own. Now the sea house itself started life as a castle or a temple, and as time marched on and civilizations rose and fell around it, people added their own modifications to it over time. It's a vast mosaic of contributions from the various peoples who have owned it, or if you believe the Sad Brothers, the various Sad Brother generations that have come and gone. There's all kinds of calling cards from long-forgotten cultures apparent within its walls. Nowadays, the sea house is a labyrinth in every sense of the word, and it's filled with all kinds of ancient treasures. It's characterized by hidden chambers and libraries and archives, and all of which are filled to the brim with some of the most ancient artifacts that we know about. And naturally, the sea house is a pretty popular destination for academic types throughout the whole of the Thrile system. The Sad Brothers, as described by Ian M. Banks himself, are positively outgoing by the standards of Gultirian religions. They're perfectly acquiescing to scholars of all types, whether they be monks from other orders or secular folks. Now, as for the Sad Brothers themselves, they are an all-male order, and they believe in celibacy and continual service to their god. They're a very pious and stoic bunch a lot of the time. They also happen to be extraordinarily sexist. And I'm not talking about like the run-of-the-mill sexism that you see in your day-to-day life. I'm talking about like next level sexism. These guys hate women and they're not afraid to show it. And unfortunately for them, one of the women they come across is Lady Sharrow, and Lady Sharo is not one to suffer fools. The thing that really sets the Sea House apart from other religious-themed places of learning, however, is its additional, perhaps even primary, function as a prison, both in a symbolic and performative sense, and a literal one. Because there are chains all throughout the sea house. Sad brothers and visitors alike are fitted to these chains, and these chains are hooked into tracks that run all along the corridors of the building. Higher-ranked Sad Brothers and the more esteemed guests of the Sea House get these more ornate and lighter and easier to pull chains while visitors and lower-ranked sad brothers and people the sad brothers generally don't like are fitted with these heavier and harder to pull manacles. You know, instead of getting the visitors passed to the sea house, you get the visitors' chain. And then you have the actual prisoners whom the various religious orders of the Thrile system dump into the sea house for breaking their religious laws. Which, by the way, is a thing the world court allows. All throughout the sea house, you can hear the sounds of these chains being sort of tugged along by those that they're attached to. Now it's been theorized that there are chambers within the sea house where the chain tracks do not run, and which the highest of the high-ranked sad brothers get to access by detaching themselves from their chains. And of course, legends and theories abound about all kinds of incredibly debaucherous acts that happen behind those closed doors. Whether any of it is true is up in the air, but that would be a pretty curious thing to be happening in a supposedly celibate religious order. And then you have the solipsists, which are a real thing, by the way. Solpsism is basically this idea that there's no real way of knowing for sure whether your mind and your consciousness are not the only one to exist. It's this idea that the people around you are merely figments of your imagination or elements of your subconscious. It's kind of like the dream sequences in the movie Inception, but it's an actual worldview. Anyway, we run into a band of solipsists in the story. There's about fifty of them, and they are a heavily armed bunch who hang out on this giant hovercraft, and essentially they work as privateers. They take great pleasure from robbing the rich and enriching themselves, and when they're not doing that, they're often working on behalf of insurance companies or financial companies and carrying out repossessions on some of their less cooperative clients. They're essentially a lovable band of pirates, but they take the solipsism thing a little further than usual. While they believe that all other people are figments of their imagination, they also believe that they themselves are god. Except for one who's an atheist, we're told. But essentially these solipsists believe that their immortal, godlike powers are only just now beginning to emerge, and that's why they need to manifest their will or their energy or whatever through the various people around them. They claim that they're not powerful enough yet to be able to exist as a singular being. And this comes with it a pretty unsettling detachment from reality, too, because, for example, there's a part in the story where the Solipsists lose like six of their number, and the only thing their captain, Elsin Roa, has to say about it is that he must be becoming more godlike because he needs fewer people to manifest himself through. So the Solipsists are a very entertaining, if less than trustworthy group. And these religions and cults that I just went over are just three of the more prominent ones that feature in the story. There are many others that occupy a more background role. You have the Null Church, which is pretty active in politics. You have the Sons of Depletion, who intentionally render themselves deaf and mute, and often mutilate themselves further, such as by sewing their own mouth shut or sewing their eyes shut, and they communicate with each other only by touch. You have the two fellowships of the gun which revere these weapons of mass destruction known as the lazy guns. One of them believes that the lazy guns were a test that was bestowed upon humanity by some advanced alien civilization, and only by worshiping these guns will the aliens finally reveal themselves to us. And the other just worships the lazy guns themselves as gods, without any extraterrestrial middlemen. So suffice to say, there's a lot of really interesting worldviews throughout the Thrile system. And most of them seem to be tolerated more or less by the world court. I mean, even the solipsists, who are a military group who presumably makes a living killing people, can be employed by legitimate enterprises. Like we discussed earlier, a lot of the prisoners who are in the Sad Brothers Sea House are people who were convicted under religious law, and this is something that the World Court has no problem with. The Sad Brothers themselves, if they were feeling a little homicidal, could just go to the World Court and request hunting passports. The World Court, despite its reputation as a bunch of bureaucrats, let a lot of things go as far as these aristocrats and corporations and religions go. We do learn about one group which the World Court takes absolutely no chances with and is very gung-ho about keeping in line, and these are the androids. Now we don't know too much about humanity's relationship with intelligent machines, aside from the more recent developments with androids, and even those more recent developments are still over a millennium old, but from the hints that we pick up throughout the story, it's pretty safe to say that it's been a pretty turbulent relationship indeed. For example, we learned about this thing called Halo, which was this giant space habitat that was built thousands of years ago by intelligent machines, which was destroyed during the second war. And as a side note, the weapon that destroyed Halo was apparently such a ruinous device that it was also responsible for the destruction of the various moons that blew up during the Second War. And the text seems to imply that those moons blowing up was a byproduct of firing it upon Halo. And unless I miss something, that's the only information we ever get on this event. It's just one more little nugget of intriguing information that Ian M. Banks dangles in front of you but never really gives you the answers to. In addition to Halo, we also see this vehicle known as the mono wheel, which essentially looks like a car with a big cannon strapped to it, and instead of cruising around on four wheels, it cruises around on a single wheel, and we're led to believe that it was used by Golterian elite back in the day to hunt down robot tanks. You also have ancient texts which make references to, quote, the condemned ungodly machine Parsemus, unquote, which kind of hints at a religious persecution of machines at some point in the Thrile system's history. So yeah, man and machine have had their ups and downs. Their story is one that has all the same waves and phases and echoes that humanity's story with itself does, and the situation with the androids is no different. When we pick up Against the Dark Background, the androids are enjoying one of those ups, but it's an imperfect up in the way that pretty much anything having to do with the world court always is. They do have civil rights, which is something that they haven't been able to say for a lot of their history, and they have their own city, which they were able to purchase when they gained their autonomy. It's this place called Vembir on Planet Golter. So Vembir, or the Dark City, if you're feeling a little poetic about it, was the site of this massive nuclear meltdown in the same vein as Chernobyl in real life, and thousands. Thousands of years ago, all the people there abandoned it. It's not exactly the nicest place on Golter for humans. In fact, there are specific travel advisories against humans staying in Venbir for more than 40 days because of the massive radiation levels, which is saying something considering, again, the massive background radiation problem that Golter has. So if even the Gultarians are complaining about the radioactivity of a place, that should tell you all you need to know about how unfriendly to human habitation it is. Which is honestly probably for the best considering how androids have historically been treated by human and how they might even be treated today, particularly by some amongst the aristocracy. Humans have a very proven track record of how horribly they treat what they consider to be the other, and the androids are no exception to that. Although that's not to say that humans and androids aren't civil with one another. I mean, there's plenty of humans who will go to Venbier and do business. I mean, for example, we see this huge military auction in the book that is hosted by the androids, in which pretty much the whole spectrum of human enterprise shows up. I mean, you've got corporations and private armies and religious groups, and they all come here to buy guns and tanks and VTOLs and stuff of that nature. Now, as for the androids themselves, they've taken pretty readily to renovating Vembir. Vembir, as it exists now, is this very sort of misty and gloomy place, and it exudes an atmosphere which hints at the troubled history that it's had, but the androids like working day in and day out to sort of give it a lively flavor and make it a more nostalgic place that harkens back to some of the grander eras of Gultirian history. And the androids do seem to take a lot of pride in this work and the creativity behind it. They they find an honest day's labor to be a very rewarding thing. Now, granted, part of that might be because, as stated by an android named Farrell, they have the ability to sort of perform these tasks on autopilot and retreat into their little mind palaces where they can watch old adventure yarns, and then just jump back into reality when the job is done and soak up all the satisfaction after the fact, but they take a lot of pride in their work nonetheless. And that's another thing, the androids themselves are pretty fascinating. They sort of remind me of that robot from the old 1920s movie Metropolis, the one that inspired C3PO. The way they're described, they look like an Adonis that is clad in metal, albeit one without the more dangly bits. They also have this pretty nifty ability to sort of function even when they're in pieces, and those individual pieces can function themselves if they're big enough. And they can also upload their brains to the central computer on Vembir so that they can still live even if the body dies. And from the encounters that we do have with androids, they seem to be very enlightened and civil and cultured. They have a very easy-going and patient perspective. And patience, that really is the defining luxury they can afford, because androids can live for a really long time, much longer than any humans can. I mean, we hear about androids that were in service to Lady Sharu's family that have been with them for generations, and if they have access to Vembir's central computer, they can theoretically live forever, or at least for as long as that computer exists. And this means that the androids can weigh out the awful stuff that humans might not be able to. I mean, humans can only live for between, you know, sixty to a hundred years, right? And that's a long time by our standards, but if you're born in the wrong time, and if you're born in a very turbulent period socially, or god forbid, during something like the first or second wars, then a human life is going to be characterized by struggle and by trauma. But an android can outlive things like that, and they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, even if that light is centuries away. And it's a good thing too, because while androids have made great strides in their acceptance in human culture, there's still a long way to go. There's the general surface level prejudices that people still exhibit towards them, but there's also the legal prejudices by the world court, because androids are not allowed to reproduce. The only androids that exist, which is said to be a little over 20,000, most of which are in Vempir, are the only ones that are ever going to be allowed to exist. At least that's the general posture by the world court. They're only allowed to repair the existing androids or otherwise upload them to the central computer. And the androids have been lobbying for as long as anybody can remember to sort of be granted permission to make a new batch of androids. The general sentiment amongst them is that they hope to whittle down the world court within the next century for a new generation of androids. If that same restriction was placed upon basically any human group, there would be pandemonium in the streets. But because a century isn't really that big a deal for the androids, all they need to do is just wait out the clock, and then maybe at the end of it they have a few new android siblings running around. So, all in all, the androids, despite the stigmas that surround them, are a pretty refreshing break from the insane religious zealots and the psychotic power mongers that otherwise populate most of the thrial system. They're they're a fountain of wisdom and perspective in an otherwise really selfish and oftentimes demented setting. So those are the broad strokes of Against a Dark Background setting. That's you know, the thrial system and Golter and everywhere else in a nutshell, but what's the story exactly? Why are we exploring these places and whose eyes do we explore them through? Who is this Lady Sharo person that I've been alluding to throughout this episode? Well, I mean, since you're asking, Lady Sharo is the last in the female line of the disgraced Daskin noble family. Now the Daskins used to be a pretty big deal on Golter before Gorko just completely tanked their legacy and his son, Lady Sharo's father, threw away what little paltry wealth was left to him. And to make matters worse, his wife, Lady Sharrow's mother, was brutally killed in this religiously motivated assassination very early on in Lady Sharrow's childhood. An event which, by the way, the young Lady Sharrow was unfortunate enough to witness. And all this has left Lady Sharrow as this very tragically directionless figure for the first maybe half or so of her life. Her early adulthood was characterized by all the indulgence and at times debauchery one might expect from an aristocratic heir, but there is little meaning with any of it. For reasons delved into via flashbacks, there's a ton of flashbacks in this book, by the way, and every one of them sort of peels back a layer of Lady Sharrow's character and gives us a ton of insight into why she is the person that she is. It's a super character-driven story. By the end of the book, we intimately know the way Lady Sharo's mind works and her personal history. We know more about Lady Shar's personal history than we do about the history of the Thrile system. But anyway, through flashbacks, we learn Lady Sharot's reasons for joining the anti-tax forces in this conflict known as the 5% War. Now, as you might imagine by the name of the army under which Lady Sharrow served, the 5% War was a war that was fought over taxation policy. Which just goes to show how meaningless a lot of these, you know, thrial system wars have been throughout history and how they really don't learn, even up until Lady Sharrow's time, 10,000 years after the first war. Now I do understand how hypocritical this makes me sound as an American whose country was founded due to a war that was fought in part because of horrible taxation policies, but at least the American Revolution had other factors going into it. There were other reasons to fight the revolution. Taxes were a big reason, but they weren't the only reason. The 5% war, on the other hand, feels like it's motivated exclusively by money and taxes, and perhaps maybe some disgruntled elites who didn't want to pay more to the world court. We don't know the exact circumstances of the 5% war, but either way, I feel like if there was something deeper than money and taxes to the 5% war, it would be called something other than the 5% war. I wouldn't exactly put it past the people of the thrial system, and like I've been saying this whole time, in 10,000 years you would think that they would find better reasons to fight, or perhaps a system in which they don't need to fight at all, like in Ian M. Banks' other series, The Culture. And I know there's some pretty big asterisks with that thing I say about the culture, but we'll get into that in some other podcast episode. But anyway, Lady Sharo was a spacefighter pilot, and she was part of this eight-person, a-pilot squadron within the anti-tax forces, and all of these pilots were connected with one another using this technology known as synchro-neurobonding, or SNB for short. And what this is, essentially, is this procedure that pretty much allows you to be as perfectly connected with others who receive SNB as non-telepathic mortals can possibly get. It allows everybody to be on completely the same page and renders them able to pretty much anticipate one another's thoughts or actions with a degree of near-perfection. It allows these eight people to work as a truly cohesive unit rather than eight people trying to be one. So the 5% war ends and Lady Sharo goes on with her life, becoming more and more delightfully cynical all the time. And some of her SNB bonded squadron mates stick with her, and together they form this sort of treasure hunting crew. Now the important thing to understand about treasure hunting, or antiquity hunting as it's called, is that this is a perfectly viable career path in the Thrile system. You know, when you combine the fact that there are ruins literally everywhere in, at very least Golter, and also the fact that today's technological level of advancement is not necessarily the highest that it's ever been, that means that you can net a pretty penny for some of the stuff that you can find throughout the system. You can find an ancient weapon or piece of technology that is way more advanced than whatever's in use now, or you can find some long-lost trinket that is so priceless that even if you were to melt it down, those remains are still valuable enough that you can keep what is said to be an a reasonably extravagant noble family afloat for a century. So with that in mind, Lady Sharo and her companions go gallivanting across the thrial system, trying to find whatever antiquities they can and making as much money as they're able. They raided tombs, they broke into vaults, they did all of the typical classic treasure hunter slash bank robber stuff. By the end of their run together, this team was a lean, mean heisting machine. But their run did indeed end, and in spectacular and explosive fashion at that, and it's after this event that we finally pick up Lady Sharo's story. When Against the Dark Background begins, Lady Sharo is trying to sort of eke out some kind of normal existence using the money she earned during her career as an antiquities hunter. These plans are unfortunately dashed, however, when her cousin notifies her that a very powerful religious order known as the Huz has procured a hunting passport with her name on it. Now the Huzz are a major power in the Thrile system. They are deeply influential in the realm of politics, and they control vast military resources, and they go way back with the Daskin family. The Daskins and the Huzz hate each other, and their feud is the stuff of legends. Literally, there's many different versions of the tale of how they first came to hate each other. And of course the Daskin version of the tale paints the Huzz in a very negative light, and the Huzz version of the tale paints the Daskins in a negative light. The reality is probably something in the middle, but the general gist of this story is that hundreds of years ago there was this temple maid. Now, whether she was a temple maid by choice or not is sort of up in the air, but what's important is that she fell in love with this duke and decided that she wanted to run away from her responsibilities at Temple and from the Huzz, and when she did so, she stole the Huzz's greatest treasure. Now, as you might imagine, the Huzz were not happy about this, and in retaliation, they murdered this Duke, and the Temple Maid, turned Duchess, swore an everlasting oath of vengeance upon the Huzz, and furthermore, she bound the daughter that she had with this Duke and all of her daughter's descendants to this same oath. And of course, not one to be outdone, the Prophet of the Huzz conveniently has this vision that implies that their prophesized Messiah, who is supposed to grace the mortal realm at the turn of the Decamennium, won't be able to be born unless the entire female line of the Daskin family is eradicated, or the great treasure that was stolen from the Huzz is returned to them. And since the Decamillenum is coming up when the story begins, it's kind of crunch time for the Huzz. The fate of their dogma and their predictions rests upon Lady Sharo being dead. And so Lady Sharo is presented with a choice. The hunting passports only last for a year, the Huzz are only allowed to legally pursue her for that long, but the thing is, like I said, the Huzz have a lot of resources at their disposal, and fleeing is basically ruled out. The Huzz are capable of projecting power all across the Thrile system, and it's made clear that there's nowhere to hide. So the only other option remaining to Lady Sharrow, other than laying down her life for the religious beliefs of people that hate her, is to go on a hunt across the thrial system for the last remaining Lazy Gun. And that's a lot of what Against the Dark Background is. It's a lot of that good old we're getting the crew back together kind of dynamic, and all of the personality and action-packed insanity that implies. Lady Sharu travels all around Planet Golter to recruit that SNB antiquity hunting team of hers for one last job. And there really is an interesting thing that the book does, because you'd think that after all the information I just conveyed to you over the past hour of podcast and all the ingredients and world building that Ian M. Banks sort of conjured for this book, that he would use them to build this s grand, sweeping narrative about finally fixing the foundational problems with the thrial system and saving everybody once and for all from this perpetual cycle of violence and suffering. But against a dark background, is it that kind of story? The stakes are much more personal than that. And the fact that Lady Sharow struggles don't have much of a bearing on the greater foundational situation with the Thrile system makes it that much more authentic, because it's just like real life. I mean, our individual experiences and lives are of extraordinary importance, but the fate of the Earth doesn't hang on any one of them. It's always dictated by grand social forces and movements, and the efforts of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, or just out-of-left field wildcards that happen every now and then in history. And even all that is nothing compared to what the simple passage of time can do. No one single person is capable of changing the Earth, and Lady Shar is not capable of changing the Thrile system. Not in an impactful way that outsines the changes that it went through over the past 10,000, 20,000 years. Her life and her story is just one piece of the grand tapestry of lives that is the thrial system. And that's kind of why I'm so bummed that Against a Dark Background doesn't have a sequel, because I love the idea of exploring such a rich setting through the eyes of somebody else. If you don't know, the culture works in a similar way where yes, the culture is a 10-book series, but each book is told from a different perspective at a different time. It's not one overarching narrative from beginning to end, it's a sampling of the experiences you can have within the culture, and Against the Dark Background felt like the first sampling of the Thrile system. And unfortunately for the rest of us, it's a place that Ian M. Banks never decided to revisit. But then again, like I said at the beginning of this episode, maybe a sequel would have just made this feel less special. The great treasure that was stolen hundreds of years ago by that old Duchess from the Huzz Temple, and the thing which Lady Sharrow is now on the trail of to save her own life is the lazy gun. Now the lazy gun is the perfect exemplar of the stratospheric technological heights that the Thrile Civilization was able to attain in its heyday. And furthermore, it's a reminder that maybe not everything needs to be recovered, and that some things are better off lost, because the lazy guns are truly terrifying weapons. There used to be eight of these things, but one by one over the course of the millennia they were all destroyed until one was left. And it feels like these weapons are cursed, too, because nearly any time somebody came into possession of one of them, whether it was a warlord or a theocrat or some kind of mad king, the weapon was inevitably the cause of their downfall. And I don't mean that in a metaphorical way either. This isn't a situation where, you know, some disgruntled elements of this warlord's faction stole the lazy gun and used it on him, and then, oh, it was the lazy gun that was the cause of his fall. No, I mean that the lazy guns themselves decided that these guys had to go. They have a mind of their own, they are every bit as sentient as a human is, or at very least they're putting on a good imitation of sentience. They have wants and desires, and granted, these desires are usually related to death and destruction, but they're desires nonetheless. And worse than that, perhaps, is the fact that the lazy guns, or at least some of them, had a very twisted sense of humor. A twisted sense of humor that was usually put on pretty grisly display whenever these things fired. The lazy guns operate on principles that are completely divorced from modern day science. Both in the way that they deliver their payload and in characteristics of the guns themselves, such as the fact that the lazy guns weigh three times as much when turned upside down as they do when they're right side up. They're very arcane devices that defy logic and understanding. And because the guns are sentient and very unwilling to share their secrets, studying them has been impossible. Every attempt to disassemble and figure out the inner workings of a lazy gun was met with disaster when the lazy gun decided to self-destruct in these huge matter antimatter explosions that were capable of wiping out cities. In fact, it was an event like this which finally drove the final wedge between the members of Lady Sharo's antiquity hunting team. Because this isn't the first lazy gun that Lady Sharo went after. Back when she was making a living as a treasure hunter, she and her team took a contract to go after the second last lazy gun. Now back then there were contracts all over the place on the Wazy Guns for people who wanted ownership of them, or people who simply wanted them destroyed. And the contract that Lady Sharo and her team took was on behalf of a group that wanted to study the Wazy guns. Now everybody was under the impression that this group was just gonna study the lazy gun in some remote desert outpost safe from any population centers, so when Lady Sharo and her team collected the second to last lazy gun and delivered it to these people, they thought nothing of it. Except it turns out that they tried disassembling the gun in the middle of a city and it obliterated half of the place as a result. That kind of puts a damper on the team dynamic, I'd say. As for the lazy guns themselves, they are these handheld devices and they function, true to their name, just like any other gun would, in theory. Except the thing is, when you pull the trigger, you have no idea what's going to happen. So let's say you have a person in your sights. When you pull that trigger, any number of things can happen. For example, a spear could appear that runs the person through, or a shark can materialize out of thin air and eat this person, or electrodes can form on either side of them and vaporize them, or an anchor can drop out of the sky and crush them. If you point it at a building, it can be taken out by a tidal wave, or a localized volcanic eruption, or it could just implode. If you point the Wazy Gun at a city, it can drop a nuclear bomb on them, or the city could be wiped out by a comet strike. These are weapons that meddle with reality with frightening ease, and the minds behind them can conjure the most creative of deaths for those that they intend to destroy. And they certainly seem to have a pretty ironic streak too. Let's say you're shooting it at a king who has a professed love for precious metals. The lazy gun might decide to drown that king in a glob of mercury. These guns are terrifying not only in their destructive capabilities, but also in the unsettling ways in which they get the job done. The only solace to be taken in these things is that they don't seem to want to destroy everything. I guess how can you continue to destroy things if there's nothing left to destroy? For example, there's this man in history who had a lazy gun and decided it would be a good idea to shoot the lazy gun at Thrile, at the Sun itself. But apparently the lazy gun wasn't having any of it because when this man pulled the trigger, man and gun alike just vanished in thin air. The Huzz claimed that they only want the lazy gun back because it's an important article of their faith, but now that it's the last one and there are no others to stand against it, who knows what the Huzz would be able to accomplish with this doomsday weapon in their hands. As a side note, as insane as the aforementioned fellowships of the guns sound to you and I, to be honest, in the context of the Thrile system, the Fellowship of the Guns belief system starts to make a lot of sense. I mean, the lazy guns do essentially have godlike powers. It m it's not really that much of a stretch to imagine that there are plenty of people who would worship them. I suppose the main surprise for me comes in the fact that there aren't more people who are bowing down to the almighty lazy guns. I mean, the lazy guns have an utterly unambiguous effect upon their world, and a destructive and memorable one at that. I can see that as the exact sort of thing that would be worshipped, in the same way that people used to revere and fear eclipses in real life. Against the Dark Background is all about the heists and the plans and the deals and the betrayals and the action set pieces that comprise the road to the final Lazy Gun, and on this road, Lady Sharo finds that she might have more in common with this weapon of mass destruction than she might have initially thought. It's an external road to treasure, but it's also an internal road to the truths about herself. As a MacGuffin and as a third act treasure, I'd say you could do a lot worse than the lazy gun. Now normally this is where I would end the episode, but there's one major loose end that I really want to address, but you might not want to hear it if you want to pick up Against the Dark Background yourself. Now I wouldn't necessarily say this is a spoiler. This isn't a big plot twist or a character death or anything like that, but it is information that Ian M. Banks is kind of cagey with throughout the book and isn't revealed to us until the last like fifty or sixty pages of the book. And it's revealed during a pretty significant existential and emotional beat at that. It's something that the audience is obviously not meant to know from page one, so use your discretion. If you're okay with hearing the key feature of the thrible system from my voice and not through the prose of Ian M. Banks, then stick around, but I'll include timestamps in the description so that you can mosey on over to the end credits of the episode. Thank you so much for listening, if this is where you decide to jump off. So that's your official spoiler warning, minor as it may be. We're gonna get into this stuff right now. There's a reason that humanity has never been able to expand past the thrial system. I mean, it's been 10,000 years, so it should have happened by now, surely. I mean, yes, it's all been this chaotic cycle of civilizational rise and collapse, but these same rising and falling civilizations managed to make something as godlike as the lazy guns, so surely they could have built some kind of engine that was capable of traveling to nearby star systems. And there's a terrifyingly simple explanation behind why they never did. There are no nearby stars. The night sky of every planet and moon in the thrial system is filled not with a wondrous cacophony of stars and constellations the way ours are, but rather just the little pittances of light that come from derelic stations and satellites or the other moons and planets in the thrial system. The closest thing that these people have to the heavens are these very faint and distant nebulae, which we learn are actually impossibly far away galaxies. Thrile is a rogue star, and it was flung from its home galaxy untold eons ago, and ever since it's been floating endlessly through the void with only its planetary children for company. The people of the Thrile system are backed into a corner, they have nowhere to run anymore. They broke through that first barrier that was Golter's gravity well and managed to colonize the rest of the thrial system, but now the rest of the thrial system is starting to fall into the same patterns that forced people to leave that irradiated, chaotic mess of a planet in the first place, and there are no more barriers to break. You know, it might take tens of thousands of years for a result to be decided, but this is humanity's last stand. If there's a solution to be had for all of the problems that this civilization has encountered over the eons, it needs to come from within because there's nowhere else. It's no accident that so many of the thrial system's inhabitants have thrown in with religion and god and some kind of deity to save them, because the the problems that are facing the system and facing humanity as a whole seem so overwhelming. There's a reason that a very common expletive in the thrial system is the word fate. I think the book can absolutely be interpreted as having a pretty potent environmental message. I mean, this really is the worst case scenario of a human race just abusing its home solar system. And when you look at the thrial system, it's really not hard to sort of substitute our present-day Earth in for it. Now, at least we here on Earth have some options. I mean we have the whole rest of our solar system and thankfully a few nearby solar systems to go to, but is that really something that's going to happen in the near future? Is that something that we can reliably plan around to help the unbelievably vast majority of humans? I don't know the answers, and I don't think there's any one person who does, but we can at very least look to Against the Dark Background and the Thrile System as an example of what not to do. Lady Shire's story is the only exposure that we ever get to the Thrile System. At least the only exposure that we ever get from, you know, the Word of God, from Ian M. Banks himself. And the question of whether humanity ever managed to get its act together and sort of rehabilitate the thrial system is left unanswered. The closest thing we have to an expansion upon Against the Dark Background is an epilogue that Ian M. Banks posted online but wasn't included with the original print version of the book. Lady Sharow's story comes to an end, but we as an audience are left to wonder about the ultimate fate of the Thrile system. All we can ever do is speculate as to what exactly happened to that one little pinprick of light and life that is floating endlessly against the dark background.