{"id":701,"date":"2010-06-05T22:44:40","date_gmt":"2010-06-05T22:44:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=701"},"modified":"2024-01-21T15:24:10","modified_gmt":"2024-01-21T20:24:10","slug":"banks_transition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2010\/06\/banks_transition\/","title":{"rendered":"Banks, Iain M.: <cite>Transition<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Iain M. Banks&#8217;s <cite>Transition<\/cite><\/strong> is, alas, entirely unworthy of its terrific opening line:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you&#8217;re told you deserve whatever you get.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Honestly I can barely remember what happened in it, and I can&#8217;t have read it more than six months ago (barely any time at all, when it comes to this backlog), so whatever the plot was, can&#8217;t have been very interesting. I do recall that it takes forever to get going, which may have something to do with it straddling the SF and mainstream genres (it was published in the U.S. as SF and in the U.K. as mainstream). It has an entirely unbelievable and rather tedious sexual relationship. And it completely squanders its opening line: you just can&#8217;t have a first-person narrator going around saying &#8220;but maybe I&#8217;m lying to you! Aren&#8217;t I cute!&#8221; when you also have ordinary third-person narrators <em>recounting the same story<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Not recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Iain M. Banks&#8217;s Transition is, alas, entirely unworthy of its terrific opening line: Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you&#8217;re told you deserve whatever you get. Honestly I can barely remember what happened in it, and I can&#8217;t have read it more than six &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2010\/06\/banks_transition\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Banks, Iain M.: <cite>Transition<\/cite>&#8220;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,15],"tags":[136],"class_list":["post-701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-banks-iain-m"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=701"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2522,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701\/revisions\/2522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}