Beautiful piece of writing by Iain Banks in The Guardian, in the process of reviewing M John Harrison's new book, Light:
"But books, and especially the created abstractions that are novels, fold our base realities. They uplift, press and pleat the plane of existence, packing and unpacking all our plans and works, all our cases and designs. The buildings rise, profiles plotting complexity, with every library a peak upon that graph, a virtual spike of processed information. Suddenly there is something there to understand that we have ourselves emplaced. Objects demand, and reward, closer inspection.
The library reveals itself to be fractal as we zoom in, growing peaks and valleys, crests and troughs, within the crumpled scape of information. And just occasionally, out of that general, gently rolling vista, an individual work jumps out at us, a spike within the spike, a spired city dominating the surrounding towns, villages and hamlets and denoting where a writer has upped the game and achieved a critical density of meaning that sends the needles of our discriminatory apparata off the scale."
If Harrison's book is half as good as Banks' review, it should be worth reading
[ps. what is it with sf writers and deploying the initial?]
