Rating: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
The Culture is my political ideology. Use of Weapons is Banks’ masterpiece on it, a brilliant combination of two forward- and reverse-running timelines that both hide and expose the final twist that undermines what we believe about the protagonist and the Culture itself. It is simply sublime storytelling, and contains both the best depiction of the Culture itself in the series and the one of best depiction of what it would be like to exist freely from class struggle in literature. Use of Weapons shows that there are no utopias, that there is always a struggle of some sort–but that getting close to a utopia is a utopia in itself.