Against a Dark Background

Against a Dark Background is a science fiction novel by Iain M. Banks. Unlike most of his science fiction, it does not deal with the Culture. In contrast with the galaxy-spanning Culture novels, it is set within a single solar system, which is isolated from the rest of the universe, alone in a vast intergalactic void (one meaning of the book's title).

Plot

The plot revolves around Lady Sharrow, an exiled aristocrat and retired pilot. An eccentric cult has decided that the messiah can not be born until the end of her bloodline, with the only way to escape their hunting passport lying in the recovery of the Lazy Gun - an ancient and highly improbable weapon, with a surreal approach to death. Naturally, this isn't straightforward.

The novel uses a variety of intricately constructed locations and carefully drawn characters to explore its themes of isolation via the pathetic fallacy on a grand scale.

The Lazy Gun

A Lazy gun is roughly half a meter long, 30 cm wide and 20 cm tall. On the front of the gun are two short cylinders that end in black lenses. A sight extends from the main body, as do two hand grips. A metallic strap allows the Lazy Gun to be fired from the waist. On one hand grip is a zoom control and on the other grip is a trigger mechanism. The Lazy gun is massy but light, and weighs three times as much when turned upside down. The Lazy gun is the only weapon known to display a sense of humour.

Firing the Lazy Gun is just a matter of pointing it in the right direction and then zooming in to the target as appropriate and then pulling the trigger. What happens next is unpredictable. When fired at humans, many different things may occur. An anchor may appear above the person, giant electrodes may appear on either side of the target and electrocute them, a blood-thirsty rabbit may tear their throat out, or they could be turned into a bowl of petunias. Larger targets such as tanks or ships may suffer tidal waves, implosion, explosion, sudden lava flows or just disappear. When fired at cities and other such targets, thermonuclear explosions are the norm, although in one instance a comet crashed into the city.

There were originally eight Lazy Guns. Seven of these were destroyed before the events of Against a Dark Background. One disappeared with its user when he tried to fire it at the local sun, one suffered a lucky strike during an air raid, two self destructed when investigators tried to take them apart, another was taken out by an assassin. A sixth was destroyed when investigators fired it with its lenses looking through an electron microscope, at which point the entire area for about half a kilometer around was replaced by a lake teeming with ocean life. The seventh, refound by the lady Sharrow and her team was destroyed by the university it was sold to when they tampered with it, and the resulting explosion devastated the city the university was located in.

Title

One possible derivation for the title of this book comes from a 1975 Ursula K. Le Guin essay titled Science Fiction and Mrs Brown, which outlines a canon of character-driven, rather than technology- or idea- driven, science fiction novels, and why they are still worth writing. The Mrs Brown of the title is a Virginia Woolf character, a woman poor grey and anonymous, yet a personification of "the spirit we live by" as humans. Le Guin's essay concludes:

And i think science fiction is - well, no, not important, yet still worth talking about, because it is a promise of continued life for the imagination, a good tool, an enlargement of consciousness, a possible glimpse, against a vast dark background, of the very frail, very heroic figure of Mrs Brown.