Use of Weapons
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Use of Weapons is a science fiction novel by Iain M. Banks, and the third to deal with the Culture, his fictional technological utopia. The story is essentially a biography of a man called Cheradenine Zakalwe who was born outside of the Culture and was recruited by the Culture's euphemistically named Special Circumstances to work as an agent interfering in primitive (compared to the Culture) civilizations. It is widely considered to be the best of the Culture novels, but also one of the least accessible due to its relatively complex structure.
The book is made up of two narrative streams, interwoven with alternating chapters. The numbers of the chapters indicate which stream they belong to: one stream is numbered forward in words (One, Two ...), while the other is numbered in reverse with Roman numerals (XIII, XII ...). The story told by the former moves forward chronologically (as the numbers suggest) and tells a self-contained story, while in the latter each chapter is successively earlier in Zakalwe's life. Further complicating this structure is a prologue and epilogue set at another time entirely, and many flashbacks within the chapters.
The forward moving stream of the novel deals with the Culture's attempts to re-enlist Zakalwe for another "job", the task itself and the payment that Zakalwe wishes for it. The backward moving stream describes earlier "jobs" that Zakalwe has performed for the Culture, ultimately returning to his pre-Culture career as a general on his homeworld.
Banks wrote a much longer version of the book with an even more complicated structure (Banks: "It was impossible to comprehend without thinking in six dimensions") back in 1974, long before any of his books (science fiction or otherwise) were published. The book's cryptic acknowledgement credits friend and fellow science fiction author Ken MacLeod with the suggestion "to argue the old warrior out of retirement" (to rewrite the old book) and further credits him with suggesting "the fitness program" (the new structure). MacLeod makes use of this structure in his own novels, most notably in The Stone Canal.
The book is also interesting in that includes, for the first time in a Banks novel, the beginning of another story ... possibly. After the dénouement of Zakalwe's story, the character Diziet Sma visits a hospital in what appears to be a less advanced civilisation. There she finds a heroic but crippled soldier and offers him a job, presumably as a Culture mercenary. This section is entitled "States of War" and is labelled a prologue. While some have interpreted this as the beginning of a possible future novel (though there are apparently no plans by Banks to write this story), others suggest instead that it adds a cyclical element to the story of Use of Weapons. As the central two strands of the novel cycle around to finish at essentially the same point, many readers find this circular interpretation appealing.