Look to Windward was published by Orbit in 2000. Its title, like Consider Phlebas, comes from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Banks described it as a companion piece to the first Culture novel — both concern the aftermath of the Idiran War, but where Consider Phlebas was about the war itself, Look to Windward is about guilt and grief eight hundred years later.
Major Quilan, a Chelgrian (a feline species), travels to the Culture Orbital of Masaq’ ostensibly as a cultural emissary. In reality, he carries a weapon intended to destroy the Orbital and its billions of inhabitants — revenge for a Culture intervention in Chelgrian affairs that inadvertently triggered a civil war killing billions. Quilan’s personal motive is simpler: his wife died in that war, and he has nothing left to live for.
The Hub Mind of Masaq’ — which knows exactly why Quilan has come — faces a dilemma: it could stop him at any time, but doing so would require violating the principles of non-coercion that define Culture ethics. The novel becomes a meditation on whether a society that refuses to use its power coercively can survive contact with those who have no such scruples.
Collecting Look to Windward
First edition (Orbit, London, 2000): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first: $120–$250