Dead Air

What Hacker News says

1. mercurialJun 2013
   I didn't know Banks personally, unfortunately, but I challenge you to find a single anti-semitic statement he made. As for BDS, I wasn't familiar with it until 5 minutes ago, but it seems to be a group calling for a non-violent boycott of Israel. I have a hard imagining how you can paint everybody who supports them as antisemitic.

   If you want a shortcut into his politics, I suggest you read Dead Air.

   thread
2. mercurialJun 2013
   > They are calling for the delegitimization of Israel as a country.

   They are? They don't exactly advertise that on their website. Even if they were, it's like saying "Belgium is not a real country". It's orthogonal to one's feelings wrt Belgian nationals. Unless you think Stephen Hawking, another BDS supporter, dons a balaclava at night to beat up his kippa-bearing neighbours.

   I have read Dead Air. And it's pretty easy to understand why he would be pissed off at Blair. If your country was headed by a compulsive liar, whose lies had brought your country in a protracted, costly, pointless war, you'd be pissed too.

   Show morethread
3. lotsofmangosNov 2014
   I love old fiction, however I cannot read old fiction that references or is inspired by modern events. The novel is as much an instrument of contemporary social commentary as much as it is anything and to ignore this is to confuse the entire subject.

   Books like Dead Air by Ian Banks, or Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, are simply not available in earlier eras as their narrative reference points did not yet exist.

   It is like looking for something in the golden age of Hollywood that closely resembles Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Without the culture of computer games to draw on, that film could not get made.

   Show morethread