"It could see that - by some criteria - a warship, just by the
perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful
single artefact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same
time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied.
To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit
to a kind of short-sightedness close to blindness, to confess to
a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself.
The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by
the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in
some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe.
By this measure the love, or just the appreciation of weapons was a
kind of tragedy."
Man that hurts. I know it is totally off-topic but the fact that there will be no more sequels really hit the other day when I was in a bookstore looking for something new to read. I'd gravitated to the area where Ian M. Banks books are on display and it took me a full minute to realize there never would be anything new in that section again. What a pity.
I'm going even further off-topic, but I saw a blog posting by David Brin where he describes the Culture as "a humanity-that-succeeds" - which is a description I loved.
Just from the first couple pages, it seems your quote is apropos. The author makes a distinction between his feelings on war, and the weapon itself. And it's hard not to get swept up in the rhetoric of their design, which is indeed a tragedy given the suffering both inflicted and halted by the devices.
"I adore weapons. Of every sort."
From Excession, by Iain M. Banks:
"It could see that - by some criteria - a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artefact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of short-sightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation of weapons was a kind of tragedy."