Analysis
In some respects Look to Windward serves as a loose sequel to the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas : the GSV Lasting Damage fought in the Idiran-Culture War, and Ziller specially composes a work to commemorate the arrival of light from a supernova triggered during the war. Both titles are derived from a couplet in T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land (which appears both in this work and Consider Phlebas as an epigraph):
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
There are references to the Culture novel immediately previous to this one, Excession, where the GCU Grey Area is referred to, and is also possible that Estray Lassils (in her younger, four-armed days) was one of the lovers of the Ah-Forget-It-Tendency SC Agent Leffid Ispanteli, thus placing the events of this novel fully 200-300 years in the immediate past.
This book deals with the themes of exile, bereavement, religious justification of mass violence against humanity/sentience in war, and the mores associated with life within a technologically and energetically unlimited anarchist utopia. The book also notably deals with the Sublimed and with their construction of a heaven.
The book's dedication reads: "For the Gulf War Veterans".
Read more about this topic: Look To Windward
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