Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining, but only average for Banks
Review: A solid book that's worth the read, but only average to below-average for Banks. Readers of his work will find most of the book fairly predictable. Banks writes his Culture novels with some significant constraints. The Culture is composed of limited biological organisms, whose story we can understand, and transcendent abiological entities who really matter -- but who are mostly incomprehensible to us. In this novel Banks takes us into the mind of one of those transcendant entities, but the effort is unconvincing. It's hard to imagine such a creature could be as "human" as this one is. Overall Banks seems a bit tired of the Culture, but he does manage to insert a good bit of entertainment and a few surprises. The vengeance of the Culture is particularly memorable!
Rating:
Summary: An Intriguing "Culture" Space Opera Novel
Review: Admittedly, this does start off rather slowly, but it becomes eventually an interesting glimpse into Culture society as seen by Major Quilan, a native of the planet Chel. His mission is to bring home Ziller, a noted Chel composer. However, that isn't his prime objective. Banks seems to have a lot of fun comparing and contrasting his Culture society with those of other, less advanced, civilizations, such as Chel's. If you are in search of a fine space opera enriched by the dense descriptive prose of William Gibson, then you won't be disappointed with this tale.
Rating:
Summary: Intelligent Life Forms
Review: Are there intelligent life forms out there? There's one at least, and its name is Iain M. Banks. What a relief -- no mimsy, syrupy fantasy here, just straightforward science fiction with plenty of aliens and starships with names like "Now Look what You Made Me Do" and "Zero credibility." The plot is convoluted to the extent that you can't skip anything but, like completing the Friday New York Times crossword puzzle, it's more satisfying that way.
Rating: 
Summary: One of the better Culture books
Review: Banks is one the rare writers who can hop through different genres and be worth reading in all of them. However, his sci-fi, and especially the Culture novels are a cut above the high standard he sets. This book is a worthy entry into the Culture pantheon, if not quite as good as Excession or Use of Weapons. Once again, Banks examines war through the lens of space opera. His musings on war are not restricted to a simplistic good guys/bad guys view, but instead focuses on tragedies and triumphs from the societal level down to the individual. Toss in a generous mixture of humor and tight prose and you have a wonderful book. As with some of his other works, it does take a while for things to get moving. Stick with it, for once things do start to move it becomes a hard book to put down.
Rating:
Summary: I loved it
Review: But I love the Culture series. Banks is having fun with this one, stowing his nicely disguised utopian communist ethics lessons into the text. There is a perfectly OK story too, but not as strong as his best. Some of the tricks have been used before. The plot needs more tension. And Banks salts the story with exotic episodes that aren't structurally related to the story line. That's my main complaint about his books, I guess. But just imagine what it must be like as a writer to have your mind so full of these bizarre scenes that they have to be tossed out to make space for other wild stuff. Banks is great.
Rating:
Summary: Life, the Universe and a Brain.....
Review: Definitely not for those with a short attention span 'Look to Windward has' a lot to offer in respect to it's parallels to our own present 'Culture'.
The novel starts quite slowly and progresses in a way that, at times becomes excruciatingly detailed. However, taken in the context that the ultimate aim of this work is to raise us to a higher level of thought about our own place in the world, than it is to purely entertain us, it definitely achieves.
As usual with Banks, the climax to the story telling builds slowly. You must be willing to wait until the very end to discover the true nature of the beast.
The parallel story lines, which I imagine can be quite difficult to follow for some, don't hold our hand in the experience of understanding the message. This is the true attraction to the Banks' novel, the experience of discovery. I'm sure that for every person who reads it, the message is a little different, couched in an understanding of the world they live in and the place they (and the characters) hold in their universe.
I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. Even if the ending wasn't what I expected. That's life!!!
Rating:
Summary: A superb addition to the Culture saga
Review: Following the baffling (or intriguing, depending on your point of view) mediaeval shenanigans of Inversions, Iain M Banks has genuinely delivered the goods with this one, giving the Culture aficionados what they *really* wanted. "Look to Windward" is a staggeringly imaginative chunk of hard sci-fi, with some of the strongest characterization and mind-bogglingly grandiose scope since Banks' classic "Consider Phlebus". Who could not empathize with the battle-weary, bereaved Quilan whose tortured soul seeks oblivion, and yet who could not condemn him for the ghastly mission he agrees to undertake? Has absolute power begun to corrupt the Culture? Can they honestly still claim the moral high ground after their ill-judged and catastrophic intervention in the war? This novel touches on some pretty profound ethical dilemmas along the way. There is also much wise and possibly prophetic investigation into the nature of the soul, heaven and omnipotence. Please don't get the impression that this is all heavy stuff though; there is much amusing and witty dialogue between the chief protagonists. Some of Ziller's bon mots will have you in stitches. To the delight of the Culture anoraks, there is also a huge amount of information about Culture minds/hubs, personality backups, orbitals and (delightfully) a roll call of some of the more eccentric Culture ship names. How I would love to visit Masaq' Orbital; I guarantee you will too!
Rating:
Summary: Tentative
Review: I get the feeling that Banks is beginning to doubt himself, which is too bad. I was at the WorldCon in Philadelphia last year and attended a panel discussion where Banks and his works figured prominently. Much of the discussion centered around the (supposedly) left-wing nature of Bank's utopian Culture. One of the panelists stated that in Look to Windward, Banks was attempting to respond to his critics. Maybe so. It seems to me, however, that left-wing/right-wing is missing the mark. The Marxist/Capitalist debate centers around the best way to divide the pie, but when the pie is infinite and everybody has absolutely everything (in a material sense, at least) that they can possibly want, then such questions become moot. In any case, this book does give a darker picture of the Culture. Major Quilan, a canine like alien, has accepted a suicide mission to destroy the Masaq Orbital, in revenge for the Culture's interference in his own civilization's brutal civil wars. Quilan doesn't really care about the issues. He's just depressed and the idea of a suicide mission appeals to him. The Culture, in this book, is not quite the all-powerful political entity that has been pictured in past books. It appears, in fact, to hang somewhere between youthful exuberance and jaded middle age. Other civilizations have reached the same point and "Sublimed," or somehow vanished into a higher (or at least different) dimension of existence. The Culture makes mistakes, no doubt about it. The Culture has a lot to feel guilty about. But the Culture is what it is, a deliberate attempt to provide the ultimate in material well being and personal freedom to the maximum number of people, and I, along with (I am fairly certain) virtually every other reader, would sure like to live there.
Rating: 
Summary: Look to Storyline
Review: I think this (the latest Culture novel) is the worst of Banks' novels. It appeared to me as if a good down payment from his publisher was his key motivation rather than literature (I saw Asimov do the same think with his later Foundation novels). The storyline was incredibly weak and finally fizzled into about 3 weaker non-endings. Characters were invisible to my mind's eye; twists generally turned into Moebius vortexes and the SF concepts were generally self-indulgent and verging on lifeless. Sorry, I was a huge fan until yesterday - hey Ian M. Banks, where's your Culture gone?
Rating:
Summary: Banks is superb as usual, but this is not his best.
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this latest Culture novel, by which Banks maintains his ranking as my favourite SF author. Windward's focus on the occasionally ambiguous results of the Culture's dominant (a)morality was a welcome change: in his other novels Banks has tended to portray the Culture as part Libertarian Utopia and part Galactic Police. This book shows that even though it is--at least in the long run--omnipotent, it still can make costly mistakes. One highlight--an obvious sop thrown to fans of the Culture's ships--is a fairly lengthy conversation concerning the hilarious names of many previously unheard-of ships. A book of this calibre from any other author would easily rate five stars; unfortunately, where Iain M. Banks is concerned, I've become used to perfection! I can't easily articulate where he goes wrong here; it just didn't quite grab me the way his books usually do.
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