Questionnaire: Brendan
Brendan lives in London and posts to the Culture List.
ARTICLE INFO
category Questionnaires
added 2001 july 23
author brendan
Your name Brendan Nelson
Email address brendan@sharesite.net
Personal homepage URL http://www.sharesite.net
Your own Banks related page URL Who needs a Banks page when everyone else on the list has a perfectly good one??
Occupation project manager
Where d'ya live? North London
Education / research Not an academic, but a cut-throat privateer
How did you hear about the List? Through the Culture Shock website back in 1997. I remember this List when it was all fields, I do (the to: field, the cc: field, etc...)
Favourite kids' TV prog Pokémon!
Think this list should stay more 'on topic'? Yes
Fancy a get together? Suggestions? Mine's a Guinness
Favourite drink Guinness
Books | Preferred Genre Good science fiction
Books | Best book ever God knows - recently I've very much enjoyed _The Forever War_ by Joe Haldeman
Books | Best Banks (mainstream / non-sf) The Bridge
Books | Best Banks (sf) Consider Phlebas
Favourite films Network is my favourite film ever. I also like the Star Wars films. I like watching some films repeatedly, most notably Network, which I think is perhaps the best film ever made (it's that or Blade Runner). I watched that film AI and it was utter tosh. The teddy bear was good though. Robocop is ace.
Favourite music Futuristic music
Favourite deviant practice Posting to the Culture List.
Favourite Banks line Can't remember. There's one in _Against A Dark Background_ with something like "the cold, dark seconds of space", which I quite like.
Favourite Banks scene The scene where the Elencher drone is trying to evade the grasp of the Excession.
Do you preach Banks to your mates? Yes of course.
If so, how many converts? Six billion.
Favourite gland (from a Banks book) Deep blue, the sharp-thinking gland that Gurgeh uses. I also like the slowdown gland that Sma uses in State of the Art, where you see trajectory lines of your assailants and so on.
If you could design a custom drug gland, what would it be? Something that mimicked synaesthesia, with really nice graphics, and responsive to very subtle variations in frequency and tone.
Sexual orientation and/or sheep joke Heterosexual. Sheep jokes are so 1990s!
Religious beliefs Complicated
Particularly despised religious viewpoint/religion Those that propagate through exploiting baser instincts like fear and self-doubt
Closest political affiliation Need to sort out that political compass thing for this one. I don't like W Bush, though, so that makes me a commie terrorist sonovabitch in American eyes, I guess!
Political Compass score (see here) Economic left/right: -1.25
Authoritarian/Liberal: -6.26
Photo http://www.brelson.com/brelson.jpg
Description Mediocre
Other hobbies Make music, am a DJ, run a few websites, write financial satire (don't ask), used to draw crap cartoons
Pets None, but I did have mice in my flat for a while. Never saw them though; only their shit in the morning.
Other people you live with No-one, no-one at all.
What you live in Three rooms: a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom. The flat is so small I practically live in all three simultaneously.
Anything else interesting you want to tell us? If you were an alien civilisation listening to TV signals from Earth, the first thing you'd have seen would be the Nazi Eagle, which opened up the televised 1936 Olympics. What would that, and the next ten years of transmissions, make you think about this planet and this species?