Kings, princes, evil
viziers, treachery, and court intrigue share the stage with galactic
civilizations, manufactured hollow worlds, interstellar spies, and terminal
technologies in Matter, the triumphant new novel in Iain M. Banks' loosely connected
Culture series. After seven books collecting Culture tales of various lengths
and experimental structures, the prolific Scottish writer has produced an
almost-perfect work of 21st-century science fiction. Combining the hard SF of
Larry Niven, Robert L. Forward, and Robert Anton Wilson with the light,
fantastic touch of Douglas Adams and Piers Anthony, Matter is a page-turner with
humor, suspense, and a huge imagination that would be intimidating if it
weren't so thoroughly humane.
Prince Ferbin, a gadabout
member of the Sarl royal family, witnesses the shocking murder of his father by
a trusted adviser and flees with his servant to find justice. That means
traveling up through the levels of the Shellworld Sursamen—a nested
series of concentric spheres created by an ancient civilization as a vast
planetary machine—to beg the help of the world's overlords, and their
overlords in turn. As Ferbin journeys into the bewildering complexity of
intergalactic peoples, his younger brother Oramen is starting to have
suspicions about that trusted adviser, who is now ruling the Sarl as regent and
mounting an invasion of the neighboring level. But the mystery of an alien city
slowly being revealed under an enormous system of waterfalls captures his
interest, and may distract him from discovering the truth about the regent's
betrayal. Meanwhile, a renegade sister, long ago farmed out to the space-faring
Culture to train with the quasi-covert agency called Special Circumstances, is
on her way back to Sursamen in the wake of her father's death. She isn't the only one with an interest in the Shellworld, however, and the menacing
plans of the crab-like Oct lead her and a motley crew of deputies on an
improbable mission to the planet's god-inhabited core.
Banks' vision of a
universal detente among anarchic superpowers overseeing a complex network of
client species, in a technological setting so advanced that scarcity has
vanished and money is obsolete, has always provided plenty of room for
political machinations. In Matter, however, he achieves an urgency born of
fascinating, fallible, but always relateable characters in microcosm to balance
his enormous science-fiction edifice in macrocosm. Then he refuses to settle
for the easy answers and predictable arcs that his adventure-genre plotting
would lead readers to expect. There's tragedy here, all the more affecting
because it swallows up people worth caring about. While the novel takes a few
introductory chapters to set up the pieces for this massive chess game, its
nested quests are refreshingly fleet and charming, and the final twists are
unforgettable. Matter is not only a magnificent gateway into Banks' obsessions, but
also an immensely satisfying banquet of science and wonder.