Matter - Iain M. Banks

Ian M Banks' latest sci-fi novel, 'Matter', is a story of immense scale in terms of both time and space, and one that is packed full of variety and ingenuity. The story revolves around the royal family of The Level 8 Sarl, a people who inhabit the eighth level of Sursamen, a Shell World. Shell Worlds are huge multi-layered artificial planets created by an aeons-long-extinct race known as the Involcrua for an unknown purpose, the worlds originally designed to link up together to channel some mysterious conducting liquid for some reason, but the project never completed. Each level is connected to all the others by Towers, and the Sarl are a rather primitive humanoid ...  Read the complete review

This is a novel of such complex imagination and creativity it quite frankly scares me that one man is capable of writing it. I have read several of his works before such as The Algebraist and Consider Phlebas, and I find that Matter continues that streak of ingenuity. The one thing that strikes me more than anything is his ability to rinse the English language for all it is worth to create new terms for the advanced technologies and cultures abounding in this futuristic world. I love the way he takes everyday words and reuses them to mean something completely different. Such as his use of 'Mind' (with a capital M) to mean an artificial intelligence contained ...  Read the complete review

A king of Sarl dies - seemingly in battle, but really by the hand of his right-hand man and friend. On of his sons runs away with his trusty servant to seek help from the representatives of civilisations so advanced that they are practically gods. A Special Circumstances agent, once the unruly princess and daughter of the king, on learning of his demise decides to get de-fanged and go back to a world which she thought she had left for good. The other son, for now Prince Regent, dodges several assassination attempts while personally supervising the discovery of a mysterious, unimaginably ancient and seemingly sentient artefact. Two of the most ...  Read the complete review