Matter

Iain M. Banks

2008 • 593 pages

Ratings92

Average rating4

In a world renowned even within a galaxy full of wonders, a crime within a war. For one brother it means a desperate flight, and a search for the one - maybe two - people who could clear his name. For his brother it means a life lived under constant threat of treachery and murder. And for their sister, even without knowing the full truth, it means returning to a place she'd thought abandoned forever. Only the sister is not what she once was; Djan Seriy Anaplian has changed almost beyond recognition to become an agent of the Culture's Special Circumstances section, charged with high-level interference in civilisations throughout the greater galaxy. Concealing her new identity - and her particular set of abilities - might be a dangerous strategy, however. In the world to which Anaplian returns, nothing is quite as it seems; and determining the appropriate level of interference in someone else's war is never a simple matter. MATTER is a novel of dazzling wit and serious purpose. An extraordinary feat of storytelling and breathtaking invention on a grand scale, it is a tour de force from a writer who has turned science fiction on its head.

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Series

Featured Series

10 primary books

#8 in Culture

Culture is a 10-book series with 10 released primary works first released in 1987 with contributions by Iain M. Banks.

#10

Popular Reviews

Reviews with the most likes.

Kavinay

Banks' specialities: it gets weird, you can't predict the end and yet it all makes sense eventually.

January 5, 2015

David

Banks's science fiction just keeps getting better, in marked contrast to his contemporary fiction. Here the breadth of ideas on show is simply breathtaking. Vast in scope, epic in scale, Banks effortlessly weaves several narrative strands into a coherent whole, as his protagonists converge on Sursamen, one of the ancient shellworlds, constructed aeons ago by a vanished ancient civilisation. The Culture and several other alien species feature heavily and despite being 500 pages, the book is immensely readable. A fine addition to the Culture series and proof that Banks is our finest Science Fiction novelist.

Katherine Hooper

Originally posted at Fantasy Literature.

Matter is the eight book in Iain M. Bank???s popular CULTURE series about a utopian society run by a beneficent artificial intelligence organization called The Culture. I haven???t read any of the previous CULTURE novels which, I think, gives me a unique take on Matter. Reading through some of the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, I see that many CULTURE fans felt like the 620-page Matter was a drastic change in pace and tone. I can???t say if that???s true, but I can say that I loved Matter and can???t wait to read the rest of the CULTURE series. In short, the setting was fascinating, the characters were interesting and fully developed, and the scope of the story was epic.

Most of the plot of Matter takes place on a backward Shellworld called Sursamen. Actually, it???s more correct to say that the story takes place in (not on) the Shellworld, for Shellworlds are artificial planets containing several underground levels stacked up on top of each other like floors in a skyscraper. The levels are held up by huge towers which allow a few people important people to travel between levels. Each level has its own atmosphere, stars, land masses, oceans, races, societies, languages, etc. The lowest level contains the world-god who is worshiped by people of the Shellworld. Read the rest: http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/matter/

March 24, 2014