I loved reading fantasy and horror and suspense as a kid, and I loved the literary fiction we read in school. As an adult, I started taking myself and my choice of reading materials far too seriously, staying away from anything too genre, making rare exceptions for Atwood’s Madd Addam series or Tolkien. [I know. Insert eye roll <<here>>]
And then about six years ago, I read and loved Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, and I started looking into his other books and found that he’d written a whole series of space opera. Not my jam. But something made me say, “Screw it and try something new.” I loved that first book, and the next, and started branching out, and now my library is becoming much more balanced.
Matter is my sixth read from Iain M. Banks’s Culture series and my favorite so far, edging out Use of Weapons. For those unfamiliar, here’s the 25-cent rundown. The Culture is an advanced human civilization that has mastered pretty much everything: hyperspace travel, planet-scale manufacturing, clean power, body transformation and regeneration, AI, you name it. It’s a post-scarcity civilization without even the concept of currency, so whatever anyone needs or desires, they get, and they pretty much never die. Sounds boring, right?
It could be, but Banks largely avoids spending too much time within the Culture itself and instead focuses on their interactions with other species in the galaxy, from the most advanced to the most primitive. In Matter much of the time is spent within a humanoid society, the Sarl, roughly equivalent to medieval Europe with knights and ladies and all kinds of chivalry, including two main characters who reminded me of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
This society lives on the Eighth level of a Shellworld, an ancient synthetic planet constructed like Russian nesting dolls, one level surrounded by another surrounded by another and so on, and that idea of nested shells permeates the book. This more primitive society is mentored and monitored by a more advanced species, who are in turn mentored and monitored by a more advanced species, all the way up to the highest nearly at the level of the Culture itself. There is a main story of murder and treachery within the Sarl, but the treachery extends to the more advanced species, each playing at its own games with those beneath.
The wildcard is that the one daughter of the Sarl court was traded as a young girl to the Culture for technological secrets, and she’s been educated and advanced within the Culture to the point that she’s an agent of Special Circumstances, sort of their equivalent of CIA or MI-6. After learning of her father’s death, she makes her way back to her home world to mourn but in the process gets caught up in whatever shenanigans are going on with those more advanced species.
And it’s all just spectacular. Banks’s imagination is endless. He reveres the idea of the Culture while skewering their shortcomings, with one of the characters thinking, “All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for (our) emptiness.” There’s a lot to explain with all of the different species and societies and constructs and concepts, and I normally hate exposition, yet he somehow writes it so damned well and moves so seamlessly between exposition and action that it’s a pleasure to read. The whole shell-like structure could be tedious and convoluted in lesser hands, but Banks finds a way to make it work beautifully. None of his books have been quick reads for me. They’re dense and complicated, and I have to move through them slower than normal so I don’t miss anything, but they’re absolutely worth the time.
This book will definitely end up on my Best of 2018 shortlist. If you’re looking for a first Culture read, however, I’d start with Consider Phlebas or Player of Games, if only because they’re better introductions to the Culture itself.
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