Book Review

MATTER by Iain M. Banks

So I caved and read another Culture novel. Mr. Banks continues to write the most convoluted science fiction that I've read in a long time. At least this time around he kept things linear. Matter follows a post-post-9/11 mindset where the analysis is no longer about the clash between fundamentalism & secularism but with the notions of stewardship of less advanced civilizations.

To keep things complicated, Banks has four layers of stewardship (Plus another peripheral one) in order to explore the different possibilities of the dynamics, and sources of abuse that can (and inevitably will) arrive when you remove freedom from a society and impose laws that don't evolve through the natural course of a civilizations development.

Plot-wise, it's your typical sword & sorcery dilemma: The king's been murdered and the princes are on the run from the baddie who seized the throne and are looking for justice. This conflict is juxtaposed with crises of an intergalactic scale, balancing out the human emotions with practical issues of a much grander scale while destroying every stereotype of a science fiction/ fantasy novel.

The book meanders and is a lot better in concept than in execution (Which is kind of the point), however the final act is so amazing it's well worth the schlep. Banks officially says a big Fuck you to the expectations of the reader and comes up with one on the biggest downers of an ending that I've read in a while. While it's not a particularly big downer, he deliberately denies the reader catharsis through the final journeys of the main characters, maybe provides a twist that (possibly) forces you to re-think the motivations of main characters and convolutes things so much that you'd better have paid a hell of a lot attention to the whole book to be able to grasp the repercussions of everything that happens.

The moral of the story: You are even less meaningless that you suspect.