Anodyne
Friday, February 29, 2008
 

New IMB shipped today from Toronto!

"It's in the nature of sf that a reader may forgive much for a certain quota of conceptual invention. And the planet itself, called Sursamen, is an extraordinary creation. You can watch the prose clicking into a kind of rapturous hard-sf overdrive as Banks begins to describe it: 'Sursamen collected adjectives the way ordinary planets collected moons. It was Arithmetic, it was Mottled, it was Disputed, it was Multiply Inhabited, it was Multi-million-year Safe, and it was Godded.' This means, as Banks evinces an infectious delight in explaining, that the planet is a series of concentric shells held up by massive towers, with internal suns rolling across each ceiling, and a different species of lifeform living on each level. The whole thing (and thousands of others like it) was built long ago, by an extinct alien civilisation, for purposes unknown. At its centre lives another kind of alien, and no one knows what that is doing there either.

Such is the epistemic suspense that drives the narrative, as aficionados of the Culture series welcome the fecund variety of new spacefaring species, as well as the pleasurable return of familiar paraphernalia such as knife missiles, and new additions to the catalogue of arch ship names, chosen by the machine Minds of the ships themselves: here is the Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill; there the Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall; and over there a kind of hero, the Liveware Problem. The novel itself has a kind of liveware problem: the ship Minds are more sympathetic characters than most of the medieval-fantasy humans.

The story's superbly kinetic endgame, meanwhile, seems a little squeezed. Here, Banks gleefully mashes together tropes from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the matériel of his universe works at maximum efficiency: combat drones work offstage magic and talking combat suits helpfully emit expository info-bursts."


<< Home

Powered by Blogger

.post-title { display: none!important; }