Looking Out To Sea

Matter is quite a meaty book, and not the kind of thing I recommend you take to work if you want to fit your lunch in your bag at the same time. Despite these warnings, I did end up taking it to work and reading it at lunchtime because I was hooked. At least I had the good sense to wait for the paperback edition.

It’s a Culture novel. If you’re not an Iain M Banks reader, The Culture is a far-future society which he describes in a number of his novels. It generally exists as the society without iniquity. The money-free, egalitarian society from Star Trek seems conservative by comparison.

The general point of the Culture (apart from being unquestioningly awesome and making you want to live there right damn now) is having some infinitely nice society which still has to make really awkward decisions and make terrible sacrifices, despite their best intentions. It’s the proper opposite of all those dystopian futures that scifi writers are adept at dreaming up — from Philip K Dick, William Gibson and so on.

The story starts in a primitive world within our own galaxy. They are living in something like a late-medieval society, with royal courts and chivalric noblemen. This society exists in a shell world, a series of Dyson spheres stacked inside each other, the planetary equivalent of a matryoshka doll.

This book sits somewhere between Inversions and Excession with regard to viewpoint. The former had an almost imperceptible Culture reference, which you could easily miss or mistake for something else. The latter is a full-on Culture nerd-fest, with huge sections of the book being faster-than-light conspiring of super-intelligent artificial intelligences. In Matter we start off deep inside the primitive culture where all the action is centred, pulling slowly out to reveal the actions of the “peasants” in the wider context of galactic politics.

The whole book is essentially about layers. Political layers in the primitive society — heirs to the throne, court favourites, noblemen and peasants; physical layers in the shellworld, and control over movement between them; and further political layers as each society attempts to control, nurture or destroy the ones beneath it.

The science fiction aspect is the most pronounced I’ve seen since Consider Phlebas. He’s really trying hard to make this as unfilmable and gadget-filled as possible. In that respect it would probably put off some first-time readers. It would help to have read previous books and followed the technological progression of the Culture. (The books of the Culture are released in chronological order, though not in real time. The events of Look to Windward take place a millennium after Consider Phlebas.)

As I mentioned earlier, it’s enjoyable though certainly not his best. I certainly wouldn’t suggest it as an introduction to Iain M Banks or the Culture. In fact, I’m not sure what I would recommend, though starting at the beginning obviously won’t hurt.