Matter

Steven Poole’s review of Iain M Banks’ Matter is moderately encouraging:

In [this first Culture novel for eight years], representatives of various advanced civilisations debate the ethics of intervention in other people’s affairs, even if it’s for their own good. Luckily for a writer who is so skilled at scenes of violent action, the Culture has a secretive arm called Special Circumstances that specialises exactly in deniable intervention. Its armed officers constitute a kind of interstellar equivalent of CIA Black Ops.

The reader has to wait, unfortunately, for all this to kick in, because it rapidly becomes heart-sinkingly clear that here, the particular society in which the Culture might or might not intervene is one of faux-medieval fantasy fiction. The uniquely hopeless odour of leather, horse-like animals, stale sweat and tortured syntax wafts from the pages, and there is a tedious drizzle of invented proper names. [...]

With considerable relief, we learn at length that the king’s daughter has for years been hopping around space with the Culture, getting upgrades and being initiated into Special Circumstances itself. She is named Anaplian (after, we might guess, either the ancient Greek for sailing upstream, or the place where Saint Daniel perched atop his pillar every day). She learns what has happened on her homeworld, and decides to go back. The stage is set for a Culture clash, in which a figure with magical alien tech wreaks havoc among the primitives. But it doesn’t work out like that: before she returns, Anaplian has to turn off her special powers. Eventually, she turns them all back on anyway, to a small cheer from the reader, who wonders nevertheless whether her having to turn them off in the first place was merely a device to engineer the excitement of their reactivation. Instead, something very weird happens with the planet inhabited by the sub-Tolkien folk. [...]

As it happens, my current reading is Steven Poole’s own Unspeak. As soon as I’ve finished that, I’ll be picking up a copy of Matter.