Time, place. Necessary, I suppose, though in the circumstances insufficient. However, we must begin somewhere and somewhen, so let me start with Mrs Mulverhill and record that, by your reckoning, I first encountered her near the beginning of that golden age which nobody noticed was happening at the time; I mean the long decade between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers.
If you wish to be pedantically exact about it, those retrospectively blessed dozen years lasted from the chilly, fevered Central European night of November 9th, 1989 to that bright morning on the Eastern Seaboard of America of September 11th, 2001. One event symbolized the lifted threat of a worldwide nuclear holocaust, something which had been hanging over humanity for nearly forty years, and so ended an age of idiocy. The other ushered in a new one.
***
Slung between these two wide-reaching levellings, the intervening years held civilisation happily if ignorantly scooped, as in a hammock.
Sometime about the centre of that sweet trough, Mrs M and I became lost to each other. We met again, then parted again for the final time just before the third Fall, the fall of Wall Street and the City, the fall of the banks, the fall of the Markets, beginning on September 15th, 2008.
Perhaps we all find such coincident place marks in the books of our lives reassuring.
Still, it seems to me that such congruencies, while useful in fixing what one might call one’s personal eras within our shared history, are effectively meaningless. Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating. Mrs Mulverhill herself said that, I think. Or it might have been Madame d’Ortolan – I get the two confused sometimes.
***
“Why, Mrs Mulverhill, you’re a conspiracy theorist!”
“Yes,” she agreed, smiling. “But not by nature. I’ve been forced into it by the conspiracy I’m investigating.”
Transition
Rating: 5/5 stars
Banks likes to write stories about crazy powerful, utopian civilizations’ covert meddling with the affairs of pointedly less advanced civilizations, and Transition is one such story. It’s not set in the universe of the Culture, but in the brand new multiverse of the Concern, which ostensibly works “to make the many worlds better,” the many worlds here being parallel versions of Earth.
Agents of the Concern, like “famously inventive ultra-assassin” Temudjin Oh, possess the bodies of folks on other Earths Quantum Leap-style by taking the drug septus, while their respective original bodies zone out on Calbefraques (an Earth where the Concern has its headquarters and the population is “Aware” of the multiverse). When an agent completes their mission and transitions (or “flits”) away, the displaced consciousness returns (often to find itself in something of an awkward situation, if not in a dead or dying body), which not only makes for some hilarious sex and chase scenes, but for some thorny ethical dilemmas, being, however, side dishes to the ethical dilemma du jour: is the Concern’s world-building justified, or just the septus-fueled equivalent of Terror War-era nation-building?
The mysterious Mrs Mulverhill (at one point Oh’s professor at the University of Practical Talents on Calbefraques, where such multiversal skills as transitioning, tandemising, tracking, blocking, exorcising, inhibiting, envisioning and randomising are studied and cultivated) gives the bird to the Concern’s Central Council, led by bicentennarian Madame d’Ortolan, defects with her private stash of septus, and attempts to recruit Oh to her cause. The ambitious, amoral financier Adrian Cubbish, a guy trying to pitch his alien movie script, a torturer from an Earth in which Islam is mainstream in the West and Christian fundamentalist terrorism is on the rise, and two mental patients are caught up in the conflict and unreliably narrate, along with Oh, d’Ortolan and Mulverhill, from their respective perspectives. This might sound a tad confusing, but Banks gives each a distinct voice and names the narrator at the start of each section, so the story’s genuine mysteries hold center stage.
Transition, like all the Banks novels I’ve read, made me laugh a good deal. Oh, for instance, flits into several folks with some form of OCD or apophenia, and the episodes in which he compulsively tallies objects and sums number strings in his environment, despite his disinterest in numerology, are priceless. Banks’ descriptions of the environments themselves are as dazzling as ever, but only a few run more than a paragraph; mostly, he imparts the feel (or “fragre”, as a transitioner would say) of a place with minimal, precise props and adjectives, his descriptive powers well suited to the many abrupt shifts in setting the plot requires.
My only criticism, and one I’d also make retrospectively of Matter, is that the ending seemed slightly rushed. I wanted more! It would be cool to see the multiverse so solidly established here developed further, but if Banks’ next book isn’t a Concern book, I won’t complain: I’ll just read whatever it is and reread Transition.
Happy reading and cuídate.
and 
[the only Silverberg novel I've read aside from his three collabs with Asimov when I was a kid] are also products of ’72) and what he saw as not-all-that-wonderful currents in SF itself. The 14 stories, though occasionally nihilistic, are all solid fun and cast interesting shadows on 2009, and Silverberg’s introductions give a sense of where his head, and the SF field, were at during those strange years.
), the novella “This is the Road” (four folks [three of different imaginative mutant races, one old school human] hit the road together after beings called Teeth destroy their homes), the titular “Trips” (guy seeks a version of his wife through a series of alternate Californias), the novella “Born with the Dead” (guy stalks his dead wife [the "rekindled" don't mix with the living] to the amusement and irritation of her dead pals and lover; Nebula and Locus winner), “Schwartz Across the Galaxies” (meta-SF again, anthropologist from homogenized “global village” near-future longs for contact with romanticized alien cultures), and “In the House of Double Minds” (where kids are commissurotomized and trained to be oracles). Most of these stories were originally written for anthologies and have been subsequently reprinted prior to this collection, so the introductions are really the only novelty; but if you haven’t read these stories before, may as well read them here!
, the design exhibit “