Holse nodded at the map. “All this, sir. Is it a game?”
Hyrlis smiled, still looking at the great glowing bubble of the display. “Yes,” he said. “It’s all a game.”
“Does it start from what you might call reality, though?” Holse asked, stepping close to the balcony’s edge, obviously fascinated, his face lit by the great glowing hemisphere. Ferbin said nothing. He had given up trying to get his servant to be more discreet.
“From what we call reality, as far as we know it, yes,” Hyrlis said. He turned to look at Holse. “Then we use it to try out possible dispositions, promising strategies and various tactics, looking for those that offer the best results, assuming the enemy acts and reacts as we predict.”
“And will they be doing the same thing as regards you?”
“Undoubtably.”
“Might you not simply play the game against each other, then, sir?” Holse suggested cheerily. “Dispensing with all the actual slaughtering and maiming and destruction and desolating and such like? Like in the old days, when two great armies met and, counting themselves about equal, called up champions, one from each, their individual combat counting by earlier agreement as determining the whole result, so sending many a frightened soldier safely back to his farm and loved ones.”
Hyrlis laughed. The sound was obviously as startling and unusual to the generals and advisers on the balcony as it was to Ferbin and Holse. “I’d play if they would!” Hyrlis said. “And accept the verdict gladly regardless.” He smiled at Ferbin, then to Holse said, “But no matter whether we are all in a still greater game, this one here before us is at a cruder grain than that which it models. Entire battles, and sometimes therefore wars, can hinge on a jammed gun, a failed battery, a single shell being dud or an individual soldier suddenly turning and running, or throwing himself on a grenade.”
Hyrlis shook his head. “That cannot be fully modeled, not reliably, not consistently. That you need to play out in reality, or the most detailed simulation you have available, which is effectively the same thing.”
Holse smiled sadly. “Matter, eh, sir?”
“Matter.”
Rating: 5/5 stars.
I really like Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. In addition to the latest one, the subject of today’s review, I’ve read Consider Phlebas
The Culture is a Type IVish utopian civilization administered, more or less, by friendly AIs called Minds and populated by fun-loving humanoids, drones (less advanced AIs) and other sentient beings, all of whom have equal rights under the absence of law. The Culture often finds itself involved in the affairs of less hip civilizations through Contact, its diplomatic branch, and Special Circumstances, the black ops branch of Contact. In the Culture novels I’ve read, the ethics of such interventionism is at length debated and wrestled with, the ops proceed apace, and statistically (as SC agents are fond of pointing out) their specific objectives are more often than not attained, though usually following set-pieces of spectacular, apocalyptic destruction. Matter deviates from this in that its SC protagonist is concerned with family, not SC, business for much of the book, and the stakes are raised to cosmic proportions only towards the end.
Matter begins on the 8th level of the Shellworld (an artificial planet made of nested spheres) Sursamen, with the murder of King Hausk of the Sarl by his trusted adviser tyl Loesp. The hedonistic Prince Ferbin observes the foul deed and is reported dead by tyl Loesp, who takes over as acting King, you know, just untill Ferbin’s brother Oramen comes of age. Ferbin and his rather sharper servant Holse (Banks gets bonus points for channeling Wodehouse here) contrive to leave Sursamen and seek help in restoring Ferbin to the throne from Hausk’s old Culture buddy Xide Hyrlis and Ferbin’s sister Djan Seriy Anaplian, who eschewed the medieval milieu of the Sarl for the Culture fifteen years previously and who’s now working for Special Circumstances. Anaplian hears of her father’s death and decides to return to Sursamen as Ferbin and Holse are departing it, as tyl Loesp mounts an invasion of the 9th level (with a little help from the Sarl’s cryptic mentors, the Oct, who claim descent from the Shellworld’s builder race and want to speed up excavation of an archaeological site on the 9th called the Nameless City), and as awareness of the conspiracy against him slowly dawns on Oramen.
The structure of the Shellworld (did I mention its “machine core” is inhabited by a Xinthian Tensile Aeronathaur the Sarl call the WorldGod and worship, and which is parasitized by oft-maligned critters called Aultridia?) is mirrored by nested spheres of influence: the conflict and tension within the House of Sarl and between levels, exacerbated by the Oct, factors into the politicking of the Nariscene (the Sarl’s mentor race) and Morthanveld (the Nariscene’s mentor race), which comes under the scrutiny of the Culture after Oct elsewhere in the galaxy start behaving (more) inscrutably (than usual), and so on. It’s a complex setup with a ton of invented terms, and Banks kindly provides an 18-page appendix, which I referred to at least once per chapter, to help the reader keep track of who’s who, what’s what and how they all relate.
Though much of it reads like high fantasy with, as I mentioned, a splash of Wodehouse, when Banks kicks into hard SF mode and starts dropping Morthanveld Orbitals, charming avatoids of the Absconded (but maybe really undercover for SC) Stream-class Superlifeter Liveware Problem, sentient, dildo-disguised knife missiles and the like, the transition to familiar Culture territory is stark but not jarring. In this regard, Matter follows le Guin’s Rocannon’s World and Martin’s Dying of the Light, which also stylishly integrated high fantasy tropes with SF ones.
One of the things I love about Banks’ writing is his manipulation of the reader’s sense of scale, and Matter is no exception. The 9th level’s breathtaking Falls and Nameless City, for example, are first seen through a child’s (young Anaplian’s) eyes:
She had wanted to shriek. She had felt that her eyes were bulging out of her head, that she was about to wet herself – the water squeezed out of her by the sheer force and battery of the trembling air wrapped pressing all around her – but mostly she wanted to scream. She didn’t, because she knew if she did Mrs M would take her away, tutting and shaking her head and saying that she had always known it was a bad idea, but she wanted to. Not because she was frightened – though she was; quite terrified – but because she wanted to join in, she wanted to mark this moment with something of her own.
…
It had been some time before she even noticed that the great blocks and bulges that dominated the watery landscape beneath the Falls themselves were gigantic buildings. When she looked properly, once she knew what to look for, she started to see them everywhere; tilted and broken around the lake-sized plunge pools, tumbled amongst the mists downstream, poking like bone bits out of the dark walls of falling water before they filled and blossomed with dirty grey spray that settled into white as it rose and rose, becoming cloud, becoming sky.
At the time, she had worried that the people of the city must be getting drowned. A little later, when they had been telling her it really was time to go and trying to prise her fingers off the railings, she had seen the people. They were nearly invisible, hidden inside the mists most of the time, only revealed when the walls and canopies of spray parted briefly. They were at the absolute limit of the eye’s ability to make out; dwarfed, insected by the inhuman scale imposed by the arced sweep of the encompassing Falls, so tiny and reduced that they were just dots, unlimbed, only possibly or probably people because they could not be anything else, because they moved just so, because they crossed flimsy, microscopic suspension bridges and crawled along tiny threads that must be paths and grouped in miniature docks where miniscule boats and diminutive ships lay bobbing on the battering surface of hectic, dashing waves.
And of course they were not the people who had built and originally inhabited the buildings of the great city being revealed by the steady encroachment of the ever-retreating Falls, they were just some of the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of looters, scavengers, diggers, climbers, breakers, tunnellers, bridge-builders, railway workers, pathfinders, mapmakers, crane men, hoist operators, fisherfolk, boat people, provisioners, guides, authorized excavationers, explorers, historians, archaeologists, engineers and scientists who had re-inhabited this ever-changing, unceasing ruin of torn sediment, tumbling rock, plunging water and scoured monumentality.
They peeled her fingers away one by one.
Though Matter is, pardon the pun, a substantial volume, and focuses slightly more on the Shellworld than the Culture, it’s still as fine an entry point to the Culture universe as any of the other novels. If you like your prose, not just your tech, indistinguishable from magic, dig Matter.
Happy reading and cuídate.
, the design exhibit “