Iain Banks

Living the last of his eight lives, Count Alandre Sessine VIII races against time to defuse a lethal conspiracy on its way to Earth, while a betrayer is fast on his heels

Feersum Endjinn

Count Sessine is about to die for the very last time ... Chief Scientist Gadfium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been waiting for from the Plain of Sliding Stones ... And Bascule the Teller, in search of an ant, is about to enter the chaos of the crypt ... And everything is about to change ... For this is the time of the encroachment and, although the dimming sun still shines on the vast, towering walls of Serehfa Fastness, the end is close at hand. The King knows it, his closest advisers know it, yet sill they prosecute the war against the clan Engineers with increasing savagery. The crypt knows it too; so an emissary has been sent, an emissary who holds the key to all their futures.

Gavin

Half the characters in this are ghosts, and one of the less-noted things about ghost stories is that they are wildly optimistic: they tend to show justice prevailing. Yes, fine, the ghost's revenge is a gory, creepy, retributive justice, and a bit late, but it's still the victim's triumph.

 The sumtym narayter Bascule makes or breaks the book. He's a good character - Molesworth on the Web - but I couldn't stand his phonetically told sections when I read this as a teen, and you'll see the reviews below focus on him despite him being only about a quarter of the focalisation. Bad spelling (cognitive dysfunction) is rare in sci-fi - let alone in SF titles - because the authors are trying to be taken seriously to make up for the genre fiction status? - and I've gotten over it since. Maybe better as audiobook. 

 The characters are squatting their own civ. What lives on (after a relatively gentle apocalypse) is more self-conscious, historically conscious than that in Book of the New Sun. Not ruined, just forgotten, off the wavefront, using the space elevator as a house. The cyberspace is pretty good (better than  or Snow Crash or Neuromancer because less neat). 
The mist was the world was the data corpus was the Crypto-sphere was the history of the world was the future of the world was the guardian of un-done things was the summation of intel­ligent purpose was chaos was pure thought was the untouched was the utterly corrupted was the end and the beginning was the exiled and the resiled, was the creature and the machine was the life and the inanimate was the evil and the good was the hate and the love was the compassion and the indifference was everything and nothing and nothing and nothing.


One virtuoso passage, on the species' trajectory after a nebula occludes the sun:
so humanity left the surface of the world to the ice, wind and snow, and sheltered, reduced and impoverished, within the stony depths of the planet's skin, finally coming to resemble nothing more than parasites in the cooling pelt of some huge dying animal.

With it it took all its knowledge of the universe and all the memories of its achievements and all the coded information defining the animals and plants that had survived the vicissitudes of time and evolution and - especially - the pressure of the human species' own until then remorseless rise.

Those buried citadels became whole small worlds of refugee communities and spawned still smaller worlds as new machines took over the job of maintaining the levels of the crypt, until gradually more and more of what was in any sense humanity came to reside not simply in the created world of its tunnels, caverns and shafts but within those worlds in the generated realities produced by its computers...

Still, what was left of humanity persisted, retreating further from the open oven of the surface until it became trapped between it and the heat of the planet's own molten sub-surface. It was then that the species finally gave up the struggle to remain in macrohuman form, pulling back fully into a virtual environment and resorted to storing its ancient biochemical inheritance as information only, in the hope that one day such fragile concoctions of water and minerals could exist again upon the face of the Earth.

Its time from then was long as people reckoned it from that point, short as they would have before. The sun's photosphere continued to expand until it swallowed Venus, and Earth did not survive much longer; the last humans on Earth perished together in a crumbling machine core as its cooling circuits failed, the half-finished life-boat spaceship they had been attempting to construct already melted to a hollow husk beside them.

He suffered with each child abandoned to the snow; with every old man or woman left - too exhausted to shiver any more - under piles of ice-hard rags; with all the people swept away by the howling, fire-storm winds; with each consciousness extinguished - its ordered information reduced to random meaninglessness - by the increasing heat.

And he woke from such dreams sometimes wondering whether all that he was being shown could possibly be true, and on other occasions so convinced that it had been real that he would have faithfully believed what he had seen was the inescapable future, rather than some mere possibility, projection or warning.


Problems: 
* Climaxes about 2/3 through. I suppose that's okay, it's not a three-act play.
* Bascule is hooked into the king's brain surveillance network, but regularly escapes the king's secret police.
* Banks shows the crypt people having Em accelerated cognition (about 1000x), but without Ems dominating the economy and society. (Actually, no human besides the military, scientists and secret police are heard of doing any real work, so maybe this is the case in the background.) 
* It's set on Earth, which is odd for Banks, but this fact isn't used much. Some of us stayed behind.
* There are several virtual worlds in this (the bird crypt, the transport map, the interrogation allegories, the deep crypt with its garden) but they're insufficiently different from each other and base reality (all have a kind of fairytale logic, all have mythical beasts stalking around).
* None of the sheer stakes, grandeur, and philosophical tension of the Culture books.
* Fun but a mere sketch.

Vladimir

Iain M. Banks

A superb standalone novel from the awesome imagination of Iain M. Banks, a master of modern science fiction. Count Sessine is about to die for the very last time... Chief Scientist Gadfium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been waiting for from the Plain of Sliding Stones... And Bascule the Teller, in search of an ant, is about to enter the chaos of the crypt... And everything is about to change... For this is the time of the encroachment and, although the dimming sun still shines on the vast, towering walls of Serehfa Fastness, the end is close at hand. The King knows it, his closest advisers know it, yet sill they prosecute the war against the clan Engineers with increasing savagery. The crypt knows it too; so an emissary has been sent, an emissary who holds the key to all their futures. Praise for Iain M. Banks: 'Epic in scope, ambitious in its ideas and absorbing in its execution' Independent on Sunday 'Banks has created one of the most enduring and endearing visions of the future' Guardian 'Jam-packed with extraordinary invention' Scotsman 'Compulsive reading' Sunday Telegraph The Culture series: Consider Phlebas The Player of Games Use of Weapons The State of the Art Excession Inversions Look to Windward Matter Surface Detail The Hydrogen Sonata Other books by Iain M. Banks: Against a Dark Background Feersum Endjinn The Algebraist

Adam Perfect

Dmitry Dudov

Peter Tving

Martin Samuelsson

Living the last of his eight lives, Count Alandre Sessine VII races against time to defuse a lethal conspiracy on its way to Earth, while a betrayer is fast on his heels. Original.

Feersum Endjinn

Reviews