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Matter

Orbit

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Average customer rating: 3.5 stars

The Greatest of the Culture books so far

I'm lucky, I didn't even know about the Iain M. Banks Sci-Fi books until late in 2009. After discovering them, I've read all of his Culture novels in a row from Consider Phlebas to Matter over the course of a few months. With that perspective in mind, I believe Matter is the apex of the Culture books.

Culture fans will love this book. Inversions haters will get more of what they hated. Combined, it's a great book. You will get your Culture fix from this one, trust me.

Banks needs a better editor

I wonder if some of Bank's earlier work (like "Player of Games" and "Consider Phlebus") are better because before he was successful he was forced to listen to the criticism of his editor(s). It just feels like "Matter" could really have benefited from some better editing. The writing is good, the characters are interesting and the basic concept of the story is cool, but the pacing of the plot is just awful (tedious) and the ending feels rushed and unsatisfying. Frankly this really goes for all of the Culture books since "Use of Weapons." If you are new to the Culture series, I recommend you read Player of Games first (great story, great character development). And don't worry about the order you read Culture books. Each one stands alone - they aren't sequels, they just happen in the same Universe. Once you have read enough of the other culture books, then you will probably be interested (and invested) enough to make reading "Matter" worth it.

Seen it all before...

This is actually the first Banks book I've not got to the end of. I'm feeling we've seen it all before, the competing siblings, neo-feudal society, and so on. The setting at least is new, but I just couldn't get on with it.

I actually preferred Algebraist, but it would be nice if he returned to top form soon - things are getting too comfortable and familiar in the Culture.

Too many overly tough, misleading reviews

I'm not going to summerize the plot; there've been many good descriptions. What got me full of trepidation was criticisms about pacing and how at the end everything was rushed to an unsatisfactory conclusion, as if the author was tired of his creation.

Well I just finished it and it's one of Banks' best works, I think. Yeah; it picks up and MOVES near the end and perfectly so, it narrows like the point of the spear: action is all. And why not? We'd gotten all the background, description, philosophy, diplomacy, court intrigue etc., all of which tend to slow down the narrative flow and all of which is vital.

But there came a point when action is all that's required and it's handled quite excitingly and beautifully. I say beautifully because the preceding 500 pages which built up to the ending had the heft to enable me over the next several days after I finished the novel to reflect upon it, its universe, its characters, so full of context. Breathtaking; reminds me of Look To Windward, for my money the other masterpiece in the Culture series.

Good read, fizzles a little

This is the second Culture novel I've read, after Look to Windward. If I had to summarize what characterizes Banks' writing, I would say it is "large scale" -- full of ideas and physical constructs that are bigger, more interesting, and more brain-stretching than you would find in most sci fi novels and pretty much any sci fi movie. Like Charles Stross, Banks has spent some time thinking about what it could mean for species and technologies to make many-orders-of-magnitude leaps that are hard for us to imagine.

Banks' writing is also generally entertaining, his characters are interesting (though not very deep), and his plots are reasonably fast paced. But where this particular book falls down a bit is that there are too many storylines that "stretch" it out in the first half, and then the plot falters and becomes kind of small scale (considering the large scale ideas involved) toward the end. The ending is rather abrupt -- it seems to confirm that the author doesn't care that much about most of the characters.

Note for Kindle readers: You're likely to miss the Epilogue because it comes at the very end of the Kindle file after a long Appendix -- be sure to look for it, it's a bit silly but it wraps up the story slightly more than would otherwise be the case.