Quick review: Matter

Iain M. Banks
Matter
SFBC Hardback Edition

There's a pretty much standard template for space opera. You have a hierarchical military organization that's organized pretty much like the U.S. military. You have either an all-human galaxy or there's one alien race that you're at war against. You have warships organized like U.S.N. warships circa 1950's, which is where space opera writers got their military experience. You have scummy merchant vessels akin to the tramp steamers of the 20th century, scrabbling to trade between ports to get the money to keep fuel in the engine and air in the hull and food in the larder. You have a government that is organized either as a monarchy or as a democracy with s strong President or Prime Minister. Everybody is either at the same technological level or if someone's not, they're primitives. Artificial intelligences play no part other than as implementers of human will. There's a happy ending where the hero vanquishes the evildoers. And finally, humanity is on top of all the hierarchy of races as the bestest most advanced race of monkeys.

Iain M. Banks turns pretty much all of these standard tropes on their head in his Culture novels. His espionage agents generally don't come to a happy ending -- they end up getting killed on the job (quite a lot of job attrition in that job), though since they can back up, it's only a specific instance being killed. The Culture has no central governing body and is anarchical and haphazard, with the Minds (giant artificial intelligences) pretty much going their own way or agreeing by consensus on plans for operations and general philosophy of operation even in the areas of military and espionage. The humanoids (who are probably not humans, in this universe humanoid life forms evolved on multiple planets and there's no indication where the humanoids who are the Culture came from) are in a symbiotic relationship with the Minds where they rely on the Minds for most of the necessities of life such as transportation, places to live, clothes, food, etc., and provide the Minds with a random factor, an entertainment value if you will, as well as some level of direction where they don't tell the Minds what to do (that'd be akin to a mouse telling human what to do), but suggest interesting things to do (the Minds, because their "brains" operate at many times the speed of human brains, get bored easily) or make random contributions to the overall philosophy of the Culture that the Minds themselves, due to their lack of organic components, don't easily arrive at. The economy of his Culture is a communism of plenty -- matter transmuters can create any goods at will, drawing upon near-limitless resources such as hydrogen skimmed from gas giants, so everybody pretty much just asks the nearest Mind for whatever they want and the only trading is cultural trading, trading of transmuter templates or works of literature or whatever. And there are a vast number of races and societies in the galaxy, at a wide range of levels of development from pre-industrial to societies that make the wide-spanning Culture look like cavemen.

Into this universe Banks throws his various characters, usually folks in Special Circumstances, a somewhat frowned-upon group of the Culture that specializes in fiddling with primitive cultures to bump them up the social ladder without destroying them culturally or via giving them destructive playtoys like nukes before they're culturally capable of handling them. Many of the agents of Special Circumstances are originally members of a primitive culture, generally an industrial-level culture somewhere, who were brought into the Culture at a fairly early age and acculturated. In Matter, one of these agents hears that her father, the King of a primitive culture that was settled by their patrons on one level of a giant artificial world many eons ago to escape a genocidal conflict elsewhere, has been killed. She heads back to see what she can do for her two brothers, who themselves are having to deal with some rather nasty things involving murder, mayhem, treachery, and malicious alien races as well as culture shock. The end game ends up with a Mind dead, the brothers dead, the agent "dead" (well, she has been backed up, so only this particular instance of her is dead), millions of the agent's people dead including its entire ruling class and most of its military class, and a world-destroying menace dead, as well as much murder and mayhem between members of various cultures at various levels of development.

So yeah, not a happy ending as such, other than that (presumably) the world is saved. But ah, what a journey. I would not call Matter Banks's best Culture novel (indeed, it is arguable that his first one, Consider Phlebas, set a standard that cannot be surpassed), but it certainly does the series proud. Two flippers up.

-- Badtux the SciFi Penguin