This is the first book I have change the grade after re-reading. It is still a great book, but I no longer think it is grand. This is a serious work of the imagination. It doesn't really fit in the Culture novels, but it's definitely some Hard-SF with a beautiful vision of a far old Earth filled with so many Big Ideas. We've got everything from allotted resurrections, ghosts solving their own murders, enormous and layered virtual realities, virus-ridden fantasy realms, and a Chaos filled with AIs. If that isn't enough, the Earth is going through some major changes. You know... like destruction. Even more physical Big Ideas keep flowing in and I reveled in it all. :) His latest book was a science fiction (SF) novel in the Culture series, called The Hydrogen Sonata, published in 2012.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks | Goodreads

It grabbed me from the start. Part of this was the simple spectacle of it all, of the brobdingnagian "castle" where most of the story is set, in its kilometers-long, kilometers-tall chambers, of a destructive civil war between royalists and those aligned with the clan of Engineers, of the grotesque "chimeric" animals of sentience, and of the multiple layers of reality implemented in the vast dataspace of the cryptosphere where the data chaos lurks. And then there is the overwhelming concern of the Encroachment endangering the planet.

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Of course not all of the story works flawlessly; there are a handful of plot-lines brought up that never resolve, the story drags somewhat through the middle chapters, and the phonetic writing style is sometimes extremely difficult to read. I wouldn't suggest going into this anticipating a Culture novel. This is Banks in full on experimentation mode, and in retrospect, the book is odd, maybe too odd. It isn’t my favorite SF/F, it isn’t my favorite cyberpunk novel—I’m sure that several would argue it isn’t cyberpunk at all (is post-post-cyberpunk a genre yet?)—and it definitely isn’t my favorite Iain Banks novel, however… Count Alandre Sessine VII, a military commander who has been killed numerous times, most recently by assassination. He awakes in the Cryptosphere, having lost his eighth and final real-world life, and now has eight virtual lives (which rapidly dwindle) to discover who has been plotting against him and why. The story is told by the weaving of four almost concurrent narratives, including an "infamous" pseudo-phonetic writing. It is made harder by the intercalation of the text within normal texts, as it is not so hard when you get used to it. Enwayz, az u ½ now gesd, Bascule ryts in an uncunvenshinol fashin. Ubowt a ¼ uv the book, maybee a litl mor, is riten in the 1st persun by Bascule, hoo hass a lerning disubiluty. He can tok normuly but can onlee ryt foneticly. An the ofor, Ean Bankz, poolz this of brilyantly.

The Algebraist - Wikipedia The Algebraist - Wikipedia

This is a future earth story, and part of the issue I have with this book was that the main character: Bascule the Teller writes a large part of the story phonetically, and is really quite difficult to get used to. What actually happens is your reading pattern is disrupted, and instead of focusing on the story and the character's dilemma, you end up deciphering the text like hieroglyphs. Iain M. Banks is the only sf author I've actively pursued in years. His Culture novels have been particularly interesting, their sociological framework being unusually intelligent for the genre. This isn't a bad book—I don't think Banks is capable of writing a bad book, from the evidence to date—and it does contain memorable lines, such as this one: "In my experience those who are most sincere are also the most morally suspect, as well as being incapable of producing or appreciating wit." Gadfium, who uses bed meetings as a cover for espionage, much like in The Algebraist (and possibly in The Business, which either way had the ‘count to 1024 in binary using your fingers’ bit). The meeting is one where she declines the comfortably jocular offer of sex (more on that in a moment), yet her relationship with another woman, observatory chief Clispier implies a recognisable queerness: A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.I happily skipped one major complaint of this novel by listening to the audiobook version with Peter Kenny. He's awesome. That's great all by itself. But the best part is breezing right past the creative spellings of words. You know. Like the title of this book. Weird, right? But it's just Fearsome Engine. :) I'm sure this would be fine for people who read Shakespeare or any number of novels including Mark Twain's, but it is dense and some people might get turned off.