The novel ends with Taak, having left Ulubis and joined the Beyonders, suggesting to a lifelong friend he has just discovered is an AI, "One day we'll all be free". I think I liked it a lot: I certainly liked the concept of the world, anyway, though on reflection I don't give much a monkey's about most of the characters. The list is useless without a certain mathematical transform needed to give the exact location of the portals.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain Banks: 9780553374599

Literary critic and historian Ian Duncan has argued that Banks's ‘fearsome engine’, like his The Bridge, “is another allegory of the state, except that this apparatus is not just sublime in its dissociation from human accountability – it is omniscient, providential, and even organic. Dweller individuals live for millions of years, and the species has existed for billions of years, long before the foundation of the Mercatoria. The other side of it is Banks's meticulous management of information, where the reader has to piece together what the Encroachment really is (it is not detailed until well into the book), and who Count Sessine's enemies are, and why the war is happening, and most importantly how everyone is going to fix this mess. The Dwellers have hidden wormhole portals in the cores of all their occupied planets, and the Transform was never necessary.I happily skipped one major complaint of this novel by listening to the audiobook version with Peter Kenny. The reason for this is that about a quarter of it is written in a kind of phonetics, that I just couldn't read. That society encompasses the living and the dead, the first-lifers and the reincarnated, the physical and the virtual, the human-basic and the chimeric.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks | Goodreads

The society in Feersum Endjin is too massive, complex, and even contradictory to pull together in a big picture that makes much sense. The story follows four different people living in the remains of what can only be described as an disproportionately scaled super-city as they are reluctantly dragged into a plot involving a threat against the entire Earth. Chief Scientist Gad­fium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been awaiting from the Plain of Sliding Stones .It doesn't help that the computer pulls out oddities like spelling "have" as "½" and the overall inconsistency in the spelling. so before i start the expensive route of diagnosis by component substitution i thought id chuck the problem out to you guys.

The Algebraist - Wikipedia The Algebraist - Wikipedia

They lead an almost anarchic existence based on kudos, and inhabit the majority of gas-giant planets in the galaxy. One pet peeve of mine is that even the best written books sometimes have disappointing endings, so I was relieved to see the story resolved to my satisfaction. Banks had a remarkable gift: he made us care about each and any of them by making them incredibly relatable and so very human, even those you slightly despise, even those whose actions seem at first completely incoherent.The Culture: The Drawings– an extraordinary collection of original illustrations faithfully reproduced from sketchbooks Banks kept in the 1970s and 80s, depicting the ships, habitats, geography, weapons and language of Banks’ Culture series of novels in incredible detail. So we have a brown, trans woman, representing all the disenfranchised (human, chimeric, data, animal) shutting down the ruling party which is predominately white hetero men, and saving the world.