As I sit here attempting to write like Bascule I can tell you it isn’t as easy at it might sound. It takes some amount of concentration. And it takes some concentration to read Bascule’s account of events. It’s not for the lazy reader. Banks’ ability to write awkwardly and unfamiliarly yet make it sound like a substantive, caring, and relatable person is pretty damn amazing. But like many of Banks’ novels there's more beneath the surface. Underlying Bascule’s phonetic writing is a point of much more substance, a commentary on the struggle we humans endure to communicate with one another and with the world. It’ll take me several steps to get there, so try to hang with me ... The characters are some of the finest Banks as ever written, and if you have never read any book by him, let me tell you that there is some competition! 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. All of them seem as complex as any real person. Chief Scientist Gadfium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been waiting for from the Plain of Sliding Stones…

Feersum Endjinn, Iain M. Banks – First Impressions Feersum Endjinn, Iain M. Banks – First Impressions

We all have reasons to love Feersum Endjinn, reasons that are often very personal and very subjective. My own is: dyslexia for the win! (... In case anyone wonders, yes, it's a very personal and very subjective reason) Feersum Endjinn is the only scifi novel I have ever read with a dyslexic main character. Bascule writes as a dyslexic person without complexes writes. Oh yes, it makes for a challenging read (particularly if English isn't your first language and/or if you have yourself some dyslexia symptoms), on the other hand it will feel so liberating to any dyslexic person. But, it is also very daring and only a writer as confident and established as Banks could try something like that. Nonetheless it's more than just a writing exercise: it makes Bascule's voice truly his own. There's a seriously giant castle, with rooms measured in kilometers. There is this virtual reality realm where time moves much faster. It occurred to me that the semi-phonetic chapters may be meant to give the reader the experience of slowing down time - it took me about twice as long to read those chapters! What does this say about our sense of time in terms of experience and communication? As usual the future extrapolation and technologies are interesting and twisted, the characters are interesting, even the good guys, though the choral structure leaves some characterizations short. The creature that is before us was of the name Uagen Zlepe, a scholar who came to study […] from the civilisation which was once known as the Culture. The crypt knows it too; so an emissary has been sent, an emissary who holds the key to all their futures.

Floor beneath where lying; pressed earth, light brown with a few small stones pressed in it. The song is birdsong. Virtual Ghost: People who die have their memories saved and are reincarnated in new bodies; however after a certain number of deaths they are reduced to virtual ghosts. After they die enough times in the virtual world, they stop existing altogether. It's not that I didn't like this one. The writing is often beautiful. The semi-phonetic chapters are brilliant as much as they are initially frustrating (you do get used to it after awhile). The story (such as I was able to make out) is wild, original, and delightfully complex. The novel unfolds in groups of four chapters, with each chapter following a particular character: a mysterious woman known as the asura (a Sanskrit word for a kind of divine being or demon), a Count on his last lifetime (oh yeah, some people get seven lifetimes), a scientist trying to decipher mysterious messages (and also caught up in a conspiracy), and everybody's favorite, Bascule the Teller, who is on a quest to find his friend who is an ant (we read his semi-phonetic journal). The book is actually even a bit weirder than I'm making it sound, but I like weird.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M Banks Book review of Feersum Endjinn by Iain M Banks

Feersum Endjinn is told from four alternating perspectives, and much of the pleasure of this book is slowly piecing together who the narrators are, what situations they face, a slow reveal of the very strange and complex world that surrounds them, and finally the ways in which they are connected, which all gets elegantly tied together at the end. 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. This is even more important for stand-alone novels. Bastule the Teller is the dyslexic narrator whose main job is to dive into the Cryptosphere and retrieve lost information, often by interrogating stored personalities that have been dormant for millennia. He is also on a mission to find his tiny ant friend Ergates, and also becomes entangled with various plots as he delves deeper into the virus-infected chaos regions of the Crypt. The central character is the human Fassin Taak who is a "Slow Seer" at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers. The Nasqueron's star system has been cut off from the rest of Mercatoria civilization because their portal (the only means of faster than light travel) was destroyed by the Beyonders. The Beyonders are a large fleet of space marauders who originated from the fringes of the galaxy. The local Mercatoria adherents await the delivery of a wormhole connection from a neighboring system via sub-lightspeed travel.She was the only speaker in a tribe of the dumb, walking amongst them, tall and silent while they touched her and beseeched her with their sad eyes and their deferent, hesitant hands and their flowing, pleading signs to talk for them, sing for them, be their voice.” This is the scene where Gadfium is in bed with Sortileger Xemetrio. They arrange to meet like this, giving the appearance of having a secret affair so they can pass information through their conspiracy network. This is not them speaking, either; they are in darkness under the sheets writing in luminous ink on a notepad. It’s the joke on the name that gives it away: Enough. To business. It’s exactly what Banks would have a Culture ship call itself, and Xemetrio saying, “Funny name for a …” signals Banks telling us what’s going on. I've no idea if this book is indicative of the rest of his oeuvre, but the best word I can come up with to describe "Feersum Endjinn" is "weird." The origins and workings of the Fastness have been lost in antiquity, ever since the Diaspora in which the builders left the world for unknown destinations, leaving a much more primitive populace to live within its mega-architectural confines. The Fastness and the Diaspora are strongly reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, two of my all-time favorite books, while the Cryptosphere feels much like the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Asura’s story slightly reminded me of Princess Nell’s coming-of-age adventures with the Primer in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. Finally, the primitive guild-like Clan Engineers and baroque society left behind after the Diaspora reminded me of the monastic societies in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, with their limited understanding of a much more advanced past, but who strive to carefully preserve that knowledge nonetheless.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks | Goodreads

This was quite a weird book even by Iain M Banks’ standards. Weird, in terms of writing style (those phonetics yo! You kind of get used to that after a while though) and also in terms of the plot directions. 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.What I wanted to write about is the ending. And how powerful it is if you’ve paid attention. We have one scene where Asura has roped up all the leaders of various factions, bound and gagged them, exposes their conspiracy and tells them what’s going to happen from now on, in front of an audience of whoever is watching — more or less everyone on the planet. Previously the Crypt practically outright says that Sessine was from his birth planned for this; it was always going to be him becoming the Asura, becoming Asura. Whether or not he changed sex in different reincarnations (the only other one we know of was male), there seems to be a premeditation or a fulfilling of Asura’s true self in Sessine being a woman. 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. That’s the story Banks tells. Although it is not a Culture books, there are some winks to Banks' preferred technologies. Here he takes the well used subject of humankind on earth at the end of time and gives it a spin. I thought I saw a couple of winks to Gene Wolfe, but may be it is in my eyes.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks | Goodreads Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks | Goodreads

The book was well received and won a BSFA award in 1994, however I have only read it once and with great difficulty. What an oddball s-f novel. My first I. M. Banks. Instead of venturing down any paths eventually leading to me reading his other standalone novels, I will probably just revert to my original plan and start the Culture series.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".