Tag Archives: science fiction

Matter, by Iain Banks

A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

All right, Iain Banks is not an idiot.  You can tell by the way he writes that he’s actually quite intelligent.  Here’s the deal: in the far-distant future, humans (or at least some species that looks a lot like us) have spread all over the galaxy in an anarchist utopia with easy FTL, strong AI, and near godlike technology.  They live in a postscarcity economy and the AIs do all the work, so ordinary citizens can do pretty much whatever they want.  One wonders why they bother to do anything at all.

Against this conflict-free backdrop, a minor diplomatic intrigue slowly develops over the course of the book on the planet of Sursamen.  Much late-night cavorting in nanotech bars and descriptions of planet-sized engineering projects ensues.  Eventually, the intrigue gets to the point where the whole planet is threatened and Djan Seriy Anaplian, secret agent, must save the day.  The ending is depressing all but one of the characters I like dies horrifically.  Even then, nothing that happens on Sursamen matters, because it is only one of literally hundreds of thousands of inhabited worlds in this universe.

Why did Banks bother to spend 600+ pages to tell us this?  Well, to show off the high-tech special effects.  If you like intricate, high-concept scientific wordplay, this book is for you, but if you were looking for plot, look elsewhere.

Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder

You’ve just got to read more of a book that has this as its opening line:

Hayden Griffin was plucking a fish when the gravity bell rang.

The rest of Karl Schroeder’s Sun of Suns lives up to the promise delivered in the first line, at least in the setting department.  Hayden Griffin’s world is a giant bag of gas with a fusion reactor at the center to give light.  Cities are wheels that spin for local gravity so that people’s bones don’t degenerate.  People hunt for flying fish in nearby clouds and farm on clumps of dirt caught in nets.  Cue lots of airship travel and zero-g aerial battles.  Oh, and outside the giant gasbag?  It’s a post-singularity far-future SF that’s only being kept at bay because the fusion reactor scrambles electronics.

In short, the setting of Sun of Suns is exotic, cool, and creative.  Everything else about the book is … well, okay.  The plot: Hayden Griffin is out for revenge against an admiral who ordered an attack on his home city.  The characters: I’m not buying Hayden’s rather sudden character growth at the end.  It feels like Schroeder deliberately put dimensionality into his characters rather than letting it grow.  And somehow he manages to make sky pirates not awesome.  They are also okay.

Overall, Sun of Suns reminds me of Larry Niven’s Integral Trees, but better.  Integral Trees had a really cool setting with characters you don’t care a whit about.  Sun of Suns has a really cool setting with characters you can kinda sorta care about.  Plus, it’s the first book in a trilogy, so maybe Hayden and his friends will get more interesting as the story develops.