If you haven’t read a Culture Novel, where the hell have you been for the last twenty years? I have to admit I’m a fan. Banks writes galaxy-sized space opera effortlessly, has a wicked sense of humour and a nasty streak. The Culture is the ultimate human society: space-faring, endlessly modified, and wise enough to know not to interfere with other species. Unless it’s a job for the euphemistically named Special Circumstances division who are not above political murder-squads, coups, and the usual and not so usual panoply of dirty tricks, all in the name of maintaining an ‘on-balance’ benign universe.

Matter, the latest Culture Novel, centres on events on the 8th and 9th levels of the vast shellworld Sursamen – a giant onion of a planet with successive levels of differing biospheres supporting widely variant lifeforms. The Sarl, approximating a seventeenth century level of technology and society are at war with their ‘neighbours’ on the level below. During a decisive battle, the wounded Sarl King Hausk is brutally murdered by tyl Loesp, Hausk’s ‘faithful’ lieutenant, apparently in secret. But the king’s second son, Ferbin who is a bit of a wastrel, witnesses the murder and after reuniting with his servant, Holse, travels through the levels of the shellworld and into space seeking some race or individual who will help him see justice done and the throne restored. Meanwhile Djan Seriy Anaplian, Ferbin’s sister, who was ‘gifted’ to the Culture by a disappointed father years before — and who is now a trainee Special Circumstances operative — hears both Ferbin and Hausk are dead and begins the long journey home to comfort her remaining brother.

One review of Matter I read in a major Australian newspaper bemoaned the fact that the setting for much of the early story (the Kingdom of Sarl) owed more to the fantasy genre and didn’t have enough cool Culture gizmos. But the theme of different technological levels rubbing up against one another — the seemingly elastic rules of non-interference — is a familiar one in Banks’s Culture books (see Inversions and Use of Weapons for classic examples). It’s also a staple of SF. And in Matter, Banks is doing something you don’t see very often: portraying a technologically backward race that has full knowledge that there are far more advanced races in their backyard. Further, we see Ferbin interact with these races, trying to elicit help from them which throws up moral ambiguities about the ‘right thing to do’. The other element the story illustrates poignantly is how ultimately helpless a less advanced society is when they have something the ‘big boys’ want, the meaninglessness of their own tiny stories in the grand scheme of things, and how little they count in actions to ‘protect the greater good’. Banks is also playing with us in Matter, setting up a fairy tale story of evil regents, regicide and ‘enchanted’ princesses, a quest for justice, a coming of age tale, all of which seem to be following the familiar arc until he gleefully derails the whole thing, shifting the focus to underlying powerplays and conflicts most of our protagonists are far from able to understand much less defend against. The dizzying technology is there too – the shellworld itself, the highly advanced Involved races, the idiosyncratic Ship Minds. There’s action and philosophy, laughter and malignancy and, being a political animal at heart, a bitter mirror held up to our own current military and political lunacies. Matter is slick, engaging and beautifully crafted.