This is a funny one. It's all very good and interesting, but it has some flaws that let it down. Like, the phonetically spelled narration is just a quirk, it doesn't mean anything. The whole ending is a bit meh, like Good AIs Did It And Are Coming Back, which is cool, but we don't see enough of the existing political machinations. This is the end of the world and the beginning of the world through the eyes of a few minor players who become major players for reasons they don't understand and aren't really explained. The only person who is in a position to explain and understand can't do the second and thus the first until the final scene, by when it serves the plot purpose only to explain what we have experienced over the last 250 pages. But what we experience is great... a future Earth (maybe) where most people have taken the AIs and fucked off, the remnents live in a giant (like really super giant beyond all comprehension) self-repairing castle, and their computer systems are hopelessly corrupted by a data-virus called the Chaos. There are mutant beasts and computer animals and machine ghosts; a war between the states who live on different levels of the castles; quasi-religious attitudes towards getting information out of the cloud; insane future tech, and all sorts of lovelyness. ( )

I love Banks but I was not a fan of this book. ( )

I’ve read well over 1000 books over the years. It is VERY rare for me to fail to finish a book (easily under 10).

This is quite possibly the worst book I’ve ever tried to read. I say “try to read”, because after roughly 150 pages, I realized that I had absolutely no clue what was going on.

I’m used to encountering books (usually science fiction), that require 20-30 pages for the reader to become familiar with the landscape and the story arc. To read 150 pages and still have no clue?

Best I could tell, there is a main character that is inhabiting some kind of virtual reality. This construct allows characters to “die” eight times before ?? Someone or something is repeatedly killing him. He is down to his last life. This story thread comprises about 30% of the narrative. Of the remaining 70%, a significant part is simply gibberish.

This gibberish is language consisting of phonetic spellings, pidgin English and even mathematical symbols (have to= 1/2 2). Deciphering this text is not difficult, but can be cumbersome. More objectionable to me is the fact that after going through the exercise, you are left with…nothing; stream of consciousness drivel.
Feersum Indjinn, get it?

The remainder was impossible for me to make any sense of. 150 pages of this garbage was all the time I felt I needed to invest. ( )

I first read this book when it originally came out, but only in small chunks and so didn't really get it. It took me almost to the end of the book to work out that we were actually inside a joke megastructure that was actually built like an "ordinary" castle but scaled up many, many times, and that was so old that actual physical landscape had formed inside some of the rooms. So I put it back on the shelf for another day.

Now, I've finally re-read it, in sufficiently large chunks to get a far better picture of what was happening. And I really enjoyed it. The political and military scrabbling about was suitably byzantine, the sheer imagination of the mad world-building (that ultimately actually had a point) was breath-taking, and I actually developed a strong liking for Bascule, the POV character who speaks in phonetics. Admittedly, I actually had to read Bascule's episodes out loud (fortunately, I wasn't in public or in company at the time), the way I do with foreign languages, which aided the flow of reading a lot. Trying to parse Bascule's phonetic speech was difficult, but speaking it made things much easier. Possibly, it rendered Bascule into a proper British character, of a sort I could identify with; though readers should not make the mistake of equating phonetic speech with a lack of intelligence.

Bascule is a Teller, someone who can project themselves into the data Crypt, a repository for uploaded personalities and the sum total of human knowledge. We follow another character, a military commander who makes a few too many enemies on his own side, into the Crypt after he is assassinated. Two other characters - a female scientist and an incarnated digital personality with a Mission - make up the other protagonists in the intrigue.

I got the impression that the Crypt was a trial run for the virtual Hells we would later find in 'Surface Detail'; and indeed, the whole thing has a baroque feel that Banks would return to on a number of occasions. But I was pleased to have revisited this book, and delighted with what I found. ( )

Entertaining, but challenging to read and get deeply into. The world is very different, even where similar, and the writing style in certain characters is hard to read quickly (or slowly - phonetic spelling takes some effort). I enjoyed this, but much less than his better culture books. ( )