Iain M Banks writes good, rollicking space opera, but, as he demonstrated with Against a Dark Background, he's also an expert at portraying far-future worlds so advanced that they're on the verge of decay. Feersum Endjinn takes place in another such world, in which the vast majority of humanity left for the stars in the fabled ancient past, and the detritus of their technological marvels litter the landscape--including the data corpus, a vaguely sentient Internet-like datasphere that surrounds the Earth, and the fast-towers, which are essentially space elevators that stretch far beyond the limit of the atmosphere.

Feersum Endjinn deftly ties together four seemingly disparate story-lines that eventually converge in an unexpected way. The first story-line concerns an amnesiac young woman who nevertheless remembers curious facts at key moments; perhaps she was brought to sentience by an AI lurking in the data corpus? The second story-line concerns a group of scientists concerned about something called the Encroachment, an enormous dust cloud that threatens to envelop the solar system and deprive the Earth of light, as well as assorted bizarre phenomena that have been popping up around the world. The third story-line concerns Count Alandre Sessine VII, a military commander who starts the book with a large number of lives but ends with only one by the end of his first few chapters. And the fourth story-line concerns a young data-rider named Bascule. Bascule's chapters are notable because they are written purely phonetically: for instance, he writes, "Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast," rather than "Woke up. Got dressed. Had breakfast." His chapters are tough going--you essentially understand them only by reading them aloud silently in your mind, and Bascule has a very strong accent that warps a lot of what he says--but after a while you get used to the glacial pace of understanding his thoughts.

Like Against a Dark Background, the setting of Feersum Endjinn is a joy: Banks is full of imagination, and he peppers his world with all sorts of awe-inspiring and bizarre phenomena that are always fun to encounter for the first time. Banks also handles the four plot-lines well; though some plot-lines are inevitably more interesting than others, each always has a little to contribute to our overall understanding of the book and its world, and the relation between the four plot-lines becomes increasingly clear near the end. Unfortunately, Banks's conclusion is still the weakest part of the novel as a whole: although it is not as ludicrous as the ending of Against a Dark Background, the conclusion here leaves plenty of stuff unexplained, and what is essentially an enormous deus ex machina (indeed, the "feersum endjinn" of the title) resolves the biggest obstacle of the book.

Nevertheless, as usual, Banks has crafted a superb science-fiction novel that will grab your interest throughout. I look forward to reading the rest of his books.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu