Iain M. Banks's latest Culture novel, Matter, is reliably entertaining but not very deep. The book revolves around an exotic alien artifact called a "Shellworld" -- one of many planet-sized constructs composed of concentric levels, each inhabited by radically different species; built by some long-extinct but ultra-powerful alien race; and populated at their cores by solitary, slumbering megafauna known by the Shellworlds' diverse denizens as "World Gods." On one level of a Shellworld known as Sursamen lives a human population still mired in a vaguely medieval existence. A king is killed; his rightful heir is pursued; and light-years away, the king's only daughter -- now a member of the Culture's Special Circumstances -- makes her slow way home to right the mess.

Matter does not stint on invention, and Banks lays it on thick; parts of the novel read like a Let's Go: Shellworld. Not that I'm complaining! The Culture novels have always featured big ideas, and Matter is no exception.

Which makes the smallness of the plot so disappointing. As the book draws to a close, a single, artificial conflict sweeps away everything else; from a vast sea of ideas, Banks chooses a relatively straightforward problem that the characters swiftly (if savagely) resolve. Oversimplified resolutions are, sadly, not uncommon in Banks's novels (though they are hardly the only books with this fault; Perdido Street Station suffered from a similar problem). Matter does not shift this unfortunate paradigm.

Copyright © 2009 Steven Wu