On the Eighth Level of the Shellworld named Sursamen live the Sarl. They are a low-tech, quasi-medieval culture ruled by King Hausk, who has two living sons, Ferbin and Oramen. Hausk has gone to war with the Deldeyn, who live one Level below. When Hausk is wounded in battle, his trusted adviser, tyl Loesp, uses the opportunity to kill the King and assume command as Regent over the underage Oramen—with full intentions to kill Oramen too, when the time is ripe. What happened to the elder son, Ferbin, the rightful heir? He was unlucky enough to witness the murder of his father and is now on the run across all the Levels of the Shellworld, accompanied only by his loyal servant, Choubris Holse.

Can Ferbin possibly save his brother and the kingdom? Probably not by himself. But luckily there's his sister, Djan Seriy Anaplian. Djan Seriy was given to the Culture some 15 years ago. The Culture is one of the galaxy-spanning polities that are tantamount to minor deities. The Culture and its rival peers poke and prod at the affairs of lesser beings without remorse. And Djan Seriy is one of the prime pokers, having been trained by the Special Circumstances group, the Culture's secret agents. After learning of her father's death, and accompanied by her wisecracking, lethal AI drone assistant, Turminder Xuss, Djan sets out to return to Sursamen. Halfway back, she'll meet up on another weird world with a Culture-shocked Ferbin, and together they'll begin to plot a coup—little realizing yet that their homeworld contains a major threat long thought extinct: one on the verge of awakening!

A lighthearted approach to life and death

There's a certain phenomenon we've all bumped into in our reading and viewing and listening lives: forming a vague estimation of a famous book or movie or song or other cultural offering without having actually encountered it, based just on general word of mouth and critical assessments and reputation. Such premature mental formulations range from the highly accurate to the wildly misfounded. And with Iain Bank's Culture novels (which began with Consider Phlebas a full 20 years ago, in 1987), I find I have fallen into the latter state.

Prior to this volume, I had never read a Culture novel. Yes, truly shocking. One of the major series of late 20th-century SF, and I remained totally ignorant of it. How can I apologize enough? But in any case, my ignorance had not stopped me from forming a certain shadow image of the series. I pictured a species of high-minded, postmodern space opera akin to that of Samuel Delany or M. John Harrison.

Imagine my surprise, then, when finally faced with the reality of Banks, to encounter the ghosts of H. Beam Piper, James White, Christopher Anvil and John W. Campbell's Astounding/Analog, along with a hefty quotient of Terry Pratchett and P.G. Wodehouse drollery.

Oh, don't mistake me: Banks is very up-to-date in his ideations and prose stylings and attitude. This is far from retro SF. He can summon up sense-of-wonder Big Concepts you've never seen before and display them with narration as deft as a conjuror's fingers. But the whole enterprise and presentation of the Culture strikes me as something straight out of Campbellian SF: the notion of degrees of societal evolution, of "advanced" races versus "primitives," of galactic machinations. ... This series—based of course on my new glancing acquaintance with it—is not so much a mutant offspring of SF as a direct scion that bears all the ancestral features in flashy new dress.

But be that as it may, there's a few more things to say about this particular novel. It strives to strike a balance between the medieval shenanigans on Sursamen and the galactic wonders of the Culture, but it fails. The Sursamen portions of the story come to overwhelm the more exotic stuff elsewhere, and I felt a little shortchanged of seeing what makes the Culture so special. And Djan Seriy is a remarkably static heroine. Basically, until the last hundred pages or so, all she's doing is traveling somewhere and thinking about things. She becomes an Action Heroine only at the admittedly rousing climax.

But ultimately, Banks does provide a sense of a thronging milieu of wonders. As the ship Liveware Problem says, "There is always more to see, of course; the galaxy renews and re-forms itself faster than one can make one's way round it." And so too does Banks's fiction.