Product Description

Count Sessine is about to die for the very last time...Chief Scientist Gadfium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been waiting for from the Plain of Sliding Stones...And Bascule the Teller, in search of an ant, is about to enter the chaos of the crypt...And everything is about to change...For this is the time of the encroachment and, although the dimming sun still shines on the vast, towering walls of Serehfa Fastness, the end is close at hand. The King knows it, his closest advisers know it, yet sill they prosecute the war against the clan Engineers with increasing savagery. The crypt knows it too; so an emissary has been sent, an emissary who holds the key to all their futures.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4447 in Books
• Published on: 1995-06-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 279 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In a future where the ancients have long since departed Earth for the stars, those left behind live complacent lives filled with technological marvels they no longer understand. Then a cosmic threat known as the Encroachment begins a devastating ice age on Earth, and it sets in motion a series of events that will bring together a cast of original characters who must struggle through war, political intrigues and age-old mysteries to save the world. (B 4worned, 1 oph Banx' carrokters theenx en funetic inglish, which makes for some tough reading but also some innovative prose.)

Review
'Dazzlingly original' Daily Mail, 'An exquisitely riotous tour de force of the imagination which writes its own rules simply for the pleasure of breaking them' Time Out, 'Banks is a phenomenon: the wildly successful, fearlessly creative author of brilliant and disturbing non-genre novels, he's equally at home writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance' William Gibson, 'Sharp, witty, comprehensively terrifying' Observer

From the Publisher
Praise for Iain M. Banks

‘Sharp, witty, comprehensively terrifying’ OBSERVER

‘Dazzlingly original’ DAILY MAIL

‘An exquisitely riotous tour de force of the imagination which writes its own rules simply for the pleasure of breaking them’ TIME OUT

‘An exhilarating world with a logic and beauty of its own’ THE TIMES

Also by Iain M. Banks

Consider Phlebas The Player of Games Use of Weapons The State of the Art Against a Dark Background Excession Inversions Look to Windward

Customer Reviews

... Indistinguishable from magic
In Arthur C. Clarke's famous saying, any sufficiently advanced technology is...

This book tells a tale of a time when the Earth is populated by descendants of those people who were (or chose to be) left behind when technology reached a point which they could no longer cope with. As a result they live in a world which they barely understand, surrounded by the legacy of people using a science way beyond them. Nonetheless, humans being adaptable creatures, they have created a society which just about functions, using the technology they were left, packed with all the usual human virtues and vices, lacking only the faintest idea of why they are where they are. It is only when they discover that their civilisation - and indeed planet - is threatened by something far beyond their abilities that they have to come to terms with what they have lost. Characteristically, they respond in different ways, most of them counterproductive.

The book is told from four viewpoints: a power struggle within the ruling clan, a loser in that power struggle, a boy caught up in the struggle without realising it and a mysterious external factor called an "asura" who despite her initial air of harmlessness is clearly going to be bad news for someone.

Initially the book is hard to get to grips with as these four strands interweave, particularly as the boy speaks/writes a phonetic English which takes hard work and practice to read at a reasonably normal pace. However, as the story starts to gel, the characters and plotting slowly become irresistible and by the end the reader has a real feeling of satisfaction for sticking with it.

This is not as easy to read as some of the Culture novels but in its own way it is every bit as rewarding as, say, The Player Of Games.

short but twisted
I like Iain Bank's sci-fi, especially the twisted and unexpected, where you really have no clue where things are heading - such as this one! Even though to me it does still have the flavour of fairly classic sci-fi about it. It is one of his shorter novels, but still takes a long time to read - the phonetic bits slow you down. Actually I liked that, a gimmick maybe, but it also made it more immersive because it was hard work. It made the switching viewpoints (a standard story telling device) more intense.
For me, this was a "better than average" Banks novel. so, I thoroughly recommend it.

Fantastic but difficult book
The world of "Feersum Endjinn" is incredibly weird. Set in the very far future, the Encroachment threatens the Earth with a new Ice Age and the possible extinction of life on the planet itself. Only the remnants of a civilisation are left on Earth ,with most of the rest of its inhabitants having long since departed for the stars. The society that is left is totally bizarre; it is organised on feudal lines and most of the people live in a huge castle the size and height of a large mountain range. The inhabitants have developed very strange and alien powers of the mind; they possess implants to provide them with AI and their minds are "shared" in a hierarchical manner , with "The Privileged" being able to access people minds at will.In parallel with the real world, there is a surreal virtual reality world called "The Crypt" which people can access through their mind ; a sort of world data bank that contains all the thoughts and actions of the past , a world into which people can even download their souls for reincarnation after death, often returning as chimerical animals. It is the complex interaction between the real world and The Crypt which makes this book a difficult one to understand and enjoy. Banks makes a lot of demands on the reader as he creates this convincing but radically different future world. A world where Life and the Afterlife , the Spirit and the Material World ,have fused together and created a totally new reality.