Feersum Endjinn

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STUART STAROSTA, on our staff from March 2015 to November 2018, is a lifelong SFF reader who makes his living reviewing English translations of Japanese equity research. Despite growing up in beautiful Hawaii, he spent most of his time reading as many SFF books as possible. After getting an MA in Japanese-English translation in Monterey, CA, he lived in Tokyo, Japan for about 15 years before moving to London in 2017 with his wife, daughter, and dog named Lani. Stuart's reading goal is to read as many classic SF novels and Hugo/Nebula winners as possible, David Pringle's 100 Best SF and 100 Best Fantasy Novels, along with newer books & series that are too highly-praised to be ignored. Feersum Endjinn was generally well-received, the completeness of the plot and the detailed description of the mega-architecture and the crypt were praised by critics. I don't really feel that I can do a fair review of this book, as I only read about 3/4 of it. The reason for this is that about a quarter of it is written in a kind of phonetics, that I just couldn't read. Space Elevator: Most of the action takes place in a giant castle-like structure which used to be the Earth terminal of a space elevator. The elevator itself is defunct, since everyone who was interested in space went there centuries ago.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks | Waterstones

Although it is not a Culture books, there are some winks to Banks' preferred technologies. Here he takes the well used subject of humankind on earth at the end of time and gives it a spin. I thought I saw a couple of winks to Gene Wolfe, but may be it is in my eyes. Feersum Endjinn is a science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, first published in 1994. It won a British Science Fiction Association Award in 1994. Author Iain M. Banks revealed in April 2013 that he had late-stage cancer. He died the following June. OK, I'm done. :) (To be honest, I have to admit to being mildly impressed with the author's ability to write that way: it takes a lot of concentration to intentionally mis-spell!) The central character is the human Fassin Taak who is a "Slow Seer" at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers. The Nasqueron's star system has been cut off from the rest of Mercatoria civilization because their portal (the only means of faster than light travel) was destroyed by the Beyonders. The Beyonders are a large fleet of space marauders who originated from the fringes of the galaxy. The local Mercatoria adherents await the delivery of a wormhole connection from a neighboring system via sub-lightspeed travel.I'm not sure why I couldn't read the Bascule parts (Bascule is the storyteller in the phoneticly spelled parts of the book) - maybe it's because I usually read whole words and groups of words at once. I do not read them as sounds but as symbols. Of course not all of the story works flawlessly; there are a handful of plot-lines brought up that never resolve, the story drags somewhat through the middle chapters, and the phonetic writing style is sometimes extremely difficult to read. I wouldn't suggest going into this anticipating a Culture novel. This is Banks in full on experimentation mode, and in retrospect, the book is odd, maybe too odd. It isn’t my favorite SF/F, it isn’t my favorite cyberpunk novel—I’m sure that several would argue it isn’t cyberpunk at all (is post-post-cyberpunk a genre yet?)—and it definitely isn’t my favorite Iain Banks novel, however… I've no idea if this book is indicative of the rest of his oeuvre, but the best word I can come up with to describe "Feersum Endjinn" is "weird." 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. Count Alandre Sessine VII has already died seven times. He has only one life left – one last chance to catch his killer. His only clues point to a conspiracy beyond his own murder. For a catastrophe is fast approaching the earth from which there is no escape – until a loophole through apocalypse is discovered. And a chosen few will do anything to keep it a secret.

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I [ ] had the idea that what virtual reality would become eventually would start to resemble myth and legend.” Big Fancy Castle: The castle where most of the action takes place takes this to a whole new level — it's a big fancy castle scaled up so that each room is several kilometers wide, a chandelier can support a king's palace, and a man can live comfortably in the divot in the eyeball of one of the gargoyles on the roof. A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children. The origins and workings of the Fastness have been lost in antiquity, ever since the Diaspora in which the builders left the world for unknown destinations, leaving a much more primitive populace to live within its mega-architectural confines. The Fastness and the Diaspora are strongly reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, two of my all-time favorite books, while the Cryptosphere feels much like the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Asura’s story slightly reminded me of Princess Nell’s coming-of-age adventures with the Primer in Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. Finally, the primitive guild-like Clan Engineers and baroque society left behind after the Diaspora reminded me of the monastic societies in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, with their limited understanding of a much more advanced past, but who strive to carefully preserve that knowledge nonetheless. First edition hardcover: The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks, London: Orbit, 2004 ISBN 1-84149-155-1 (UK)Riting a revyoo as thoh I wuz Bascule seems 2 me the obveeyus cors. 1 mit even say the playd cors; the yoosd up an cleechayd cors. But a browz uv the revyoos postd on Goodreedz indicayts uderwize. I wood ½ thot bi now sumbudy wood ½ ritten a revyoo in the styl uv Bascule but it apeerz not 2 b the cays.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks | Hachette UK

Ultimately far too much of the book is basically filler, and the central plot is not well or tightly told. The phonetic sections were impenetrable to me without an audio book, and there was no good reason to have them in that form(apart from showing how Banksy explored so many original approaches). Count Alandre Sessine VII, a military commander who has been killed numerous times, most recently by assassination. He awakes in the Cryptosphere, having lost his eighth and final real-world life, and now has eight virtual lives (which rapidly dwindle) to discover who has been plotting against him and why. We all have reasons to love Feersum Endjinn, reasons that are often very personal and very subjective. My own is: dyslexia for the win! (... In case anyone wonders, yes, it's a very personal and very subjective reason) Feersum Endjinn is the only scifi novel I have ever read with a dyslexic main character. Bascule writes as a dyslexic person without complexes writes. Oh yes, it makes for a challenging read (particularly if English isn't your first language and/or if you have yourself some dyslexia symptoms), on the other hand it will feel so liberating to any dyslexic person. But, it is also very daring and only a writer as confident and established as Banks could try something like that. Nonetheless it's more than just a writing exercise: it makes Bascule's voice truly his own. The story is told by the weaving of four almost concurrent narratives, including an "infamous" pseudo-phonetic writing. It is made harder by the intercalation of the text within normal texts, as it is not so hard when you get used to it.Little is known about the ancient human society that built the Crypt inhabited by our POV characters—their history thoroughly corrupted by time into the realm of myth. We’re thrown right into the world to find our way as the characters find theirs. You can tell Banks is having a blast using the cyberpunk toolbox to tell the story he wants in the way he wants to.

The Algebraist - Wikipedia The Algebraist - Wikipedia

I'm a huge fan of Banks's Culture novels (see my blog post on all of them: http://examinedworlds.blogspot.com/20...). I also enjoyed The Algebraist and The Wasp Factory. I really wanted to give this five stars, but despite heavy doses of Banksian brilliance, I can't say it quite measures up to his other work.When I finished this novel I wasn't sure if I liked it. With a good portion of the book written in the vernacular of our grammar-challenged hero, and a whole lot of heady stuff like cyber regions and vast settings, Iain Banks isn't giving the reader an easy go of it. I even had to seach the Internet for As usual the future extrapolation and technologies are interesting and twisted, the characters are interesting, even the good guys, though the choral structure leaves some characterizations short. The book is set on a far future Earth where the uploading of mindstates into a world-spanning computer network (known as "Cryptosphere", "the Data Corpus", or simply "Crypt") is commonplace, allowing the dead to be easily reincarnated, a set number of times, first physically and then virtually within the crypt. The crypt has become increasingly chaotic, causing much concern within society. Much of the story takes place within a giant, decaying megastructure known as the "Fastness" or "Serehfa" built to resemble a medieval castle, in which each "room" spans several kilometers horizontally and vertically, and the king's palace occupies one room's chandelier. The structure used to be a space elevator, left behind by the ancestors of those who remained on Earth, with the circuitry of the crypt built into its structure. The world is in crisis as the Solar System is slowly drifting into an interstellar molecular cloud ("the Encroachment"), which will eventually dim and then destroy the Sun, ending life on Earth. October 2004 Interview: Iain Banks". Archived from the original on 15 June 2011 . Retrieved 29 January 2009. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown ( link)