Subject: Feersum Endjinn

From: [email-masked] (Stephen MG Hodge)
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 1994 23:31:01 GMT

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks
Orbit, June 1994, 279 pages, GBP15.99

A Review by Stephen M.G.Hodge

Iain M. Banks' latest SF offering again moves away from the milieu of
Culture in which his early SF novels Consider Phlebas, The Player of
Games and Use of Weapons are set. Feersum Endjinn however displays
the same arresting imaginative flights of fancy as his earlier
books, but in a rather more controlled and discplined manner than in
Against a Dark Background which I felt was perhaps over full with
novelties. However Feersum Endjinn still has the authentic Banks'
look and feel of a complex civilisation in full maturity, if not
decay, with millenia of history tradition and culture determining
events as much as the efforts of the characters; and he is still
fascinated by size. In Feersum Endjinn, instead of intelligent
starships hundreds of kilometres long as in the Culture, we have a
20-plus kilometre high structure set somewhere on the North American
land mass, in the form of a medieval castle, with a tower and rooms
and halls and windows kilometres high and wide; as so often with
Banks' inventions one says to oneself 'Why not?', especially later
in the story when the original purpose of this gigantic structure
becomes clear.

Banks has applied his fertile imagination to the cyberpunk/virtual
reality world, and comes up with the Data Corpus or the crypt. The
crypt is the result of thousands of generations of humnan and
cybernetic evolution for into the crypt go the personalities of
every inhabitant of the planet, as downloaded by their 'implants' at
the moment of their final death (in this world you get eight real
lives and eight virtual lives) A good part of the action takes place
in crypt, where times runs several thousand times faster than in
'base reality', (a useful plot device), and you can get killed or
damaged severely in an impressive variety of ways. Indeed some of
the characters exist only in the crypt, while the most engaging of
them, Bascule, makes his living by diving into the crypt to
interrogate its inhabitants. Banks I think likes to challenge his
readers, sometimes - as in his main stream novels such as the Wasp
Factory - by shocking them, and in this case making us suffer from
Bascule's insistence on spelling phonetically (he can't do otherwise
he tells us because 'unlike evrybody els I got this weerd wirin in
mi brane so I cant spel rite juss have 2 do evrythin foneticly') You
suffer with it however (Bascule writing in the first person takes up
perhaps 20% of the book) because Bascule is an engaging character,
and the action moves along when he takes up the story. As always
with Banks there are plenty of other interesting characters, both
bad guys and good guys, cyberbetic, animal and human, including
Egates, a mechanical ant who is Bascule's friend but has a mission,
Count Sessine who someone is trying to assassinate, which is a long
job when you still have one real and eight virtual lives to go
through, a King who gets his kicks by spying on his subjects through
their implants and Gadfium the Chief Scientist and the alter ego she
creates in the crypt. 

The story line concerns the response of this decaying civilisation
on Earth -- left behind after most of mankind migrated to the stars -- 
to the encroachment on the Solar syatem of an interstellar dust
cloud, which is first going to freeze the Earth, then turn the Sun
nova. The political classes and their henchmen are of course working
on saving themselves and no-one else, and actively opposing the
effort of the good guys, and whoever or whatever it is at the bottom
of the crypt and the top of tower. The action moves along rather
smartly on several levels with a satisfying outcome at the end. All
in all a worthwhile read.

%A Banks, Iain M.
%T Feersum Endjinn
%I Orbit/Little Brown & Company (UK) Ltd.
%C London, UK
%D 1994
%G ISBN 1-85723-235-6
%P 279pp
%O hardback, GBP15.99