We just don't get to read the whys and hows.īut we 'see' knife missiles and possibly other Culture tech at work without getting any firsthand descriptions of any of it. The story is at once intensely annoying in its lack of answers (at a level only beaten for me by The Alien Years by Robert Silverberg, where the extremely infuriatingly annoying ending is at the same time genius) while at the same time on the surface the stories that are 'complete' - the main protagonists, the Doctor and the bodyguard, each serving their respective rulers, conclude their 'missions' with varying results. Sometime before the story starts the world it is set on is hit by a devastating catastrophe of 'burning rocks' falling from the heavens, yet we don't know if it's a meteorite, an intentional interference, or perhaps a massive Culture ship crashing into the atmosphere? From other books, it's clear that Culture citizens have artificially expanded life spans, so the protagonists in Inversions could have been there much longer than you'd expect. We don't know who they are - they could be agents of Contact or Special Circumstances, or they could be individuals with their own agendas, or perhaps just shipwrecked aliens waiting for their ride home? It reads like fantasy: The setting is clearly alien, with two suns and multiple moons, and it's set in a roughly medieval setting, perhaps sort of an early renaissance equivalent.īut if you've read the other Culture novels, the book is littered with hints that the two main characters whose respective stories are intertwined, forming the 'inversions', are clearly Culture.

On the surface it's not even clear to a casual reader that it is science fiction. If you have, you may either love or hate this depending on whether you read Banks books for their 'space opera' qualities or for the twists and turns and explorations of culture and alien societies. If you haven't read any Culture novels before, don't start with this. It's a novel set in Iain Banks massive Culture setting, but at the same time not.

Inversions banks