Matter (Banks)

Published in January 2008, Banks’s first Culture novel in eight years. It sets a dynastic succession story — a murdered king, an exiled prince, a sister who left to work for the Culture — inside an artificial shellworld of nested inhabited levels, so that a feudal court intrigue and a galactic-scale civilisation are happening in the same structure at different scales and mostly cannot see each other.

Context: the eighth entry in a16z’s Culture listing. Its device is the series’ favourite idea made architectural: layers of civilisation stacked on one substrate, each level’s politics invisible to the level above.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates it.
• Iain M. Banks — the author.
• Look to Windward — the preceding Culture novel.
• Surface Detail — the one that follows, and shares a character thread.
• Historical Futurism — the research lens.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.