pickSo, gradually still working my way through Banks's sci-fi/Culture novels. This was interesting, as it's a Culture novel masquerading as a sort of historical/fantasy novel, because the main events take place on a planet that has no space travel (but that doesn't mean it doesn't have space travellers...). Anyway, a quite intense meditation on power, politics and morality, with a dark undertone running throughout. Recommended.
pickWe follow a king‘s Doctor in one kingdom & a ruler‘s Bodyguard in another on an alien planet still in its Medieval era and examine their inverted philosophies.
It‘s never explicitly stated that the Doctor and the Bodyguard are secretly members of the space-faring wildly-technologically-advanced Culture but, yeah.
Slow-going for awhile, but the gut-punch Banksian twists at the end did not disappoint.
Somewhere along the way of this slow and meandering plot, I said to myself “Self, having read plenty of Iain M. Banks, I feel very safe in assuming that all of this is intended to lure me into a false sense of security, and that this slow little book is going to end with some insane and twisty fireworks.”
Good call, me. Holy jeez.
#Starting the 6th novel of the Culture... although this one is only tangentially Culture related.
While the rest of the series is the wildest strange-beings-and-giant-starships science fiction there is, this book takes place entirely on one alien world in its medieval period following a doctor in one nation and a ruler‘s bodyguard in another.
Been spacing out Banks' Culture novels for years, not wanting to blaze through but rather to grow and read along with them. 3+ years in, I'm now around to book 6 of 11 (10 novels and one short story collection). This one is intriguing, as out masquerades as something other than a Culture novel.
Inversions | 
