A Meaningless Title

So, Matter’s the latest of Iain M. Bank’s Culture novels and, well, I can’t really recommend it.

Quick summary: The King of a pre-industrial species, the Sark, has been assassinated by his trusted second-in-command. The King’s eldest son witnesses the murder, and is forced to flee before he too becomes a victim of the conspiracy. He escapes to alien-controlled territory, and begins a search for his sister, who decades ago left the Sark to join the Culture and is now an agent of the Culture’s Special Circumstances.
Meanwhile, the King’s younger son has to avoid assassins as he slowly realises the new regent doesn’t have his best interest in mind.

At the same time, the Oct, an advanced civilization that acts as the mentors of the Sark, are pursuing their own agenda as they search for something in the mysterious ruins known only as the Nameless City…

And then Cthulhu wakes up and kills off 90% of the cast, and the survivors all end up sacrificing themselves to defeat him.

No, seriously, the ending’s that abrupt. And, alright, it’s not literally Cthulhu, but it’s a mysterious slumbering creature from a nameless city that predates all known galactic civilizations and on awaking immediately tries to destroy the world, so close enough, yes?

And it’s actually a lot worse than it sounds, because I’m skipping over most of the pre-Cthulhu story. See, the Sark don’t live on a planet, they live in a hollow artificial world that’s home to dozens of species at various levels of technology, each of which live on their own layer of the world. The Oct have their own mentor species above them, each of which have their own rivals and allies. Oh, and there’s a mysterious alien living at the core of the artificial world, worshiped as the World-God by the Sark. Oh, and the Sark are at war with the aliens on the level below them, the level that’s also home to the Nameless City – but the aliens below them aren’t really aliens, just a sub-species of the Sark that were isolated and moved to their own layer millennia ago by the Oct – and the only reason the Sark can even get to the lower level is because the Oct are now interfering more than they’re technically allowed to, and giving the Sark access!

So, yeah, there’s a lot of details to keep track of, a lot of hints of plots and larger conspiracies, a massive setting… and none of it ends up mattering. The ending is just totally abruptly pointless – I mean, yes, it resolves the story, in the sense that “And then they were all run over by a bus” resolves a story. It really feels like Banks abruptly grew sick of the story or realised he couldn’t satisfactorily resolve all the plot points.

If you were planning on starting on reading the Culture novels, pick up Player of Games or Use of Weapons – they’re fantastic, and I strongly recommend them. Leave Matter on the shelf.