Less concerned with who’s first up against the wall than with how to decorate it

Skip to content

Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

21 Comments

  1. Aylwin
    January 9, 2019 @ 11:55 am

    blush

    Reply

  2. Kevin Carson
    January 9, 2019 @ 6:41 pm

    I felt cheated by Stephen King’s Under the Dome because the first part of the book included elaborate subplots all obviously leading up to an apocalyptic confrontation with Big Jim and exposure of his dealings at a town meeting. King didn’t just mention Checkhov’s gun over the fireplace, he took that motherfucker down and practice fired it, cleaned it and checked the sights. Then he fizzled all that out and instead just killed everybody in the town.

    Reply

  3. Douglas Muir
    January 10, 2019 @ 1:31 pm

    I’m in the minority that liked Matter well enough. A couple of points.

    1) Wait, what is the name of this series again? Cultural… what now?

    dude why are you ignoring the class issues here? THIS IS A BOOK WITH CLASS ISSUES. Ferbin is an self-centered, clueless aristocratic dimwit, and that’s a huge part of the point. Oramen is smarter and vastly better in every way, but he’s still passive and unquestioning of his social system, and that’s another part of the point. Ferbin is the detault aristocrat; Oramen is the “good as it gets” version. Banks is setting up a narrative of Oramen as the Good (or at least Less Stupid) Prince who will take over the Kingdom and Rule Wisely. Instead he subverts that narrative; Oramen dies pointlessly and the Kingdom ends up a Republic.

    (Note that this is very similar to what GRRM did a few years earlier in A Game of Thrones. He set up a narrative where Edward is the Good Prince who will avenge his father’s murder, take over the Kingdom, and rule wisely. And then he gives us the Red Wedding.)

    Just to drive home the point, Ferbin’s servant — who, as we’re repeatedly shown, is much smarter than he is — ends up as a Senator in the new legislature, with the quiet backing of the Culture.

    So basically the Sarl get a classic Marxist aristocracy-to-bourgeois Revolution, courtesy of a billion year old death machine.

    (And as long as we’re here, King Hausk is a Napeleonic nation-builder who might as well have the words “Violently Clearing The Way For Modernity” tattooed on his forehead.)

    2) could there be any other meanings to the title? pretty sure there are at least two.

    2a — “does it /matter/?” well, some things do and some things don’t. As it turns out, Oramen’s whole subplot, about a quarter of the book, didn’t matter much. Too bad for him, but “Not everything / everybody matters, and yeah that sucks sometimes” is one of the book’s points.

    Complaining about this is a bit like complaining that The Magic Mountain drags a bit in the middle. TMM is a book about tedium and having your life wasted by the pointless passage of time. Mann does his best to thread the needle between deploying boredom as a literary tool and actually boring the reader out of the book. In different ways, Proust and John Crowley (Little, Big) try the same thing. So, similarly, here Banks is saying “large chunks of everything are pointless” and demonstrating that by giving us ~60,000 words of mildly interesting narrative that turns out to… be pointless. Maybe that detracts from the neatness and expected-fun quotient, but for me it was a stop-and-think-and-say-“huh” experience.

    2b1 — you know the whole King Arthur story? the thing with Arthur and Lancelot that starts with the death of Arthur’s father Uther and ends with the death of Arthur and the collapse of his kingdom? Remember what that thing used to be called? That’s right — it was called the Matter of Britain.

    and yes, Banks is absolutely, positively riffing on this. No question. No, there are no analogs to Arthur or anyone else. That would be obvious! And stupid! But it’s about the villainous and heroic goings-on around the end of the old feudal order, at the end of which there are Heroes, Villains, and a new world without a king. IMS we are specifically told that the dimwitted Ferbin has been rehabilitated as a heroic martyr, so presumably future generations of Sarl will indeed look back at this as the equivalent of Arthurian legend.

    2b2 — and come to think of it, isn’t the whole “history melts into legend” thing a core part of this book? We’re given huge infodumps of history which are quite clearly tagged as legendary, incomplete, or just plain wrong. Most obviously, the Oct are digging up the death machine thinking it’s a benevolent god, which is exactly and 180 degrees incorrect, but that’s just one example — we’re given multiple instances of muddled or confused or absent historical facts.

    In this context, note that the “Matter of Britain” was not alone — there were other “Matters”, most notably the Matter of France (which was a legend cycle about Charlemagne and his paladins). I humbly suggest that Banks is implying that ALL history is a Matter, or will eventually turn into one.

    and finally,

    3) It’s almost tediously on the nose, but how does the Iln machine plan to destroy the world? by detonating a big pile of antimatter. And how does Anaplian kill it? by suicide-detonating the grain of antimatter in her head.

    cheers,

    Doug M.

    Reply

    • Roderick T. Long
      January 12, 2019 @ 9:50 pm

      And of course one of Ursula Le Guin’s anthropological-sci-fi short stories is titled “The Matter of Seggri.”

      Reply

    • Aylwin
      January 12, 2019 @ 11:36 pm

      Less of the “dude”, I suggest.

      The thing about the social hierarchy and historical “progress” stuff is that it’s text rather than subtext, so it’s all there out in the open for the reader without needing a critic to highlight it, and that it’s frankly not terribly interesting. So it’s reasonable not to single it out as something to write about.

      I think the Arthur idea is rather a stretch myself. And where do you get this thing about Ferbin’s reputation being rehabilitated?

      Reply

      • Douglas Muir
        January 14, 2019 @ 6:53 am

        tfw you take the trouble to write a long response and you get some guy tone policing you. and for using “dude”? what?

        anyway. it’s “rather a stretch” to think that this is the Matter of Sarl? to me it seems pretty obvious. it’s a bloody tragedy about the complete destruction of a royal family by treachery, random violence and death in battle, and the subsequent end of the old order. it opens with a battle scene, in which a member of the royal family is victorious, and ends with the royal family being wiped out in a battle that kills off everybody, hero and foe alike. but it’s not all about battle! there’s also court intrigue! and people going on quests! lots of quests, actually.

        I dunno, man. how on the nose does this have to be?

        social hierarchy as boring text: man that is just the starting point. if it were just about peasants and lords, maybe. but there are multiple nested class structures here. most obviously, you have the idea of classes of societies, all the way up to the “Optimae” — and let’s note that Banks knew his Latin, and this is a slight corruption of “Optimates”, which was the Roman term for the senior Senatorial class. and when you’re talking about class between societies, as opposed to within them, you’re talking about colonialism and imperialism. are colonialism and imperialism subthemes in this book? well, the first scene is a member of the royal family thwarting an imperialist war of conquest, and then the very next scene is her father dying as he completes a successful imperialist war of conquest, so… maybe just a little? and of course colonialist issues are of course always present whenever Special Circumstances enter the picture.

        meanwhile, where does most of the action take place? in a “shell world”, which literally consists of levels, above and below. could there be a reason Banks chose this particular setting? a reason beyond “it’s cool”? well, does Banks have a history of using large artificial structures as enormous metaphors? The Bridge, Canal Dreams, A Song of Stone? maybe sometimes, yeah?

        note that if you look at the shell world as a literal class structure, the Iln machine becomes a lot more interesting. the surface read is, it’s something like a Berserker, a machine simply programmed to destroy shell worlds. but if you see the shell world as a metaphor for class, then the Iln machine becomes a revolutionary — and that’s super interesting, because it’s an evil revolutionary, a nihilist that must be stopped! which it is. by, um… the noble self-sacrifice of a couple of royal aristocrats.

        wait, a committed Socialist writing a story where heroic aristo sacrifice themselves to stop a wicked revolutionary from committing genocide? did I just imagine that? well, does Banks have a history of flipping the narrative, playing with expectations, inverting? maybe just a tiny bit now and then, yeah?

        and of course the Iln is a successful revolutionary in that it kills off the entire surviving Sarl royal family, clearing the way for the new Republic. that’s not its intention, of course. but “the result you got is not what you intended” is a recurring theme both in this book and in Banks’ work generally.

        Doug M.

        Reply

        • mx_mond
          January 14, 2019 @ 8:36 am

          “tfw you take the trouble to write a long response and you get some guy tone policing you. and for using “dude”? what?”

          misgendering someone is a matter of tone to you?

          Reply

          • Douglas Muir
            January 14, 2019 @ 3:20 pm

            “can dude be used as a gender-neutral term” is currently up in the air; google it and you’ll find dozens of blog posts, reddit threads, what have you. at least in the US, there is not currently a clear consensus.

            “call people what they want to be called” is the rule, and if El doesn’t like it I’ll never do it again. but that’s up to her, no?

            Doug M.

          • Aylwin
            January 14, 2019 @ 4:35 pm

            So what you’re saying is that there is a sizeable body of opinion, well-known to you, which would make this an offensive form of address in this case, that you don’t know how the person you’re talking to feels about it, but that you don’t see this as a reason to err on the side of caution? What would that cost you?

          • Elizabeth Sandifer
            January 14, 2019 @ 4:48 pm

            It’s generally not a good idea to use it when talking to a trans woman, and I resent that I have to come down here and make a voice of god ruling on what should have been a fairly obvious point of etiquette.

          • Douglas Muir
            January 14, 2019 @ 8:38 pm

            I apologize; the usage was careless; no offense was intended. I’ll indeed err on the side of caution in the future.

            Doug M.

        • Aylwin
          January 14, 2019 @ 4:29 pm

          How on the nose? Well, actually bearing some specific resemblance to Arthurian legend would be a start, rather than just operating in the extensive generic realms of pre-modern political violence and fantasy fiction, where the sort of features you mention are pretty routine. Especially given that the book explicitly points to a much less tenuously-connected and more meaningful field of interpretation regarding the significance of its title. Multiple references are of course possible, and you can read it how you like, but this is hardly a clearly-established resonance, let alone the kind of open-and-shut case you suggest. And you haven’t explained where we are “specifically told that the dimwitted Ferbin has been rehabilitated as a heroic martyr”.

          “Optimae” is surely just a coining from the same root-word as “Optimates” rather than being derived from it, not that this matters very much, since it is the meaning of that word – “best” – that counts. But again, the hierarchy between societies is overt text, the related issues of imperialism are nothing new in this series, and I think this book has less to say about them than earlier ones, so there is no special reason to focus on them here.

          The Shellworld does not work as a metaphor for social hierarchy, since there is no hierarchical relationship between the different levels, except in as much as the highest-status people are found right at the top…and, er, also right at the bottom. Well, never mind. Even if it were, an attempt at destroying the entire thing and its whole population would not stack up as a metaphor for attempting to eliminate hierarchical distinctions within it. Nor does an anachronistic relic of a long-defunct galactic power pursuing an ancient vendetta against a people long extinct, with casual disregard for the present state of things, make any sense as a stand-in for a revolutionary or a revolutionary movement, which are expressions of forces within a society intensely concerned with how it is and how it might be. The whole point about the Iln machine is that it stands right outside the socio-political dynamics of this world and upends them in passing.

          Reply

          • Przemek
            January 17, 2019 @ 11:51 am

            I like that last point a lot. Coming from a small country, that’s how I see History: as this external force that periodically sweeps through your land and renders all your internal squabbles basically irrelevant.

    • Przemek
      January 17, 2019 @ 11:55 am

      “Banks is saying “large chunks of everything are pointless” and demonstrating that by giving us ~60,000 words of mildly interesting narrative that turns out to… be pointless. Maybe that detracts from the neatness and expected-fun quotient, but for me it was a stop-and-think-and-say-“huh” experience.”

      That is a very risky literary strategy and judging by the overall reception of “Matter”, Banks didn’t really succeed in employing it.

      But then again, I did think that “The Magic Mountain” dragged in the middle. Perhaps “large chunks of everything are pointless” is just not a very interesting point to make.

      Reply

  4. Roderick T. Long
    January 12, 2019 @ 9:59 pm

    “This is the second Culture novel to spend an extended amount of time with a vaguely medieval society … and it’s also the second one to not really work. Banks just fails to thrive with this setting.”

    Your mileage may (well, obviously does) vary, but “Inversions,” the previous mediaeval/Culture mash-up, is one of my favourites in the series — partly because it has some of the most memorable characters (unlike “Matter,” at least for me — though I did like “Matter” more than you did).

    Incidentally, “Winds of Dune” (which I haven’t read; I haven’t read any of the Brian Herbert / Kevin Anderson continuations of the Dune saga, though I suppose I should read at least one to see if they’re as unsatisfactory as most Dune fans say) came out the year after “Matter,” and there’s just a teentsy chance that the cover of “Winds of Dune,” was influenced by the cover of “Matter,” don’tcha think?

    https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1441455107i/6072318.UY500_SS500.jpg

    Reply

  5. Aylwin
    January 12, 2019 @ 11:16 pm

    Yes, I think the “point” to the book is the intersection of the “matter still matters” stuff about chaos and the fortuitous repercussions of small events with the way the story stresses the tininess and perishability of human life in the cosmos.

    It’s a book that really emphasises the vastness of things in Banks’s galactic meta-civilisation in space and time, stressing the vast antiquity of artefacts like the Shellworlds and of species and societies both extant and extinct, and featuring the very biggest of his megastructures (the Nestworld of Syaung’un, which I think is also, apart from Culture Orbitals and ships, the only one not to be the enigmatic product of some long-vanished civilisation). Then there is the impact of that near-OCP that so casually sweeps aside all the political intrigues and agendas of the human characters and their immediate mentors that have dominated so much of the book, reflecting the tenuous fragility of all human lives, efforts and intentions in the face of the brute forces of History and the yet larger powers of the material world. All this sets up a bleak mood almost of cosmic horror (the ancient world-killer, released from its slumber of billions of years to wreak havoc for its own inscrutable motives is the closest the Culture series gets to an Eldritch Abomination). That is then counterpointed by a resolution which affirms Hyrlis’s point about the potentially vast impact, just every now and then, of individual human actions in the right place at the right time.

    It’s a bit of an undersold and so-whattish point though, and doesn’t really work artistically overall, for the kind if reasons you discuss. I was also baffled and dissatisfied with the very rushed and awkwardly contrived resolution, and what I felt was a tonally off-kilter epilogue.

    Speaking of the Lovecraftian aspect, one of the most entertaining aspects of the book for me is the hilarity of the sheer jaw-dropping un-genre-savviness of everyone at the Falls. “So we’re doing a really exciting dig in an ancient city built by an unknown vanished civilisation hundreds of millions of years ago! What’s it called? Oh, we don’t have a proper name for it, we just call it the Nameless City. You think that sounds a bit creepy? Well, it’s funny you should say that – as we approach the heart of the city there have been increasing reports of horrifying apparitions, people going mad and blinding or killing themselves, all sorts of odd things. Still, I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. What we’re all most excited about right now is this huge structure buried beneath the very centre of the city. We’re calling it the Sarcophagus. I can’t wait to see what’s inside!”

    RUN AWAY!!!!

    Another way the book sets up expectations and then frustrates them, perhaps deliberately, is with regard to the enigmatic original purpose of the Shellworlds. I think any reader will be naturally inclined to wonder if there will be revelations about this, and especially to suspect that the vaguely defined and barely substantiated but apparently universally accepted narrative of the benevolent aims of the Involucra will turn out to be ill-founded. Then right at the end the Iln machine claims exactly that, but Djan Seriy just says “nah, it must be bullshitting to confuse us”, and that’s all there is. Which does just seem kind of wilfully provoking.

    Reply

  6. Aylwin
    January 12, 2019 @ 11:26 pm

    One thing I did like about the resolution, though, is the remark that Culture Enabler programs (freeze-dried First Contact procedures) purvey “subtle misconstructions about Contact and Special Circumstances”. Because of course they would.

    Reply

  7. Aylwin
    January 13, 2019 @ 12:13 am

    Incidentally, The Algebraist, published right in the middle of the eight-year gap between Look to Windward and this one, features simulationism as the official “religion” of its galactic empire, so it does seem to have been a concept he had on his mind for a while.

    Reply

  8. Daru
    January 13, 2019 @ 6:11 pm

    After having a first read of the article El, went to have a look at my book collection, convinced that I had it still on my shelf. Just found out that I didn’t seem to have kept it. Some of the set pieces such as the falls and the setting of the Shellworld made an impression on me certainly. It has been a while since I dipped into the Culture novels and will likely again soon based on the Cultural Marxism pieces, but I wonder if I will rush to Matter? perhaps, but others would come first.

    Reply

  9. Guest
    February 11, 2024 @ 12:33 pm

    Matter is my second-favorite book in the series. I love the main characters fighting for what is right even in the face of near-certain death, especially Ferbin’s evolution from worthless layabout prince into a self-sacrificing hero after experiencing a bit of the universe outside his bubble civilization, and it’s always refreshing when a book has a realistic ending instead of a happy trite one where the good guys win everything and lose nothing.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Douglas Muir Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Discover more from Eruditorum Press

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading