Feersum endjinn

What Hacker News says

1. ozyschmozyJul 2026
   After getting a hankering for more Culture books, I recently started going through his other fiction and they're all really fun and scratch a similar itch. I read Feersum Endjinn and The Algebraist, and I'm most of the way through Against a Dark Background now, and they're all great (and quite different from The Culture and each other)
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2. frm88Feb 2026
   Feersum Endjinn has this plot line. Can recommend.
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3. tech2Nov 2025
   One of my favourites that starts out difficult but you become fluent in by the end is Banks' "Feersum Endjinn". I love seeing people's facial expressions on first attempting to understand Bascule, or read it "normally".
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4. spauldoAug 2025
   Writing in the vernacular, I believe it's called. I do something like that if I'm texting.

   The book "Feersum Endjinn" by Iain M. Banks uses something like this for one of its characters to quite good effect.

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5. atombenderApr 2025
   Thanks, I'll check out Permanence, never heard of this author.

   Oh, Banks is definitely maximalism. I always enjoyed him as a kind of more serious version of Douglas Adams; his books are infused with a kind of wry, mildly nihilistic comedy, full of colourful, somewhat random exposition and sarcastic asides. His "Outside Context Problem" [1] is like something straight out of the Hitchhiker's Guide.

   Phlebas is pretty atypical among the Culture series, in that's not particularly funny, but actually pretty grim. It's not even told from the point of view of the Culture. There is lots of classic Banks shenanigans — the set pieces (Clean Air Turbulences, the Game of Damage), the drones, the long expositions of backstory, they're all there in later novels.

   He's rarely all lasers and explosions, though! Keep in mind that Phlebas is his "Hollywood world war 2 movie" book. It's his version of the "suicide mission behind enemy lines" Hollywood plot (think The Dirty Dozen or maybe Cross of Iron). But it's also a really grim version of it. It ends up on a poignant note, then undermines its entire premise by pointing out, in the appendix — which explains what happened to the characters afterwards — that none of it actually mattered in the end. This poignancy is carried over to Look to Windward, a sequel set about 800 years later that examines the long-term consequences of the war depicted in Phlebas. So much of the Culture books are about the consequences of war and the desire to avoid it at all costs.

   Just because I'm a roll, I'd like to add that I think Banks' non-Culture sci-fi is underrated. A standout is Feersum Endjinn, which always struck me as a novel Terry Pratchett could have written if he'd been into hard sci-fi. It's set on a future earth where most of humankind has long ago left for the stars, and the remaining, rag-tag population has descended into a medieval class inhabiting the gothic megastructures left by the previous generations. Much of the book is told by one of Banks' most memorable and endearing characters, a young monk-like simpleton who writes phonetically á la Riddley Walker (hence the book's scrambled title) and who inadvertently bumbles his way into a conspiracy between the warring classes. Shades of China Miéville and William Gibson here, too, with the baroque city landscape and cyberpunky "cryptosphere" holding the uploaded images of the dead.

   I also really enjoyed his early novel (but later-published) Against a Dark Background, a road movie of a crime heist thriller set in a sort of anti-Culture universe, a planet so distant from any galaxy that its civilization has given up ever trying to reach the stars. Like Phlebas it's very grim, and not for everyone.

   [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Prob...

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6. mattmanserSep 2024
   Use of Weapons is great. I struggled a bit with Surface Detail and found it a bit meandering, like a few of the later books. It was good, but I definitely rate others above it.

   Excession, Player of Games and Use of Weapons are probably my top Culture novels. With Feersum Endjinn up there in his general SF work, though I must admit I've only read it once as I don't have a copy.

   Probably far too late for this thread, but lots of his non-SF work is amazing too. Though often dark and dealing with uncomfortable themes. The plots and themes of Song Of Stones + The Wasp Factory have popped into my head for decades after I read them.

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