Feersum Endjinn

Product Information

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. She was the only speaker in a tribe of the dumb, walking amongst them, tall and silent while they touched her and beseeched her with their sad eyes and their deferent, hesitant hands and their flowing, pleading signs to talk for them, sing for them, be their voice.”

FEERSUM ENDJINN | Kirkus Reviews

Bonus points in that his parts of the book have to be read out loud in your head - if anyone was to see your lips moving they might conclude YOU are the one who's dyslexic. The crypt knows it too; so an emissary has been sent, an emissary who holds the key to all their futures. Instead of the usual cyberpunk mega-corporations and seedy streets filled with high-tech low-lifes, Banks set Feersum Endjinn sometime in the far future after most of humanity has abandoned Earth, their tech becoming a somewhat mythical element to our point of view characters, themselves descendants of those who chose an Earth bound existence. A somewhat modified Feudalistic society now exists in the ruinous mega structures built by their ancestors. Underlying all of this is the Crypt—a virtual reality maintaining a near one-to-one relationship with the real world. In the dark corners of the Crypt lurk strange digital societies: monstrous chimeric beings, artificial intelligences, and the digitally migrated dead of the corporeal world. Some privileged corporeal characters have the ability to access the Crypt at will, and some Crypt lifeforms are able to force themselves into physical reality, terrorizing humanity via what is perceived as apparition and animal possession. Let’s have a diversion into names. In one of Banks’ last novels, The Hydrogen Sonata, there’s a Culture Eccentric ship called Mistake Not…. We don’t find out what the ellipsis hides until the end. It’s worth the wait. In Feersum Endjinn, he describes the the fastness Serehfa, a colossal space elevator once called Acsets built to resemble a mediæval castle on the scale of kilometres and mountains, as something where the massiveness we are first confronted by is the bare outskirts, behind which its true scale is like the ship’s full name: “Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath.”

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Feersum Endjinn was generally well-received, the completeness of the plot and the detailed description of the mega-architecture and the crypt were praised by critics. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. Little is known about the ancient human society that built the Crypt inhabited by our POV characters—their history thoroughly corrupted by time into the realm of myth. We’re thrown right into the world to find our way as the characters find theirs. You can tell Banks is having a blast using the cyberpunk toolbox to tell the story he wants in the way he wants to.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks | Hachette UK

Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith.First edition hardcover: The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks, London: Orbit, 2004 ISBN 1-84149-155-1 (UK) Sometimes a book has so many incredible elements that it defies easy summary. Compound that with the fact that it shares themes with some of your favorite genre classics, and that it is written by the incredibly-talented Iain M. Banks, and you have the recipe for a very unique reading experience. As I read the story, I was forcibly reminded of some classic books in the genre, particularly Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Anathem.

Feersum Endjinn - Wikipedia

Girl in the Tower: Spoofed. The handsome prince turns up to rescue the Damsel in Distress in her tower. She helps him climb most of the way up and then lets go of the rope so he'll fall to his death, as she knows she's in a Lotus-Eater Machine. As I sit here attempting to write like Bascule I can tell you it isn’t as easy at it might sound. It takes some amount of concentration. And it takes some concentration to read Bascule’s account of events. It’s not for the lazy reader. Banks’ ability to write awkwardly and unfamiliarly yet make it sound like a substantive, caring, and relatable person is pretty damn amazing. But like many of Banks’ novels there's more beneath the surface. Underlying Bascule’s phonetic writing is a point of much more substance, a commentary on the struggle we humans endure to communicate with one another and with the world. It’ll take me several steps to get there, so try to hang with me ... I think the most important aspect of Banks’ storytelling was his tight grip on the differences between theme and setting. Something that is not as common among science fiction writers as you might think. Cyberpunk stories are primarily known for two things: 1. Themes of isolation, paranoia, and self-identity in an oppressive world grown out of control. 2. A dirty, high-tech setting full of seedy characters. The themes of Feersum Endjinn are cyberpunk through and through, but the setting—even in the entirely virtual Crypt—is much closer to that of epic fantasy. After all, it wouldn’t be a Banks novel if genre tropes and conventions weren’t completely turned on their side. Splitting cyberpunk themes from their usual counterpart setting, shows a terrific understanding of the genre and the unique power of the differing storytelling tools available to writers. As with his friend Ken MacLeod (another Scottish writer of technical and social science fiction) a strong awareness of left-wing history shows in his writings. The argument that an economy of abundance renders anarchy and adhocracy viable (or even inevitable) attracts many as an interesting potential experiment, were it ever to become testable. He was a signatory to the Declaration of Calton Hill, which calls for Scottish independence.You might not "enjoy" Feersum Endjin in any traditional sense, but you will be glad you read it when you're through. The most distinctive aspect of Feersum Endjinn (1994) is definitely the chapters narrated in phonetic spelling by Bascule the Teller, an amiable young man who is seeking a tiny talking ant named Ergates that was snatched away by a strange bird. His section begins like this: Of course not all of the story works flawlessly; there are a handful of plot-lines brought up that never resolve, the story drags somewhat through the middle chapters, and the phonetic writing style is sometimes extremely difficult to read. I wouldn't suggest going into this anticipating a Culture novel. This is Banks in full on experimentation mode, and in retrospect, the book is odd, maybe too odd. It isn’t my favorite SF/F, it isn’t my favorite cyberpunk novel—I’m sure that several would argue it isn’t cyberpunk at all (is post-post-cyberpunk a genre yet?)—and it definitely isn’t my favorite Iain Banks novel, however… There's a seriously giant castle, with rooms measured in kilometers. There is this virtual reality realm where time moves much faster. It occurred to me that the semi-phonetic chapters may be meant to give the reader the experience of slowing down time - it took me about twice as long to read those chapters! What does this say about our sense of time in terms of experience and communication? First of all, I'm a big Iain Banks fan. Keep that in mind when I tell you that this book is unreadable.