There was ample time before his funeral.
At that point — like all the dead, whether they were high or low, and Privileged or not — he would face the final proof of the crypt’s ferociously impartial judgment. As the saying had it: the crypt was deep and the human soul was shallow. And the shallower the soul, the less of it survived as any sort of independent entity within the data corpus; somebody whose only opinions were received opinions and whose originality quotient was effectively zero would dissolve almost entirely within the oceanic depths of the crypt’s precedent-saturated data streams and leave only a thin froth of memories and a brief description of the exact shape of their hollowness behind, the redundancy of their beings annihilated by the crypt’s abhorrence of over-duplication.
- Title: Feersum Endjinn
- Author: Iain M. Banks
- Genre: Science Fiction
- Year: 1994
Iain M. Banks is something of a phenomenon, managing to achieve best-seller status and command a loyal fandom despite going against the established marketing wisdom of writing in more than one genre. Banks successfully writes both ‘mainstream’ hits like The Wasp Factory and Complicity but also, with only the middle initial ‘M’ to distinguish between his identities, intellectual space operas such as Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games. Indeed, Banks’ Culture series of novels, which take place in a vast, near-Utopian galactic civilization, were an important part of the renaissance of big-idea space opera fiction in the 1990s. Why Banks is able to prove the publishers wrong is because he writes in his own distinctive style no matter the genre — and this boldly imaginative and blackly humorous, smart and ruthless storyteller writes sci-fi on par with the best literature, and literary novels as inventive as the best SF. He’s just really damn good no matter what he’s doing.
Feersum Endjinn is a science fiction novel, but it does not take place in Banks’ Culture universe. Instead it takes place entirely on a far future Earth, one menaced by an encroaching spacial anomaly called ‘the Encroachment.’ Much of the action takes place in and around the impossible structure of the castle Serefa, rooms of which are big enough to contain entire towns. Serefa’s tallest tower is in fact a space elevator, though it has long been inoperable. Here is a hint at the novel’s strange conjoining of the technical and the fantastical, and in many ways the world of Feersum Endjinn seems more like a fantasy one than what one would expect in science fiction. It is a post-Diaspora world where the best of humanity has left for the stars, and where the remnants live their lives with the aid of half-understood technologies that seem almost magical.
And in the case of lives, everyone has eight. You use up one and your personality is popped back into a duplicate body and you are reborn in your family vault. You use up all those lives and you have eight more waiting for you in the Crypt, or cryptosphere, a virtual reality universe that underlies everything in the ‘real’ world. Banks’ imaginative rendering of the Crypt is perhaps the best aspect of the novel, and its function as a kind of ‘afterlife-cum-fairyland’ within the novel further reinforces the fantastical feeling of the narrative.
Banks follows four primary characters, each of which is the point-of-view for a chapter in each section of the book. Each of these chapters always appears in order, with each section being a set of four chapters. Asura, a girl with no knowledge of herself, begins the book waking up in a family’s vault in a state of innocence. Hortius Gadfium is a scientist and conspirator who stumbles upon ancient information that may yet save the planet. Count Alandre Sessine, a man on his eighth and final life as the book opens, is assassinated during a military operation and spends the rest of the book in the Crypt unraveling the conspiracy that led to his death.
And then there’s Bascule. A young man with the ability to move in and out of the Crypt at will, Bascule’s chapters are the only ones told in first person. Bascule thinks differently than most people, and there is something wrong with his mind that only lets him write phonetically. And this is what that looks like:
Bascule talking about the Crypt:
In here, thi trik is thinkin rite. Thas all u ½ 2 do. U ½ 2 think rite. U ½ 2 b dairing & koshis, u ½ b ver sensibil & totily mad. Moast ov ol u ½ 2 b cluvir, u ½ 2 b ingenius. U ½ 2 b abil 2 use whotevir is aroun u, & thass whot it reely cums doun 2; thi kript is whot they col self-referenshil, which meens that — up 2 a poynt — it meens whot u want it 2 meen, & displays itself 2 u as u r best abil 2 understand it, so iss up 2 u reely whot yoos u make ov it aftir that; iss ol about injiinooty & thass y itz a yung persins meedyum, frangly.
I’ve seen worse on several online forums, but Banks’ textual experiment here is the dividing line for a lot of readers — for many the idea of reading a three hundred page book in which one-fifth is written in hard to decipher phonetics is a deal breaker. And I wish I could say Bascule’s passages become second nature after a while but they didn’t for me — they got easier, but never easy. But ‘easy’ is not at the top of my list of requirements for books, and Bascule’s chapters in a way function as a reminder to the reader that we should slow down and savor the experience of a novel, and Banks’ rich prose elsewhere in Feersum Endjinn is all the better appreciated for having the brakes put on every fourth chapter.
Banks does not hold the reader’s hand — which should be obvious from him daring to write whole sections in phonetics in the first place — and the events of Feersum Endjinn demand that the reader pay attention and work out what may be going on for themselves. Not that everything isn’t explained by novel’s end. But on the way the multiple story threads, taking place as they do both inside and outside the VR world of the cryptosphere where time moves differently and decades pass in the space of an hour, the underlying strangeness of the world, the phonetics of Bascule, and the expectation on Banks’ part that the reader do his own thinking, means that Feersum Endjinn can be difficult to follow on occasion, and is not light reading. But it is well worth reading as a science fiction novel of big ideas and unique stylization, a total immersion experience that is indeed as feersum as its title suggests.
