Inversions

A book review.

Inversions

by Iain M. Banks

published: 1999.09.01

ISBN: 0671036688

genre: Sci-Fi

reviewed:2000.02.18

👍🏼 recommended

Inversions is an excellent tale about two professionals (one a doctor, the other a bodyguard), in the employ of different kings. The doctor claims to have worked for a distant kingdom more advanced than her current employer. This raises doubts at court, and we're led to question her past and her motives*. Needless to say the current outfit is the kind of brutal mess that has a chief torturer and is rigidly caught in a medieval stasis.

It is cleverly written from the point of view of the participants in either one of the stories, and the two parts of seamlessly tied together in the end, once one king has fallen.

This is excellent fiction, and I flipped through this without rest. Banks writes with a style that cuts out much of the pomp and wordiness often found in Sci-Fi. I will now seek out some of his other novels...

*In fact her going on about the relative advanced state of that past employer is something that wears on her current employers when she speaks of it. To the extent that a jealous rival at court goes to great lengths to bring an ambassador from that country only to be astonished when it turns out she can speak their strange language. Only, that other land wasn't as advanced as all that, technologically...