Paperback, 455 pages
English language
Published Dec. 2, 1997 by Orbit.
Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared.
Now it is back.
Solid space opera, but construction (how Banks creates suspense and mystery) and message ("more humility, less competition") are a little in-the-face ("man merkt die Absicht und ist verstimmt"). Good: how Banks deals with identity, memory and guilt.
I know it's not fair to the book itself, but I struggled to finish this one because the narrator's voice did not agree with my ears. It's quite interesting overall, a bit complex but I think necessarily so given the topic.
Not the best of the Culture books by a long shot, though it's an interesting addition. I enjoyed the atmosphere of menace and mistrust that builds through the book, and the focus given to all the non-human minds fleshes the Culture out nicely, but the story felt overambitious and overloaded. At times it was seriously hard to follow which of the amusingly-named ships were doing what, with whom, under which pretenses, and after a well-paced build-up for about 3/4 of the book, the last few chapters pulled together a little too quickly to be satisfying.
Not the best of the Culture books by a long shot, though it's an interesting addition. I enjoyed the atmosphere of menace and mistrust that builds through the book, and the focus given to all the non-human minds fleshes the Culture out nicely, but the story felt overambitious and overloaded. At times it was seriously hard to follow which of the amusingly-named ships were doing what, with whom, under which pretenses, and after a well-paced build-up for about 3/4 of the book, the last few chapters pulled together a little too quickly to be satisfying.
