Feersum Endjinn

Product Information

Each situation is introduced in turn, without resolution, then each resolution is presented one after another after another at which point the narrative curtain is lifted and the impact is demonstrated for us in the physical world. The combined effect, presented in series like this is breathtaking to read, and speaks to the courage and singular sense of purpose present in this character. It’s a fantastic moment. Addeddate 2022-12-30 20:17:20 Identifier something-real_202212 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2qh6pj9h0m Ocr tesseract 5.2.0-1-gc42a Ocr_autonomous true Ocr_detected_lang zh Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script HanS

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks | Goodreads Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks | Goodreads

I happily skipped one major complaint of this novel by listening to the audiobook version with Peter Kenny. He's awesome. That's great all by itself. But the best part is breezing right past the creative spellings of words. You know. Like the title of this book. Weird, right? But it's just Fearsome Engine. :) I'm sure this would be fine for people who read Shakespeare or any number of novels including Mark Twain's, but it is dense and some people might get turned off. This is the first book I have change the grade after re-reading. It is still a great book, but I no longer think it is grand. This is not a Culture novel per se, though, god knows, it may fit in somewhere as pre-C in the broad canvas of Banks' imagination. What it is is a future Earth story, date unstated, but certainly not near-future. The ostensible plot-driver is an interstellar cloud which, increasingly, is occluding solar radiation, threatening all life on the planet. As usual, the story is approached from the perspectives of several, disparate characters and much is left mysterious until the final chapter. Chief Scientist Gad­fium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been awaiting from the Plain of Sliding Stones . . .

At one end of the vast C bitten from the castle a single great bastion-tower stood, almost intact, five kilometres high, and casting a kilometre-wide shadow across the rumpled ground in front of the convoy. The walls had tumbled down around the tower, vanishing completely on one side and leaving only a ridge of fractured material barely five hundred metres high on the other. The plant-mass babilia, unique to the fastness and ubiquitous within it, coated all but the smoothest of vertical surfaces with tumescent hanging forests of lime-green, royal blue and pale, rusty orange; only the heights of scarred wall closest to the more actively venting fissures and fumaroles remained untouched by the tenacious vegetation. 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? When I finished this novel I wasn't sure if I liked it. With a good portion of the book written in the vernacular of our grammar-challenged hero, and a whole lot of he October 2004 Interview: Iain Banks". Archived from the original on 15 June 2011 . Retrieved 29 January 2009. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown ( link) Multiple Narrative Modes: There are four POV characters; three are written in third-person, while the fourth is in first-person, using Funetik Aksent.

Feersum Endjinn (Literature) - TV Tropes Feersum Endjinn (Literature) - TV Tropes

Feersum Endjinn? Really? C., you do realise I read it when it was first published and that I still love it as much as on the first day?" 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.” Big Fancy Castle: The castle where most of the action takes place takes this to a whole new level — it's a big fancy castle scaled up so that each room is several kilometers wide, a chandelier can support a king's palace, and a man can live comfortably in the divot in the eyeball of one of the gargoyles on the roof. Ultimately far too much of the book is basically filler, and the central plot is not well or tightly told. The phonetic sections were impenetrable to me without an audio book, and there was no good reason to have them in that form(apart from showing how Banksy explored so many original approaches).His latest book was a science fiction (SF) novel in the Culture series, called The Hydrogen Sonata, published in 2012. We all have reasons to love Feersum Endjinn, reasons that are often very personal and very subjective. My own is: dyslexia for the win! (... In case anyone wonders, yes, it's a very personal and very subjective reason) Feersum Endjinn is the only scifi novel I have ever read with a dyslexic main character. Bascule writes as a dyslexic person without complexes writes. Oh yes, it makes for a challenging read (particularly if English isn't your first language and/or if you have yourself some dyslexia symptoms), on the other hand it will feel so liberating to any dyslexic person. But, it is also very daring and only a writer as confident and established as Banks could try something like that. Nonetheless it's more than just a writing exercise: it makes Bascule's voice truly his own. This is a future earth story, and part of the issue I have with this book was that the main character: Bascule the Teller writes a large part of the story phonetically, and is really quite difficult to get used to. What actually happens is your reading pattern is disrupted, and instead of focusing on the story and the character's dilemma, you end up deciphering the text like hieroglyphs. The book is set on a far future Earth where the uploading of mindstates into a world-spanning computer network (known as "Cryptosphere", "the Data Corpus", or simply "Crypt") is commonplace, allowing the dead to be easily reincarnated, a set number of times, first physically and then virtually within the crypt. The crypt has become increasingly chaotic, causing much concern within society. Much of the story takes place within a giant, decaying megastructure known as the "Fastness" or "Serehfa" built to resemble a medieval castle, in which each "room" spans several kilometers horizontally and vertically, and the king's palace occupies one room's chandelier. The structure used to be a space elevator, left behind by the ancestors of those who remained on Earth, with the circuitry of the crypt built into its structure. The world is in crisis as the Solar System is slowly drifting into an interstellar molecular cloud ("the Encroachment"), which will eventually dim and then destroy the Sun, ending life on Earth. 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.

Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks | Waterstones

In an interview in 2004, Banks stated that "It probably could become a trilogy, but for now it’s a standalone novel." [2] The Algebraist was shortlisted for the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novel. [3] In 2011, the novel was short-listed for the NPR Top-100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Titles. [4] Release details [ edit ] Bastule the Teller is the dyslexic narrator whose main job is to dive into the Cryptosphere and retrieve lost information, often by interrogating stored personalities that have been dormant for millennia. He is also on a mission to find his tiny ant friend Ergates, and also becomes entangled with various plots as he delves deeper into the virus-infected chaos regions of the Crypt. 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.Chief Scientist Gadfium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been waiting for from the Plain of Sliding Stones... First edition hardcover: The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks, London: Orbit, 2004 ISBN 1-84149-155-1 (UK) It's not that I didn't like this one. The writing is often beautiful. The semi-phonetic chapters are brilliant as much as they are initially frustrating (you do get used to it after awhile). The story (such as I was able to make out) is wild, original, and delightfully complex. The novel unfolds in groups of four chapters, with each chapter following a particular character: a mysterious woman known as the asura (a Sanskrit word for a kind of divine being or demon), a Count on his last lifetime (oh yeah, some people get seven lifetimes), a scientist trying to decipher mysterious messages (and also caught up in a conspiracy), and everybody's favorite, Bascule the Teller, who is on a quest to find his friend who is an ant (we read his semi-phonetic journal). The book is actually even a bit weirder than I'm making it sound, but I like weird. 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. 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 .