Book review: Feersum Endjinn

By Iain M. Banks. Read wiki (from which I find "Kirkus Reviews described it as 'Dazzling stuff: a shame it doesn't add up'; true dat, though I think "dazzling" rather over-sells it) or Goodreads.

The Bascule phonetic-writing stuff gets old very quickly, especially as it becomes clear it is entirely irrelevant to the plot. Fortunately, he's only one narrator.

For the rest: well, there is a story, it is reasonably entertaining - this is my second reading after a gap of perhaps twenty or more years - and frequently implausible and like most other such it doesn't really manage to sanely connect the online and real worlds.

As it becomes clearer that the central "castle" really is a giant-sized version of a castle as the ground terminus of a space elevator, I began to wonder how that physically worked, in a structure that is not modifiable. For example, in the "chandelier city", how do you get in? Are there rickety tacked-on ladders? Where does the water supply come from and where does the sewage go? Are there really, as there would be in such a real inflated structure, enormous "useless"spaces? None of this is clarified; instead, the building is largely inhabited and traversed as though it was normal, except the characters sometimes go "woo! It's a giant castle". So I think that aspect could have been better handled.