Transition

[communicator]

I finished Transition by Iain Banks. It's the best SF novel I have read (actually I listened to it on an excellent audio version) this year. It seems to me to be a return to form for Banks. It overlaps in theme with some of his early and most successful novels. Like The Bridge and Walking on Glass everything that happens is or may be a delusion in

Comments

[unixronin]

I find I tend not to like Banks' "non-M" fiction. Of those I've read, The Bridge came closest to being a good book, and that mostly for the more steampunkish sections of the bridge "dream". Rather Moorcock-ish; it wouldn't have been the least out of place for the protagonist to stumble across Jeremy Cornelius and Una Persson taking tea (and who knows what else) in a private compartment on the train.

[communicator]

On the whole I don't like it as much either, but The Bridge is great I think. I've heard it's Banks' favourite of his own books too. This is definitely SF, not mundane realism, but it's not set in space.. dunno why he left the M out.

[unixronin]

Out of curiosity, what is it about The Bridge that you feel makes it SF? There's really nothing SF about it to me.

In essence, as I recall it, the book recounts the story of a man who wrecks his car and, lying comatose in hospital, has fantastic dreams about a seemingly-endless bridge, disturbed by an urgent feeling that somehow he must escape from the bridge. True, some of the scenes in his dream have a Gernsbackian SF flavor, but I don't think the book can fairly be classed as SF; and judging from the omission of the indicative M, Banks didn't consider it so either.

[communicator]

By 'this is definitely SF' I meant this book, Transition, which has the by-line 'Iain Banks'. Transition is definitely SF as its central premise is a technology which doesn't exist.

[violet_lynxy]

can't wait for russian-language publication :o)