I've been delving into Banks' The Culture series. Despite their widespread acclaim, I've found myself oddly unmoved.

Sure, the idea of living in a post-scarcity world with Minds, drones, and a lifespan of 400 years is awe-inspiring. But such a setting also exposes the shallowness and pettiness that can result from a life essentially free from care from birth to "death". This might have philosophical significance, but it doesn't make for captivating reading, at least not for me.

I've noticed that my enjoyment of this series falls into two camps. The first consists of novels where members of The Culture are the main characters, like Player of Games and Excession. The second includes those where the majority of the action involves non-Culture elements, such as Use of Weapons, Inversions, and perhaps Matter.

The former I find frivolous and dull. Beings shielded from hardships, suffering, and even boredom from the start come across as spoiled and fail to understand their insignificance in the grand scheme of things. (I often find myself imagining throwing them into the Total Perspective Vortex.) And when technology is so advanced that it seems like magic, what's left to create narrative tension? How high do the stakes have to be for us to care? They read more like SF cartoons.

The latter, on the other hand, contains much stronger humanist themes. The characters are vivid and seem to jump off the page, immersed in their own pains and sorrows. Caught up in events they're too small to change, even with all the wonders of technology and endless life, they still can't escape the human condition. I'm touched by the bittersweetness of first love, the gloating pride of the powerful, and the helpless hatred of the powerless.

In short, so far, Inversions is my favorite of the bunch.

Still waters run deep within Inversions, concealing a plethora of strange schemes, fierce ambitions, reservoirs of grief, profound questions on the nature of humanity, and intense longings for both death and love. In terms of its setting and scope, this novel stands as an intriguing outlier within the Culture series. Yet, it unmistakably bears all the hallmarks of its masterful author. The prose is ironic and emotionally detached, with a keen eye for the small details that symbolize greater things. There is a deep fascination with systems of power and individual culpability, and an ease with ambiguity, both in the slow unwinding of its mysteries and in portraying the compelling opacity of personalities carefully holding themselves restrained.

In an unusual turn for Banks, the story features twin love stories. Both are subtle and understated, never overshadowing the main plot. One develops slowly, evolving from awe to lust, then to admiration, and finally to a despairing devotion. The other is presented so discreetly that it is almost disguised, until suddenly the masks are removed, and love becomes the driving force behind swift and necessary actions.

Inversions is a remarkable work that defies easy categorization. It is a medieval historical saga rich with courtly intrigue, yet it is also a challenging speculative work of futuristic fiction. It is one small link in a glittering and ornate space opera chain that spans galaxies, while simultaneously being an intimate chamber piece that tracks important moments of personal change and psychological development. It is two parallel stories that detail the sociopolitical impact caused by two very different change agents, a tense and tightly wound mystery about hidden pasts, hidden plans, and hidden agendas, an empathetic feminist tract, a classic Banks critique of the successes and pitfalls that occur when a technologically superior culture engages with a less advanced one, and a cheeky yet highly intellectual experiment in illustrating cultural relativity versus individual responsibility and morality - and the always painful collision between the two. This is an objective book about subjectivity, and it truly has levels.

This is a reread for me, the first time since the book came out in 1998.

I was trying to place the book in sequence - it came out after A Song Of Stone and before The Business. The previous science fiction novel was Excession and the next was Look To Windward.

Of those, A Song Of Stone was his worst book, and The Business was fun but certainly not his strongest. I remember hearing him read the prologue in Fred Hanna's Bookshop when I worked there, and it was one of the funniest readings I ever heard.

Anyway, it's in a funny place. After the misfire of ASOS, I wanted a return to the Culture to be a big, bold space opera. Instead, I got this, which isn't. I did write a review, but I've no idea where it is. I know I didn't dare allow myself to feel let down or disappointed, and, frankly, I knew it was too well-written and well-crafted for that, even as I mourned the lack of grandeur. But I think I was.

Now, of course, it's different. He's gone from us way too soon, and we're left with a body of work to enjoy, judge, and re-evaluate. I think The Crow Road will remain the best book he ever wrote and the most beloved. But Inversions is a masterpiece. It achieves that by sheer dint of the one thing Banks was not known for in his writing: restraint.

He reined it all back in for this, two concurrent stories set on the same world featuring a Doctor to a King and a Bodyguard to a Regicide. It might be a quasi-historical fantasy novel save for the many moons, the falling space rocks, and various other clues that we're in a different genre.

The setting is not so much drab as understated, and in many ways unexceptional - societies emerging from feudalism, caught somewhere between Reformation and Enlightenment. There is a great deal of courtly intrigue, political maneuvering, and suggestions of social reform. All of those in power are men. There are harems, concubines, and serving girls.

There is the Doctor, who keeps the King healthy, and there is the Bodyguard, who kills the Protector's enemies. They are from a different Culture. They represent differing philosophical approaches to intervention by an advanced Culture into a less advanced culture. It is not as obvious as it seems who represents which approach.

So, no explosions, no battles, no mind-bending cosmic science, no vast entities, no mind-boggling warfare. Just these two stories, which do converge but most assuredly not in the dazzling, head-wrecking narrative coup of Use Of Weapons. Instead, Banks creates his most literary of science fiction novels, exploring the theme set out in the title.

As a science fiction novel, it is an inversion of all his other novels by sheer dint of the restraint in style and setting. The doctor and the bodyguard are inversions, as are the king and the regicide. But it is power that is inverted most. What is at first the casual scenery of misogyny, the jokes, the crude or clever lecherous references, the dismissals, the insignificance of women in both settings, becomes the overwhelming heart of the story.

If this is a world creaking towards progress, women are the afterthought, and a kind of rage builds, a hidden and barely detectable undercurrent of horror. Because, of course, the Doctor is a woman. She alone of all the women appears to be granted agency within this world, for all that she must bravely defy convention and face danger as arrogant men conspire to bring her down. But there is an inversion there, too. She is not one of the women of this world. She is armed with knowledge, and more than knowledge, she is protected.

Of course, she is the character we identify with, root for, cheer on to defy these irredeemable sexists. The women of this world have no such privileges, and while we sympathize with their plight, they are background dressing, the necessary illustrations of the backwardness of this world, to give the Doctor's position a more heroic stature. Which is how Banks delivers a salutary lesson in the shallowness of tourism in developing civilizations, whether you be a reader or an agent in special circumstances, and that no matter how much of a long view you try to take and how much you debate your philosophies of intervention and what is necessary to do the right thing, these little people are real and they demand justice, or revenge.

Banks started the Culture series from the point of view of one of its enemies. Inversions pulls the rug out from under Special Circumstances and holds it up to show the real blood from real people staining it. I now think it is one of his finest works, and I hope that if you first read it when it came out, or in sequence with the rest of his books, and felt let down by all the things that it does not contain, you'll go back and give it a chance and appreciate it for what it does contain.

My love for the fiction of Iain M. Banks remains as strong as ever.

This particular work, although counted among the Culture books, is truly one of a kind. In fact, a reader who is not familiar with the Culture could easily enjoy it as a standard fantasy novel, yet it is an unusually witty and well-written one at that. Having said that, I firmly believe that having read at least one of the Culture books is a prerequisite for fully savoring Inversions. I almost wish I could have read this book without being aware of the Culture connections, as uncovering them on my own would have been a sheer delight. On the other hand, I might not have noticed the connections if I wasn't actively looking for them, given how subtle they are. Besides, Banks and his publishers undoubtedly thought that highlighting the Culture connection would boost book sales; indeed, that's precisely why I read Inversions when I did. I'm making my way through the Culture books in publication order, which isn't essential but I decided to do so just for the sake of having some kind of reading sequence.

Now, let me say a few words about the book itself. There are two alternating narratives that only rarely intersect. The chapters titled "The Doctor" are narrated by Oelph, the assistant to a king's doctor, Doctor Vorsill (who annoys the nobles of the kingdom both for being a foreigner and a woman). The chapters titled "The Bodyguard" initially seem to be in omniscient narration and tell the story of the bodyguard of another monarch in a country on the other side of the world. The stories often unfold at a slow pace and are far from being action-packed. Nevertheless, the stories and the stories within stories are captivating and emotionally engaging. Banks channels his considerable talent into almost fairy tale-like storytelling. I don't want to give away any spoilers about what the stories entail, but I highly recommend reading the prologue and epilogue carefully.

On a philosophical level, Inversions prompts a great deal of thought about truth, narrative, selfishness, selflessness, cultural progress (or is it really "progress"?), cross-cultural contact, gender, and sexual violence (while there are no extremely graphic scenes, readers should be aware that rape is a theme).