He’s always carried out his orders faithfully in the past, but is this new wave of blood-letting really in the Concern’s, or anyone else’s best interests? And if not, how will his refusal to obey orders be interpreted? The Concern is not, of late at any rate, an organisation known for any leniency of disposition…īanks takes his time getting started. Temudjin is ordered to liquidate several of d’Ortolan’s opponents, including Mulverhill.

The story centres on the Concern triangle of Temudjin Oh, rising-star field agent ‘Mrs Mulverhill’, brilliant many-worlds theorist of questionable loyalties and Madame d’Ortolan, the Council’s de facto kingpin. But the Concern is painted here to be distinctly more manevolent than either of its textual precursors.) (Of course, Banks has treated the mysterious overseeing organisation idea elsewhere, obviously in the many Culture novels but also in the non-genre book The Business. This ability requires considerable training, and the application of a tightly-guarded drug, sepsis, the dispensation of which is controlled by a mysterious and increasingly autocratic organisation, the Concern, which makes its home on a version of Earth called Calbefraques and which seeks to guide the separately unravelling histories of the many worlds into a shape which is pleasing to the Concern’s ruling Council.

The crux – I suppose it qualifies as a conceit, really – of Transition is the ability of certain individuals to relocate themselves, essentially at will, from one time-stream to another. There are ideas contained within which he’s explored before, certainly, but overall Transition is something new. There are indeed deeper connections – incest, and a hospitalised and helpless POV character respectively – which can be drawn with the earlier works also, but it would be wrong to see Transition as Banks starting to retread old territory. But it’s also set very identifiably on Earth (or on a version of Earth, or, in fact, on several versions of Earth), and therefore shares some common ground with Banks’s early reality-fractured ‘non-genre’ work such as Walking on Glass and The Bridge. Or is it? I’d say Banks has done a spot of genre-bending here, because while it lacks the full-on gadgetry and richly alien-infused tapestry of his Culture novels, Transition certainly features as much SFnal content as, say, the ‘M’-attributed title Feersum Endjinn. Transition, Banks’s latest, lacks the ‘M’. The Iain Banks trademark – one of them, at any rate – is to alternate the writing of SF books, most often featuring the Culture, with non-genre or literary work, with the SF titles recognisable by virtue of authorship by ‘Iain M Banks’, serving to distinguish them from non-SF novels by ‘Iain Banks’.

Poems by Iain Banks