Generally great! First 350 pages were mind-bending, well written, with fascinating characters and ideas. Last 50 pages kind of fell into B-movie plotlines. I'd still give it four stars though. ( )

What was that? Okay, so it had an ending, but definitely not a climax.

Plus, Banksy just can't help himself and toss out leftist buzzwords and shit. Try writing better stories and less political fiction. ( )

This was a disappointing book for me. It read as one of the lesser Culture novels, with just a few interesting ideas, but mostly being a supposedly fun romp with nothing of note. There's a lot of time spent on characters that do nothing by the story's end, except acting exactly as they did before.

It's no wonder it took me a long time to decide to finish this book, since there wasn't much to grab me. The whole multiverse thing has been overplayed by now in too many media, and while there could have been an interesting twist on it (revealed near the end, but Banks doesn't do anything with it).

It feels as a misfire, or something that, with some work, could have been expanded into a serious contemporary sci-fi thing, but Banks couldn't bother or didn't know exactly where he was aiming with it.

( )

I guess this was a work in progress but he ran out of time. I could have done without all the copulating but the basic idea of the multiverse was tackled really well. So thanks for a last book.
Ah - I later realise this wasn't his last book, so theoretically he could have done some editing......

Tried re-reading but didn't hold my attention so only got a few chapters in. ( )

What is up with all the books that can't keep to a straight timeline? Eventually it's nice to be surprised, but this is one of many books I've read recently that jumps around randomly in time.

So this book, imagine a world where some people can move then consciousness between humans and it being full of internal fighting. That is the back story to this book and in jumps through time we're presented with a story mostly narrated by one of the main characters.

The book feels disconnected with many stories that don't quite come to their conclusion. This is probably intentional to leave a bit for the reader as well but I was not up for it so I cannot give this book a good grade or recommend it. ( )

Really slow and even after finishing it I'm not quite sure what or if anything at all has happened. ( )

In this exploration of the 'many worlds' theory, Iain (M.) Banks hearks back to two of his earlier works that pre-date his science fictional explorations, 'Walking on Glass' and 'The Bridge'. This caused his publishers some confusion; it was published in the UK as an Iain Banks novel, presumably because of one character, a venal City wide boy in the early 2000s giving it a contemporary fiction vibe; whilst in the USA, it was published as an Iain M. Banks novel because of a lot of hopping between parallel universes. I think the Americans have it right on this one.

We also have a set of intertwining plotlines with a number of different characters, and a non-linear structure. Those who are comfortable with 'Use of Weapons' will find no problems with this. Mostly, we follow a character named Temujin Oh, who hails from a parallel Earth where the pre-eminent culture is Mongolian; but we never see that. We do visit a lot of alternative Earths as the story plunges us into the Concern, a trans-dimensional organisation ostensibly devoted to the betterment of humankind, everywhere. It's another vast, shadowy organisation of the sort that Banks enjoyed exploring in books like 'The Business', or the family firms in 'The Crow Road' or 'The Steep Approach to Garbadale', or even the Culture's Special Circumstances division. We also get some of Iain's trademark politics, though there's also a political joke towards the end that feels as though it has been injected by his friend Ken Macleod. (You will have to share Macleod's wide knowledge of Leftist politics to spot it, but it is a laugh-out-loud example.)

There is a certain amount of politicking, a lot of travel and considerable helpings of hedonism. For someone like me, who revels in world-building, this is a treat, and there are some set-piece scenes which allow for plenty of action. Those who do not like violence will probably find this book not to their taste, however; there is a lot of discussion about the practice of torture and some instances of it in the plot.

I recently had the opportunity to read an extract from an earlier draft of this novel, a fragment privately published as 'The Spheres'. It revealed some things about Temujin Oh that did not make it into the final novel, and indeed it would have set the book travelling along a completely different path; in that early draft, Oh was a very different sort of person, and the parallel Earth we are introduced to rather different. The final book did not go down that path; it might have made an even more interesting novel, with a range of very alien Earths, but reconciling that with a story of human extremes was probably too big an ask within the confines of one novel. ( )

Banks has a number of themes that appear repeatedly across his now quite large output of fiction and they ALL get stuffed into this one. That makes for quite a rich book but some of it is just so unsubtle that it's irritating - take Adrian, the 100% cliche drug/financial dealer whose role is very minor as compared to the space he's given. Adrian is given that much space so that Banks can have another go at Capitalism, without any subtlety involved and giving a girl in a bar a walk-on part as Banks' mouthpiece for what is wrong with modern business; Public Limited Companies, apparently. All of this was done much better in The Business.

We have another take on Interventionism, as if the Culture novels hadn't discussed it to death by the end of Excession (the fourth one).

Solipsism rears it head again, intertwined with, "What is Reality?" Look in Against a Dark Background and The Bridge for earlier occurences.

Religion/terrorism/Islamophobia/the state of Britain these days, over-reliance on swearing, too much sex, yep, all the trademarks are here.

What has been absent lately but makes a very welcome return here, is an imaginative, well told, coherent, compelling story, although it does open really badly, with Banks being far too clever for his own good. He needs some new philosophical/political ideas to examine in his books, though. ( )

Briefly: it reminded me, in unflattering ways, of Phillip Pullman. Dimension hopping didacticism. Both were better executed than Pullman, but I don't care for either. The didacticism was especially irritating, since I'm largely in agreement with Banks's politics. I guess I don't like being lectured to, no matter what the cause. It seems like such a waste of effort. In the majority of cases, with most readers who might pick it up, the result will be either preaching to the choir or to a stone wall.

Banks is still one of my favorite authors, but this was one of my least favorite of his books. ( )

(...)

Although the book has a veneer of science fiction – using many-world science as a starting point – there’s actually zero consistent science in the book. The mind-body problem is just sidestepped – a bit like in Altered Carbon – and used inconsistently to be able to do something gimmicky with OCD and with polyglotism. In this sense, Transition is like a 21st century version of all that laughable telepathy focused scifi of the 50ies and 60ies.

Similarly, there’s a veneer of deep thought and philosophy: solipsism gets some pages, but it’s simply not that interesting – maybe if you're 15 it is. It’s all painting by numbers. Let’s try this insightful passage as an example:

"He did recall, despite the pulsings of such concentrated extended pleasure, that there were people who existed in a state of perpetual sexual arousel, coming to orgasm continually, through the most trivial, ordinary and frequent physical triggers and experiences. It sounded like utter bliss, the sort of thing drunk friends roared with envious laughter over towards the end of an evening, but the unfunny truth was that, in its most acute form, it was a severe and debilitating medical condition. The final proof that it was so was that many people who suffered from it took their own lives. Bliss – pure physical rapture – could become absolutely unbearable."

DEEP!! DEEP!!!

Themes are typical hedonist Banks: lots of sex, some drugs. He opens the book explicitly by embedding the setting between the fall of the Berlin wall, 9/11 and the 2008 economic crisis. That seems promising at the first, as Banks does it with quite some aplomb, but sadly none of the political stuff is explored – except for some asides about torture (in an interview he said to have Guantanamo in mind) and a few rants against capitalism. There’s also the typical stuff about those that have superpowers and try to influence reality for the better, and that power corrupting… you’ve read it all before.

(...)

After all these negatives, let me backtrack a bit: this is an okay book.

(...)

Full review on Weighing A Pig ( )

Transition takes an Inception-y hopscotch across concepts like Torture, Greed and Faith before pogo-ing itself back to the base of Borges' Aleph. There were a pair of action sequences which didn't contribute much but otherwise the novel was a philosophical rumination beyond the looking glass. Transition is a curious approach and an enjoyable means to idle away an afternoon. ( )

An interesting idea made totally unremarkable. Two weeks after reading this book I can barely remember it. ( )

I've been dragging my heels over this review. The first Banks I've actively disliked. I know he ventured into dark, creepy, violent stuff and I have avoided that part of his oeuvre. Supposedly this book is connected with his greater sf "culture" works, but there was no evidence of it. Here, there is a multi-verse situation and a group, called the Concern, that can travel between these different worlds -- all our Earth -- and who have taken it upon themselves to monitor and eliminate the people who they deem to be likely to harm "progress" toward peaceful and rational societies, manipulate behind the scenes. A pill enables this travel, but the Central Committee has been exploring other possibilities and ways not only to travel but to monitor their own agents. The theme is power and the inevitability of the desire to retain power to corrupt even the best of intentions. Also, the naivete of the many to the manipulations of the few. The ever present tendency of all of us to be solipsistic (pathologically self-oriented, in a nutshell) is also explored. (It can't happen to me!). That all sounds rather intriguing, sort of. But it plays out in a way that smacks of a boyish sort of fantasy (talking philosophy with some gorgeous dame in a hot tub while she strokes your, ahem, with her feet? Are you kidding me? Take note fellas, not workable.) The ultimate geeky fantasy??? Anyway, didn't float my boat. I read it through out of respect for Banks and, because it was Banks, there were some moments. But I never once even cracked a smile. Only for hard core Banksians, I'd say. Three stars is kindly. *** ( )

A good, solid Banks book - not one of his classics, perhaps, but a superbly paced thriller that handles both the different skeins of narration and the twists and turns of plot deftly. The novel is a contemplation of solipsism, and of the responsibilities and insulations of power, with a lovely mirror held up to the War on Terror and a quick diversion into financial ethics.

For me, all Banks' great books fall into his SF works, and in some ways this "cross-over" allows him to flex some of those same allegorical muscles here (although he has done so before, with the Bridge and Walking on Glass), and this is definitely in the high end of his non-M books. ( )

There are alternate realities and the Concern travels between them setting things right. Who should Temudjinn Oh trust? Mrs Mulverhill or Madame d'Ortolan?
A good science fiction story. ( )

Banks usually splits his novels between contemporary fiction and science fiction, but here he publishes what is obviously a science fiction story under his 'contemporary' nom de plume. I'm unsure of the reasons for this, but it is certainly his most enjoyable novel in quite some time, certainly an improvement on The Steep Approach to Garbadale, which was just The Crow Road reheated.

The story, told from the point of view of several characters, but mainly that of a man called Temudjin Oh, is about an organisation called The Concern, which intervenes in the affairs of alternate realities for supposedly benign reasons. They do this using the talents of 'Transitionaries', people who can flit between realities with the aid of a drug called Septus. With me so far? Good.

But the head of the Concern's central council, Madame d'Ortolan, has her own agenda, and Oh finds himself a hunted man. A renegade called Mrs Mulverhill comes to his aid and he finds himself caught in a power struggle for control of The Concern. It's an ambitious storyline and thankfully free, for the most part, of Banks's recent penchant for making his character's mouthpieces for his political rhetoric.

Banks is no stranger to mixing genres, his earlier novels such as Walking on Glass and The Bridge featured fantasy elements, but here the whole story is fantastical.

However I do have reservations. The structure is fragmented to say the least and the start of the book is very confusing. You're not sure what the hell is going on and it takes perseverance to get a grip on the story. As ever Banks' can tell a good tale but what I'd really like is for him to return to the form of Espedair Street or The Crow Road - brilliantly told contemporary fiction. However, well worth reading. ( )

This is an odd book, being an Iain M Banks book in the US and an Iain Banks book in the UK. But the truth is that it fits into neither oeuvre, being a sort of exploration of the multiverse disguising a rant about the evils of the world, particularly the commercial aspects of the world. I virtually always finish books that I start,,but in this case it was a real effort. I gained no enjoyment or knowledge from reading this book. ( )

I got half way through and gave up. There was no particular storyline, just a group of unpleasant people talking about themselves, having sex, and killing people. Not one of his better ones ( )

Banks is funny, sexy and irreverent in his writing. His style can sometimes be confusing. This one is fairly straightforward despite all the different parallel stories unfolding simulaneously...and is relatively fast-paced compared to some of his other work which can tend to be more descriptive. "Sometimes you cannot tell everything about a thing until you've seen it broken." Banks makes his terrorists Christian extremists in this his most post-9/11 sci-fi. ( )

The closest thing to a collaboration between Iain Banks and Iain M Banks since his second novel "Walking on Glass".

Superb writing and wonderfully confusing plot. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2516359.html

I'm sorry to say that this late Iain Banks work didn't really grab me. The idea of people with access to different parallel universes trying to pull off politically convenient changes to their timeline is not original to him, and has been done better by others (most recently in The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August). A lot of the characters are simply nasty without the redeeming virtues of depth or reflecting our own lived reality. One of my favourite writers, but really not one of my favourite books of his. ( )

The best thing I can say about this book is that the narrator for the audio book was great. The second best thing I can say about it is that the writing was smooth and smart.

Unfortunately those things don't necessarily make for a great story or characters. I kept hoping this was going to go somewhere but it really didn't, unless you count the last chapter which was actually a little exciting. The rest of was just wandering aimlessly. It was like spy vs spy vs spy but with no clear cut definition of who was working for who or who anyone really was.

So if I had read this instead of listened to it, it would probably be getting one star instead of two and I probably wouldn't have finished it.

I've read and loved a couple Banks novels but the last three (Player of Games, The Bridge, and this one) have been pretty flat for me, this one being the worst of three. So I'm not sure I can hold out waiting for another The Wasp Factory or Against a Dark Background. ( )

This book was released under both Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks author names. I agree that it doesn't fit into 'normal' or science fiction categorioes. I persisted in reading it in the hope that it woukd suddenly come together or make sense but I was disappointed. Should have given up after the first couple of chapters as it actually got worse rather than better. Not quite as bad as Whit but very near. This is from someone who rates some of Iain Banks books (Espedair Street, The Wasp Factory) as among the best I've ever read - and Whit among the worst! ( )

The Concern engage in philanthropic activities spanning the whole of the multiverse, or so they would claim to their own people, using the powers of those capable of Transitioning between the many worlds to bring order out of chaos. Like some sort of dimensional Robin Hood affair, they put the bad to rest while supporting the good, steal from the evil to give to the just. However, looking under the surface, it would appear that the Concern might not be quite what it seems. The Council in charge have been in power for a long time and seem intent on making a long time even longer. Agents of the Concern sent to different worlds to make subtle adjustments to events or simply kill those who might turn a reality into something horrific, find evidence that the Concern might be engaging in extracurricular activity that no longer fits the template of acting to make things better. Someone on the Council has plans...

Iain Banks weaves a fair old tale here, cast in a form that sees the writer flitting between viewpoints of different characters, views that overlap and build a more and more complex picture over time. The efforts of the Concern and the powers of those who Transition gather detail as you traverse the pages of the book, and connections appear that make you stop for a moment to think back to earlier scenes. I enjoyed reading this book, though I understand - in passing - that Iain may have written it, to some extent, to fend off the words of mean spirited critics. I liked the concept and as someone who likes role-playing games, I could see myself using some of the ideas to create adventures across the multiverse. You could create something like a cross between Sliders and a Quentin Tarantino movie, all strange realities and blood-drenched gun battles.

In a way, I could have done with more of the same. Reading the book, and reaching the end, I found I wanted to get more detail about the Concern and the machinations of those perverting its cause. I wanted to read more about the powers of those within the Concern and the experiments carried out to chart their abilities. I could see this as the first book of a series, rather than a beginning, a middle and an end all wrapped up in one book. You get to see fragments of some of the worlds and I can envisage further exploration of these alternate realities where the quantum flow of events led to worlds very different to our own.

I rate the book for its potential as much as anything; and, I consider any book with several hundred pages that engages me from beginning to end a winner. As I say, I would love to see more, and if I cannot see more, I'd be happy to create more myself within the context of role-playing adventures. Banks does a fair old job here - not by any means his best, but a solid read that I enjoyed and would gladly come back to in the future for another round (assuming I ever reach the bottom of my existing book piles!) ( )

I used to be an Iain M. Banks fan, but this book was just bad. There are many, many parallel universes and many parallel Earths (and a very few non-Earths) and in this universe there are a few lucky people who can transition at will between universes and take over a person. Banks takes us through the lives of a few different versions of the same person, plus a few other main characters. The book jumps from viewpoint to viewpoint quite often. Most of the characters are not pleasant people. Through this universe of transitions there is one organization that seeks to nudge things in a positive direction - until it starts to do the opposite and there is a power struggle for control. Who's a good guy and who's a bad guy is a mystery through the book. Unfortunately, this is mainly a biography of some bad, mostly forgettable people with some James Bond-ish action thrown in, undertaken by someone who can pop from universe to universe and still maintain the abilities of a Bond type agent no matter what body or universe they are in. Eventually his 'hero' develops mysterious superpowers out of nowhere.
Somewhere in the middle Banks throws in a completely random, pointless 'Christian Terrorist' group which causes problems in one universe - for what reasons he never explains, nor why its important to the book. It just shows up to allow him his mandatory anti-religion rant, without him bothering to make it effective. Sure, in an infinite multitude of worlds such a thing is possible, but since it was a total tangent (and never resolved) to his main conspiracy, what was the point?
Pointless, drifting, random, meaningless. A real transition for Banks, from well-written scifi to worthless action thriller. ( )