Matter was Iain Banks' 8th book of the Culture series and the first after an eight-year break by Banks. Like other Culture series novels, it tracks the happenings of an advanced civilization, the Culture, as their hippy, drugged-out civilians attempt to maintain peace in a violent and chaotic universe.
But this is the least sci-fi of the sci-fi series. It really tracks the Sarl, a medievalesque humanoid species at war within a Shellworld: an artificial planet layers upon layers of "floors" comprise concentric worlds, each with their own sets of species at varying levels of technological development. The Sarl fight the Deldeyn, a species that's one level above them in the Shellworld but of equal technological development. That fight is watched by layers upon layers of more advanced civilizations, all the way up to the Culture. Within the Sarl leadership, there's betrayal and murder and scheming that opens into a saga of princes fighting, alternately, for survival and control.
Medieval conflict is interweaved by Anaplian, a Special Circumstances agent who left the Shellworld as a child. She was adopted by the Culture, receiving a golden ticket to a technological enlightenment. It’s from her view that Banks weaves in the most emphasis on power and foreign policy. The chapters "Seed Drill" and "The Hundredth Idiot," in particular, are rich with debate on power and interventionism:
"Tell me you're ashamed." "We are," Anaplian assured him. "Constantly. Still, we can prove that it works. The interfering and the dirty-tricking; it works. Salvation is in statistics."
"One might intervene and interfere at every available opportunity and at every single instant when things did not turn out as any decent and reasonable creature would like. However, with every intervention, every interference--no matter how individually well-meant and seemingly right and proper and judged purely on its own immediate merits--one would, subtly, incrementally but most certainly remove all freedom and dignity from the very people one sought only to help."
Despite the momentary debates like those above, I had a hard time getting through Matter. Kindle estimates the book should take 11 hours to read... but it took me a month and a half to finish. I felt no sympathy for either prince, and, for the majority of the book, the main characters were in three groups: Anaplian traveling to the Sarl, one prince traveling to meet Anaplian, and one prince fending off assassination attempts. That means two-thirds of the characters spent the majority of the book traveling to the others. Without twist, without action.
And I did not care about the Sarl royalty's backstabbing. Anaplian did nothing with her Special Circumstances superpowers, and the high-tech weaponry was isolated to the final chapter of the novel. Even the Minds' were largely absent, despite Anaplian spending the first 85% of the book traveling among ships. Banks went for a sprawling universe drenched in lore and intra and interspecies conflict for power. But instead, it coalesced into a muddled medieval slog.