Rating: 
Summary: Rare Dull Banks Book
Review: I liked this novel for its richness of plot and mystery. For anyone familiar with Banks' Culture novel, it will be obvious that the two protagonists are from the Culture. They have a disagreement as cousins growing up together about whether pre-contact civilizations should be left alone or should be meddled with so that they find the true path out of the scarcity stage of planetary evolution. So the cousins decide to put it to the test. The female becomes a doctor to a king and manipulates him into egalitarian beliefs while the male becomes the protector to the rival king and keeps Culture ethics out. Both have plots against them which they deal with in ways consistent with their beliefs. The doctor by using Culture technology and the protector by adopting the native ways. All this background is gleaned obliquely through childrens' stories, journals and histories written by the natives. You soon come to realize that the doctor has robot spies and kills her enemies with knife missiles and cures patients with high tech potions. The protector wins by being a swashbuckler. But their covers are so masterfully designed that they fool the reader into doubting if they are Culture or not. In the end, the doctor fails in her mission and goes back to the Culture, displaced out into space. The protector goes native, perhaps staying to marry one of his king's concubines. Like other Banks novels, events happen that are puzzling until you collect and put together clues -- not always an easy task. An even more complex novel is his "Use of Weapons." I hope I do not spoil the story for you by revealing some of the plot but I feel you will be more entertained by puzzling less on "just what the hell is going on here." I probably would not have enjoyed it as much if I was not familiar with Banks' universe.
Rating: 
Summary: A puzzle wrapped in an enigma.
Review: I liked this novel for its richness of plot and mystery. For anyone familiar with Banks' Culture novel, it will be obvious that the two protagonists are from the Culture. They have a disagreement as cousins growing up together about whether pre-contact civilizations should be left alone or should be meddled with so that they find the true path out of the scarcity stage of planetary evolution. So the cousins decide to put it to the test. The female becomes a doctor to a king and manipulates him into egalitarian beliefs while the male becomes the protector to the rival king and keeps Culture ethics out. Both have plots against them which they deal with in ways consistent with their beliefs. The doctor by using Culture technology and the protector by adopting the native ways. All this background is gleaned obliquely through childrens' stories, journals and histories written by the natives. You soon come to realize that the doctor has robot spies and kills her enemies with knife missiles and cures patients with high tech potions. The protector wins by being a swashbuckler. But their covers are so masterfully designed that they fool the reader into doubting if they are Culture or not. In the end, the doctor fails in her mission and goes back to the Culture, displaced out into space. The protector goes native, perhaps staying to marry one of his king's concubines. Like other Banks novels, events happen that are puzzling until you collect and put together clues -- not always an easy task. An even more complex novel is his "Use of Weapons." I hope I do not spoil the story for you by revealing some of the plot but I feel you will be more entertained by puzzling less on "just what the hell is going on here." I probably would not have enjoyed it as much if I was not familiar with Banks' universe.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent and gripping sci-fi/fantasy-ish novel.
Review: I picked this book off the shelf after reading what it was about. I was expecting just a mediocre science-fiction novel at best, however, I was pleasantly suprised.
I've never read any other books by Iain Banks, but this made me want to find his others and read them. I was pulled into it the second I began reading of Doctor Vosill and DeWar. And unlike many other books, this one kept my interest throughout.
I do not want to reveal the plot, but it is an excellent sci-fi/fantasy/mystery and is written incredibly well. There are many surprises throughout it and I recommend it to any fans of the mentioned genres. The only faults I could find were that the description's so-called "link" of Vosill and DeWar wasn't as close as thought and I was aware of a certain culprit very early in the book. Other than that, excellent.
Rating:
Summary: The Culture
Review: I'm a huge Iain Banks fan, but this was really just boring. Is this really the same author who wrote Consider Phlebas???? This has very little action, almost no technology, not even what I would really call fantasy. Just kind of a boring story with a little political intrigue thrown in. Yes its a culture novel, yes there's kind of a twist to it, yes I get what Mr. Banks was trying to do with this book... guess what people... I DON'T CARE. You won't either. A boring book is a boring book. Not all ideas for books should be explored and committed to paper. Maybe it gives you another perspective on the culture, but so would a novel about some culture citizens painting a wall and watching it dry. This book is hard to take after other Banks books where every ten pages some new technology is introduced or jaw dropping action scene takes place. Maybe I'm just ADD, but this is more about the culture than I really needed to know. Ho hum. (If you read this Iain, you are the man, absolutely the best, I just didn't like this one.)
Rating:
Summary: Wasn't really feeling this.
Review: I'm a huge Iain Banks fan, but this was really just boring. Is this really the same author who wrote Consider Phlebas???? This has very little action, almost no technology, not even what I would really call fantasy. Just kind of a boring story with a little political intrigue thrown in. Yes its a culture novel, yes there's kind of a twist to it, yes I get what Mr. Banks was trying to do with this book... guess what people... I DON'T CARE. You won't either. A boring book is a boring book. Not all ideas for books should be explored and committed to paper. Maybe it gives you another perspective on the culture, but so would a novel about some culture citizens painting a wall and watching it dry. This book is hard to take after other Banks books where every ten pages some new technology is introduced or jaw dropping action scene takes place. Maybe I'm just ADD, but this is more about the culture than I really needed to know. Ho hum. (If you read this Iain, you are the man, absolutely the best, I just didn't like this one.)
Rating:
Summary: Rare Dull Banks Book
Review: Iain Banks's SF books are dense with astonishingly imaginative settings, well filled-out characters and rapid, complex plotting. Inversions has none of these virtues. It is long, ponderous, and dull. The events are slow and predictable. The characters, flat and with the exception of the two protagonists, nearly indistinguishable. The two protagonists are humorless stand-ins for competing opinions about the proper behavior of members of an advanced civilization toward members of a less advanced civilization. There may be a good book possible from this premise but it would need more disciplined and editing than this one shows. I hope that Banks has not become so successful that he thinks that anything he writes is gold and his editors agree. If so, and this book is an example of the result, we may have seen the last of the Banks magic. I will miss that magic but life is too short to slog through books like this in hopes of finding it.
Rating:
Summary: the culture from a different angle...
Review: Iain M. Banks can do no wrong in my book, except that i wish he would write about twenty more novels, and soon. Of course, what got me hooked in the first place was the wild neo-space opera of "Consider Phlebas", but I fell under the spell of the much-less wild "Inversions" very quickly, and liked it every bit as much as his other Culture books (though, yes, i know, the Culture is never mentioned explicitly, but come on, that's an awfully tricky dagger Doctor Vosill carries around in her boot). I have enjoyed seeing the Culture from different points of view, watching it with Horza's jaundiced eye in "Consider Phlebas", then watching it from Zakalwe's ambivalent position in "Use of Weapons" (and don't get me started on how much John le Carre-style amibiguity i think there is in "Player of Games"). This time we look out from inside the head of someone who's in the same "out-of-context" relationship to space-faring civilization that the Culture itself experiences when confronted by the mysterious black sphere in "Excession". We sympathize with the narrator as he tries to make sense of the Doctor's foreign ways, and are never made to feel like the natives of this many-mooned world are to be looked down upon for their backwardness. After all, they are much more like us than the Culture is, and so it's well to remember that however much fun it may be to fly around in a sentient module, visiting an Orbital here, a GSV there, it's good to see the Culture in action at the small scale, putting its power behind its ethical principles (though many may argue about the exact nature of those principles). Besides all that, the characters are all vivid, the prose excellent as ever, and the tech, though hidden, is still pretty amazing. Plus, if you read "Inversions" as more fantasy than SF, then it's nicely reminiscent of a long rainy afternoon spent curled up with Jack Vance, and that ain't bad, either. So you win both ways, i think. Now i just wonder if the ending is really how it ended, or is it okay to pretend that it ended a different way, a way the narrator wouldn't understand, but anyone who knows about the Culture would understand perfectly well...well, the truth is different things to different people, i suppose....
Rating:
Summary: More fantasy than traditonal science fiction
Review: Of all the science fiction books, Ian M. Banks have written this is the one that people who like his "normal" Ian Banks books may like. This is partly because it is more like a medival story, a fantasy with limited fantasy in it. If you can swallow two suns, you can swallow this book. I give it four and a half star, its to good for four and not a total five. I recently had the pleasure of hearing Ian Banks at the book festival in Edinburgh, where he read from a new book he is writing. He got the obvious question why he writes under the to different versions of his name (Ian Banks nad Ian M. Banks). The reason was basically that his publisher wanted him to use the M., to send a signal to his readers that these books were different. The M. he explained came from his grandfather who was a miner, and whos name was Banks Mingus, and who at some time had to flee the law. To be sure that he would not be found he switched the names and became Mingus Banks, so thats explains the M.. Banks strongest side, besides his humour, is that he is able to create very symphatetic and interesting characters. Characters that we the readers want to follow and which makes the stories interesting. So also in this book where we meet the personal physician to King Quience, Doctor Vosill: who like many women before her meets mistrust because of her superior medical knowledge and prejudice against her as a woman (this may be a distinct medival side of this book). The other "hero" DeWar, meanwhile, is principal bodyguard to another regent in another country General UrLeyn, and struggles to safeguard his too-trusting charge in an dangerous world. In alternating chapters of the novel, the two narrators (who are not our heroes) are so personally involved in the events that we the readers cannot be complete sure about the truth. And this is both the strength and maybe also a weakness of the book. What can you trust, who can you trust and where will it all end? So be adviced, you may have to use your brains a bit to follow the story. If you do not like that, keep away from it.
Rating:
Summary: An engaging and thought-provoking book
Review: Of the science-fiction/fantasy works of Iain M. Banks, this book goes high on my list of favorites. Very engagingly written, with a nicely progressing plot. Both stories are strangely intertwined, so loose yet so connected at the same time. There is a touch of Umberto Eco in the literary style (it does remind me of The Name of the Rose and The Island of the Day Before), with the close observer being biased to portray events as he/she sees it. Next to The Player of Games and Consider Phlebas, this book can be considered a good introduction to the works of Banks.
Rating: 
Summary: Is this a boring Banks or is it just me?
Review: Okay, I am a published sci-fi writer, reader, fan of Iain M. Banks starting with The Bridge which totally blew my mind and then working my way thru his excellent Culture books but this one has caused me to do a Google search to see if it is worth my finishing -- as after several chapters -- I am <yawn> needing some trace of sci-fi or at least some great Jack Vance-ian fantasy happening -- and sadly all I find is fancy writing about cloak and dagger on another world. But alien planet spats and in-fighting over this-n-that do not a great read always make. If you want fantastic tales like Banks is known for with sci-fi cutting-edge, tech-near-magic -- skip this book. If you want high fantasy and flashy Michael Shea-ish sword-n-sorcery -- skip this book. If you want slick writing and character development, etc, prosetry stuff and thus do some research into a Banks book not like his others -- have at it. I am selling my copy this week without finishing it as I have too many other fine tomes awaiting my precious time. [...]
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