Trans­ition is the latest book from the prom­in­ent Scot­tish author Iain Banks. Or Iain M Banks, depend­ing on which genre of his books you read. Iain writes fic­tion nov­els start­ing with his very fam­ous debut of, “The Wasp Fact­ory,” which laid out a style of writ­ing that dis­played an emphasis on the sud­denly shock­ing. Par­tic­u­larly the shock­ing that is to found inside the seem­ingly mundane lives of the char­ac­ters. Banks is a mas­ter of lay­er­ing sus­pense and then jolt­ing you out of your seat in the final moments. For example, Iain will think noth­ing of killing off a main char­ac­ter sud­denly and with no preamble.

Iain M Banks writes Scifi, and amongst afi­cion­ados of the genre (myself firmly included) he is gen­er­ally con­sidered to be a top tier writer of what I call, some­what clum­sily, ‘semi-hard’ fic­tion. In this form, his nov­els usu­ally revolve around or are con­nec­ted with the fic­tional post-scarcity human soci­ety called “The Cul­ture,” and the effects this ultra-liberal soci­ety has on the oth­ers around it; be they lesser, equal, or (in one par­tic­u­lar novel) greater in power. Up until now, Banks has kept these worlds very sep­ar­ate and rarely incor­por­ates char­ac­ters from one genre into another. The nearest he has come to this was in the “non M” novel, “The Bridge”, where there is a reoc­cur­ring sec­tion involving a clue­less but wily bar­bar­ian who is clearly in a space­ship (not that he knows this and describes it in mundane language).

One of the things I think Banks has in his mind (and this is my guess here) is that the two genres, whilst usu­ally sep­ar­ate, do actu­ally occur in the same uni­verse. There is no reason why this should not be so, and I sup­pose that it was only a mat­ter of time before the two col­lided. While this novel is NOT a “Cul­ture” novel, it does allow for the pos­sib­il­ity that it too occurs in the same universe.

As the title of this book sug­gests, this is the ini­tial res­ults of a clash; a trans­ition from one style of writ­ing to another. I read an inter­view with Banks where he announced that writ­ing the Cul­ture nov­els, as attract­ive that they are to him, is harder than writ­ing the nor­mal ones; as the Cul­ture is almost all-powerful and thus what can he do to chal­lenge it in a real­istic man­ner? By bring­ing the two genres together in, “Trans­ition,” Banks is exper­i­ment­ing with hav­ing the unbridled ima­gin­at­ive fun of a Cul­ture novel in the every­day Earth-bound set­ting of a nor­mal one. Trans­ition could eas­ily be an “M” novel; It has, in my opin­ion, more sci­ence fic­tion involved in it that not. I have read that it has been released under M in the states and this shows that the nor­mal rules we know and love do not apply here.

Trans­ition is a novel from mul­tiple view­points, but it gen­er­ally fol­lows the life of a super-assassin from another dimen­sion. This assas­sin is a mem­ber of a very secret organ­isa­tion called “The Con­cern” that uses people with his par­tic­u­lar tal­ents to “trans­ition” dimen­sions. They do this to attempt to con­trol the flow of his­tory in a pos­it­ive way by, say, killing one man or per­haps sav­ing another. The novel mainly focuses on the effects of such trans­itions, explores the depths of pos­sible exper­i­ences this brings to Banks’ mind and what form a civil war amongst those who trans­ition would take.

The story is there­fore just as silly as the above sounds.

When the main char­ac­ter “trans­itions” into another dimen­sion he takes over the body of someone in that dimen­sion and is able to fully exper­i­ence their real­ity, includ­ing mak­ing them do things they would never nor­mally do, be able to do, or even know about. It seems that he can fully take over the per­son entirely. What hap­pens to his ori­ginal form or how he man­ages to get back is much of the explan­a­tion around which the plot hangs. This influ­en­cing events style of organ­isa­tion is ter­rit­ory Banks has writ­ten about before as in the Cul­ture nov­els, where there exists another, sim­ilar, organ­isa­tion with high tech powers called Spe­cial Cir­cum­stances that effects very sim­ilar oper­a­tions on lesser soci­et­ies and indeed, there may be an argu­ment to be made (or forth­com­ing in later nov­els) that this is what is hap­pen­ing behind the scenes in Transition.

How­ever, is the basic premise non­sense? How does the dimen­sion stuff work and where does it come from?

The idea of mul­tiple dimen­sions is becom­ing more and more pop­u­lar in sci­ence due to the effect of Quantum the­ory. You have three options at this point in the review.

1. You can read my explan­a­tion of altern­ate dimen­sions. I shall explain it as con­cisely as I know how.
2. You can read the ver­sion by Douglas Adams.
3. You can read the ver­sion by The Cat from Red Dwarf.

Option 1

A note: I am a Philo­sopher, not a sci­ent­ist and cer­tainly not a Particle Physicist!

It has long been known that what we exper­i­ence as sep­ar­ate dimen­sions: length, breadth, width and time are not in fact sep­ar­ate, but dif­fer­ent ways of look­ing at the same thing. Ein­stein proved that space and time are actu­ally space­time and inter­joined, so that your move­ments in one effects your move­ments in another.

Noth­ing much was made of this until the advent of a fam­ous exper­i­ment and the rational explan­a­tion of its observed effects. The “Double Slit Exper­i­ment” involves the fir­ing of a single particle towards a wall with two slits cut top to bot­tom in it; like two open doors. The particle can obvi­ously go through the slit on the right or the slit on the left. Behind the slits is another wall that shows the res­ults of which one the particle went through.
Sens­ible so far.

How­ever, some­thing magical happens.

The wall behind shows that the particle behaves as if it goes through both slits at the same time. This is seem­ingly impossible, but the exper­i­menters have locked the exper­i­ment in the clean­est of con­di­tions and fired only one particle at a time, but still the wall behind shows a pat­tern that clearly means the particle has trav­elled through both slits.

Then it gets stranger.

The sci­ent­ists, being sens­ible fel­lows, put some fur­ther detect­ors on the slits. This, they thought, would explain which slit the particle went though as the detector would register right or left, or (gulp) both. How­ever, as soon as they turn them on, the second they turn them on, the particles stop going through both and start act­ing pre­dict­ably by going through the left or the right. When they turn the slit moun­ted detect­ors off, the particle goes straight back to going through both. The implic­a­tions of this are enorm­ous. Why does the particle behave this way, only when we are not look­ing (detect­ing)? What is this telling us about reality?

The upshot is that sci­ent­ists wondered if per­haps the particle is being influ­enced by a particle from another dimension.Imagine if you will that as the particle goes towards the slits real­ity itself splits into two parts. There are two pos­sible out­comes and so real­ity breaks into two dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tions, two dimen­sions, in order that both are played out. In one, the particle goes left and in the other the particle goes right. How­ever, at the Quantum level the particle still can some­how effect the other in the second dimen­sion and this is why the wall behind the slits shows the res­ults as it does. In other words, the particle effects itself! Cool huh?

By turn­ing on the detect­ors on the slits, we are in effect for­cing ourselves into a par­tic­u­lar real­ity, choos­ing a dimen­sion, and this ghostly inter-dimensional inter­fer­ence disappears.What this means is that for every decision ever made by every particle in the entire uni­verse (that is a lot of particles) real­ity splits into two and the pos­sible out­comes of that decision are played out in full in another dimension.

The cumu­lat­ive res­ult of zil­lions of small changes could res­ult in real­it­ies quite dif­fer­ent from ours.  In these other real­it­ies per­haps Ger­many won the Second World War, or Eng­land could have won the 1995 European Cup, or some­thing even more bizarre and improb­able. Or even some­thing more mundane. It could be that in the other real­ity, I had one extra drop of cof­fee in my cup this morn­ing. Not some­thing that any­one would be able to notice in the abso­lute sea of dimen­sions split­ting off all-over the place.

Option 2

Douglas Adams’ ver­sion: Mostly Harm­less (Hitch Hiker’s guide to the galaxy)

Quote: “The first thing to real­ize about par­al­lel uni­verses… is that they are not par­al­lel. It is also import­ant to real­ize that they are not, strictly speak­ing, uni­verses either, but it is easi­est if you don’t try to real­ize it until a little later, after you’ve real­ized that everything you’ve real­ized up to that moment is not true”

Option 3

Cat: [turns to Lister] “So what is it?”

Lister: “Its a sin­gu­lar­ity, a point in the uni­verse where the nor­mal phys­ical laws don’t apply.”

Cat: [turns to Rim­mer] “So what is it?”

Rim­mer: “Its a way of cross­ing dimen­sion­al­ity, a trans­fer of the soul across time and space.”

Cat: [turns to Basho] “So what is it?”

Basho: “It’s a hole in space”

Cat: “Oh, a magic door! Why didn’t you say so.”

Trans­ition is about a group of people who have access to these other real­it­ies and can move through them with the aid of a cer­tain drug and with the fore­know­ledge of where they will end up. Of course, like all humans they mainly use this skill to kill people and have sex with each other. With mas­tery of the trans­ition tech­nique you can Ima­gine a situ­ation, and this hap­pens in the novel, where you can have sex with your part­ner and trans­ition at peak moment of orgasm to another real­ity just behind our own. Extend­ing the “clouds and rain” almost end­lessly (and delight­fully) for as long as you could find real­it­ies to jump into. It is test­a­ment to Bank’s ima­gin­a­tion that his char­ac­ters ever make it out of bed in the morn­ing! If I were gif­ted such a skill, I would make love to my wife all day and then simply trans­ition to a real­ity identical to my own, except where I went to work. Bonus!

This is in fact the main prob­lem I have with Trans­ition.  If the dimen­sions are almost infin­ite, then there is no way that any organ­isa­tion would be able to effect con­trol over them. By try­ing to do so, they would only add to the dimen­sions being cre­ated, it’s self defeating!

The influ­ences that go into think­ing up such a work are man­i­fold. Films such as Ghost in the Shell, The Mat­rix and Blade run­ner, as well as TV shows such as Quantum Leap and espe­cially Sliders (a very sim­ilar concept) could all be pos­sible influ­ences, not to men­tion books such as Timeline by Crichton, Red Dwarf and even Dune. What Banks offers that is unique is his own per­sonal abil­ity to build ten­sion. He is one of those authors where long and seem­ingly quiet pas­sages of prose can be sud­denly broken up in a burst of viol­ence that is so rapid and vis­ceral that you read right past the them and have to turn back and reread the pre­vi­ous few pages again this time with more con­cen­tra­tion. This must be entirely on pur­pose, as we all know that real-life con­flict and viol­ence is identical to this. I think that Banks’ method of reflect­ing the speed of viol­ence adds to the illu­sion of real­ity neces­sary to read a fic­tion novel and espe­cially a scifi one. How­ever, this does lead to some­what abrupt end­ings, and the inclu­sion of epi­logues to tie up the lose ends.  This book has a par­tic­u­larly unsat­is­fy­ing epi­logue, which is left to not only tie up some lose ends, but also explain some of the plot in a rather abrupt man­ner. I have to com­ment that this book is the sort that could not come from a new writer; it wouldn’t get pub­lished. The idea is just that little bit trite and Banks works hard to show the cracks in the plot as little as pos­sible before pulling the top off the idea and let­ting it flow. In other words, he spends much of the book set­ting up lim­its for these powers only to unleash them by the end. This final moment is frankly too sim­ilar to that found in Heretics of Dune, where Miles Teg sud­denly changes and I won­der if it isn’t some­thing of a homage to that.

The above may make you feel that I did not like Trans­ition, but this is not true. I love read­ing Banks’ prose and I am very com­fort­able with his writ­ing style. Some of the main char­ac­ters in the novel are only given a little out­line, but the minor ones are (mostly) fleshed out mar­vel­lously. Much is made of a pro­fes­sional tor­turer called, “The Philo­sopher,” by his com­rades due to his intro­spect­ive man­ner.  It is with the minor char­ac­ters that the polit­ical aspects of the novel arise.  “The Philo­sopher” lives in an altern­ate ver­sion of Earth where Muslims run the coun­try and it is the Chris­ti­ans who blow them­selves up.  At first I thought this was a cheap trick to avoid con­tro­versy in the press, but it is per­haps a form of social com­ment­ary. Read like this, Trans­ition becomes a polemic on the state of our world, its people and val­ues via the medium of satire and the the plot becomes a moot point. I, per­son­ally, don’t think that this is Banks’ main inten­tion, but the inter­net is awash with the idea. The reason I dis­count it is that, frankly, the social com­ment­ary is not that good and if Banks really meant to write it as the fore­ground, it would be stronger and more of a focus.  Another inter­est­ing char­ac­ter is Adrian, who I can­not help think­ing that I know (I work in the city myself). His, Gor­don Gecko style, “greed is good” city­boy atti­tude is per­haps meant as a dig at the bank­ing crisis, but, again he is hardly real­istic. Also one of the char­ac­ters could be Banks him­self and this almost breaks, ‘The Fourth Wall’.

In con­clu­sion, “Trans­ition,” is a good read but does some­what hit the rails in the end­ing. I sus­pect that this book is an exper­i­ment in com­bin­ing the two halves of Iain and M Banks. I liked it and can’t wait for more. Per­haps in another dimen­sion I am already read­ing future Banks novels?

7.5/10

Regards,

Basho

You can buy Trans­ition here:

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