“MATTER is a novel of dazzling wit and serious purpose,” reads the jacket. It’s this kind of thinking that almost dooms the book: the idea that MATTER – and Iain M. Banks’ science fiction – is somehow inherently superior and far more literary than its contemporaries on the sci-fi shelves. This isn’t true, but MATTER is pretty great.

MATTER, as the logo on the cover states, is “A Culture Novel,” set in a universe where multiple civilizations exist in multiple planes of development. The Culture, a post-scarcity (doesn’t use money) society in which anyone can do and be pretty much anything they choose, is near the top of a stratified civilizational hierarchy that ranges down to nearly medieval human colonies on far-flung worlds.

Banks shovels a huge amount of data at readers at MATTER’s outset, and if you’ve never read a “Culture” novel (I hadn’t), it might very well be too much. But as daunting as all the names, terminology (there’s a glossary in the back, but I never read those) and concepts that get bandied about in the first 100 pages are, don’t give up, because the following 476 pages constitute an epic adventure that’s thrilling, funny, tragi, and not at all self-important or pompous, even if the jacket would like you to think otherwise.

The plot is Shakespearean at its core: When the king of a feudal nation on the planet Sursamen is killed, his oldest living son – up to that point a callow fop – and his loyal servant set off on a quest for justice while a younger prince has to survive palace intrigue and the threats that surround him. As the older prince leaves his planet to search for his sister who joined The Culture years before, it becomes obvious that other, greater forces are at work in and around Sursamen, and there’s far more at risk than a penny-ante kingdom.

The world-building and civilizations that Banks has created are reminiscent of DUNE in their execution, and like DUNE, it never gets stupid. Some authors fall so much in love with their world-building that they forget to write a book, but Banks is better than that. His accessible, conversational prose counterweights the information dump in MATTER’s opening chapters, and the space opera that unfolds is actually a repudiation of its above-it-all packaging.

The novel embraces weird alien races, cyborgs, laser fingernails, antimatter bombs, self-aware spaceships, sweet epic battles and all the other glorious trappings of science fiction as a genre, and doesn’t shy from its roots in pulp fiction and dime-store paperbacks. There’s a saying somewhere about books and covers and the judging thereof; science-fiction fans would be well-advised to heed it. –Ryun Patterson

Buy it at Amazon.