Thanks to Liviu Suciu at Fantasy Book Critic

Iain M. Banks’ early Culture books, “Use of Weapons”, “Consider Phlebas” and “The Player of Games” as well as the standalone “Against a Dark Background” are among my top sff books of all time, with “Use of Weapons” still at #1 after 17 years since first read and many re-reads in the meantime.

[…]Once I finished the novel and I started understanding its nuances, I immediately got back into it and read it twice again and it was worth, Transition becoming indeed my top sff novel of the year and one of top two overall 2009 releases so far. I will explain why in the following and argue that you definitely need at least one re-read to fully appreciate the subtlety and depth of the novel.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: I started on the re-read – I re-read already many passages several times trying to fully understand the book, but a full end-to-end re-read is needed –

For now I do not really know how to rate the book – from brilliant to very good but not coherent, or as a review put it a bit of a mess…

Marketed as an M book in the US and a non-M (mainstream) in the UK, Transition can be read in a dual way – as core/adventure sf with the Multiverse, assassins, conspiracies, The Concern a…more The main conceit of “Transition” is that our and many other Earths are part of the Multiverse in which special people, “Transitioners”- usually of the assured, selfish type – can travel in between by temporarily occupying the bodies of unsuspecting persons with the help of a drug called “septus” which is native to Calbefraques, the one special, “Platonically perfect”, totally open Earth where everyone knows about the possibility of transition and the “Speditionary Faculty of the University of Practical Talents” delves into the mysteries of the Multiverse as does the associated “L’Expedience” aka “The Concern” which tries to influence – to the good as it claims – other “Earths”.

Read More here

This sounds really interesting. The idea of other parallel universes is nothing new, but science has just starting looking at multiverses, and this is the first sci fi book I’ve heard of that uses them.

Are you planning on reading this? Have you read any of Banks’ other books?