Joseph Michael Owens’s Reviews > Matter > Status Update

-focused Shellworld of Sursaman, where comparatively minor events are revealed to be strategic moves being played in a much larger, older, and more dangerous game on said Shellworld…

To be continued!!

I remember thinking that the first ~300 pages of this Nobel was “slow,” and in some regards—especially compared to the relative blistering pace of other Culture novels—the first half of MATTER establishes a classic tale of palace intrigue & a hero's journey, but frames it within a universe of staggering scale and technological disparity nested (and nestled!) within the matryoshka-like layers of its centrally-