On a planet with a late-medieval culture, Doctor Vosill attends ailing King Quience as his personal physician. (Publishers: For future reference, Kirkus reads English English and American English with equal facility, and understands other English variants too.) Here, Banks’s near-ubiquitous Culture (Excession, 1997, etc.), controlled by super-smart artificial Minds, figures only at great remove. It would still be a damn good read, but if you read a few other Culture novels first reading Inversions will be so much more rewarding.Another book that, despite a June 1998 UK hardcover and a May 1999 UK paperback, the US publishers somehow were unable to convey to Kirkus swiftly enough for a timely pre-publication review. Inversions can be read as a standalone novel, but I wouldn't recommend it – you would simply miss too much of the underlying story.
There's no contact between the two – calling the link between them weak would be wrong, it's more a subtle kind of thing, with no real consequences for the surface story.
They both live in the same medieval type world, but serve different masters, in different empires, in different capacities (I guess that their titles kind of gave that one away). Inversions is about these two characters called "The Doctor" and "The Bodyguard", each of their stories are told in alternating chapters. Banks does some of his best writing on par with Crow Road and Use of Weapons. If I had to sum up Inversions with two words it would probably be "Damn good". There are some small references to The Culture, but calling it a culture novel is probably stretching it a bit. I'm not saying that it isn't just that you have to look closely. You have to look really closely to find anything that by any stretch of definition can be called Science Fiction. Banks which usually means that it's a Science Fiction story. If I had to sum up Inversions with one word it would probably be "Different". Inversions is a Culture series novel by the noted British author Iain M Banks.
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