Continued:

The Retreat at Cadracet

What he had earlier assumed were clouds in the far distance turned out to be the peaks of snow-covered mountains strung around the massif’s top. Deeply corrugated cliffs rose almost straight up, bannered with thin white veils that might be waterfalls. Some of these slender columns stretched all the way down to the base of the cliffs, while other, still thinner white threads faded and disappeared part-way down or vanished into and merged with layered clouds drifting slowly across the great serrated wall of rock.

He stared at the great folded sweep of snow-settled cliff and mountain as it materialised out of the haze, becoming more real with each beat of his heart.

The monastery sat on a rocky outcrop on the shoulder of a modest peak, within a small stand of sigh trees by a tumbling mountain stream. It looked across the forested gorge beneath to the crags, cliffs, snow and ice of the tallest peaks in the range. Behind it, crossing the stream by a modest but ancient stone bridge celebrated in songs and tales three thousand years old, passed the road from Oquoon to the central plateau, momentarily straightening from its series of precipitous hairpins.

The Seastacks of Youmier

Kabe and Quilan were walking along the cliff tops of the Vilster Peninsula on Fzan Plate. To their right, thirty metres below, Fzan Ocean beat against the rocks. The haze horizon swam with scattered islands. Closer in, a few sailboats and larger craft cut through the spreading patterns of the waves.

A cool wind came off the sea. It whipped Kabe’s coat about his legs and Quilan’s robes snapped and fluttered about him as he led the way along the narrow path though the tall grass. To their left the ground sloped away to deep grassland and then a forest of tall cloudtrees. Ahead, the land rose to a modest headland and a ridge heading inland notched with a cleft for one branch of the path they were on. They were taking the more strenuous and exposed route along the cliff top.

Quilan turned his head to look down towards the waves falling against tumbled rocks at the cliff’s base. The smell of brine was the same here.

In the morning, waking to a thudding, not quite regular booming noise and the distant screeches of birds, he opened the shutters to look down over a sheer gulf of air at a blue-green sea streaked with foam and breaking waves boiling round a jagged coastline fifty metres away and a hundred down. A line of cliffs vanished into the distance on either side, and immediately opposite him there was a huge double bowl cut out of the cliffs, so that the drop from the bottom of the bowl to the sea was only thirty metres or so. Clouds of seabirds wheeled in the sunlight like scraps of foam blown up from the fretful sea.

Absence of Gravitas

The dunes were not normal dunes; they were titanic spills of sand forming a three-kilometre-high slope from one Plate to another, marking where the sands from one of the Great River’s sandbank spurnings were blown across towards the Plate’s spinward edge to slip down to the desert regions of the sunken continent below.

People ran, rolled, boarded, ski’d, skiffed or boated down the dunes all the time, but on a dark night there was something special to be seen. Tiny creatures lived in the sands, arid cousins of the plankton that created bioluminescence at sea, and when it was very dark you could see the tracks left by people as they tumbled, twisted or carved their way down the vast slope.

It had become a tradition that on such nights the freeform chaos of individuals pleasing only themselves and the occasional watching admirer was turned into something more organised, and so - once it was dark enough and sufficient numbers of spectators had turned up on the crawler-mounted viewing platforms, bars and restaurants - teams of boarders and skiers set off from the top of the dunes in choreographed waves, triggering sand-slip cascades in broad lines and vees of scintillating light descending like slow, ghostly surf and weaving gently sparkling trails of soft blue, green and crimson tracks across the sighing sands, myriad necklaces of enchanted dust glowing like linear galaxies in the night.

A Defeat of Echoes

Aquime’s altitude and consequently cold winters meant that a lot of the life of the city took place indoors rather than out, and as a result what would have been ordinary streets in a more temperate city, open to the sky, here were galleries, roofed-over streets vaulted with anything from antique glass to force fields. It was possible to walk from one end of the city to the other under cover and wearing summer clothes, even when, as now, there was a blizzard blowing.

Free of the driving snow that was bringing visibility down to a few metres, the view from the apartment’s exterior was delicately impressive. The city had been built in a deliberately archaic style, mostly from stone. The buildings were red and blonde and grey and pink, and the slates covering the steeply pitched roofs were various shades of green and blue. Long tapering fingers of forest penetrated the city almost to its heart, bringing further greens and blues into play and - with the galleries - dicing the city into irregular blocks and shapes.

A few kilometres in the distance, the docks and canals would glitter under a morning sun.

Expiring Light

Somewhere near the furious centre of the work, while the thunder played bass and the music rolled over it and around the auditorium like something wild and caged and desperate to escape, eight trails in the sky did not end in air bursts and did not fade away but slammed down into the lake all around the Bowl, creating eight tall and sudden geysers of lit white water that burst out of the still dark waters as though eight vast under-surface fingers had made a sudden grab at the sky itself.

Quilan thought he heard people shriek. The entire Bowl, the whole kilometre-diameter of it, shook and quivered as the waves created by the lake-strikes smashed into the giant vessel. The music seemed to take the fear and terror and violence of the moment and run screaming away with it, pulling the audience behind like an unseated rider caught in the stirrup of their panic-stricken mount.

A terrible calmness settled over Quilan as he sat there, half cowering, battered by the music, assailed by the washes and spikes of light. It was as though his eyes formed a sort of twin tunnel in his skull and his soul was gradually falling away from that shared window to the universe, falling on his back forever down a deep dark corridor while the world shrank to a little circle of light and dark somewhere in the shadows above. Like falling into a black hole, he thought to himself. Or maybe it was Huyler.

He really did seem to be falling. He really did seem to be unable to stop. The universe, the world, the Bowl really did seem to be unreachably distant. He felt vaguely upset that he was missing the rest of the concert, the conclusion of the symphony. What price clarity and proximity, though, and where lay the relevance of being there and using or not using a magnification screen or amplification when everything he’d seen so far had been distorted by the tears in his eyes and all he’d heard had been drowned out by the clamour of his guilt at what he had done, what he had made possible and what was surely going to happen?

…And that’s all. Every time I read those excerpts, or think about this setting in general, I’m filled with a horrible longing. It’s probably not mentally healthy. The setting is devastatingly beautiful, moreso because it’s a place that will never exist. You can dream about it (and I have, multiple times) but you’ll never go there. Which hurts. Is that cringe? I bet so.

Funny thing, Inversions is the only Culture novel I haven’t read. Matter was decent, but I was slightly peeved by how three of the subplots just get instantly cut off towards the end with

Also the ending had a lot of loose ends left untied - if it was like Surface Detail, which gave a brief summary of what happened to each character afterwards, I think it would’ve been much more satisfying.

Excession is decent too, though I remember its plot being a bit of an anticlimax. But the AI chat logs were pure gold. To this day I really can’t look at a single AI chat log anywhere without thinking of The Culture. Actually AIs in general automatically make me think of the Culture. I may be slightly obsessed, though.