Matter

Matter is a science fiction novel by the Scottish writer Iain Banks, published in 2008 and set in the same fictional civilisation as his other Culture books.

Most of it takes place on Sursamen, one of roughly four thousand shellworlds: artificial planets built as concentric spheres, lit from the inside by small stars, and inhabited at each level by peoples at very different stages of technology. The eighth level belongs to the Sarl, an early-industrial feudal race who worship what they believe lives at the core of their world. Prince Ferbin, the heir to the throne, watches his father King Hausk killed by the king's own second-in-command, Mertis tyl Loesp, and he has to leave the level, the shellworld and eventually his own region of space.

His way out is the sister who left Sursamen long before to serve a distant and far more advanced power. She is a member of the Culture, the civilisation that built these worlds and no longer has much use for them, and reaching her is a journey through peoples and politics that Ferbin has never had to understand. The novel moves between her world and his, and underneath both of them is the question of what the shellworlds were built for, who destroyed so many of them, and what is still living in the core of this one.