With a middle initial like Iain M. Banks, the famous author of “The Wasp Factory”, “Crow Road”, “Business”, “Streets of Despair” and other novels beloved by the domestic reader are not for the faint of heart, publishing his science fiction. “Inversions” - this is a new version of “It’s Hard to Be a God”, in Banks’ style and with a stereo effect. The action takes place on a planet that has experienced a catastrophic meteor shower; in two rival states at the junction of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the focal points of paradoxically intersecting storylines, with bloody conspiracies and insidious intrigues, are the court physician of one ruler and the personal bodyguard of another. For the first time in Russian!