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The Hydrogen Sonata is the ninth and sadly, almost The Hydrogen Sonata the last novel in Iain M. In fact, despite sharing a setting, each Culture The Hydrogen Sonata stands alone and really one can start anywhere and be fine. Conventional wisdom says Player of Games is the best place to start, and that from there readers should move on to Use of Weapons. Usually people say they are more accessible, especially Player of Gamesbut really if accessibility is the only concern then one might as well start with the first book, Consider Phlebas. But a detailed discussion of their particular qualities will have The Hydrogen Sonata wait for another day; having provided guidance to readers new to the series, I can in clear conscience spend the rest of this review discussing The Hydrogen Sonata in the broader context of the series. The setup this time is that the venerable Gzilt The Hydrogen Sonata has been winding down for some time and is now mere weeks from Subliming, a process by which a civilization irrevocably transfers its individuals out of our universe and into a new and incomprehensible plane of existence. But as they prepare for their society-wide death and rebirth, a message sent to the Gzilt by a long transcended civilization is intercepted and destroyed. Vyr Cossont is sent The Hydrogen Sonata the Culture to discover the message and the dangerous truth behind it, a revelation that could change the course of her entire people. Nothing coming of it is a surprisingly common The Hydrogen Sonata for Culture novels, starting all the way back in Consider Phlebas and showing up in ExcessionLook to Windwardand especially in the penultimate novel Surface Detail. When I finished reading Surface DetailI was frustrated by the way all of its many viewpoint characters turned out to be irrelevant to the outcome. If anything, Hydrogen Sonata doubles down on this concept. I would have expected this to be even more frustrating, but it forced me The Hydrogen Sonata start thinking harder about why Banks insists on writing stories this way. In light of that, and it being the last The Hydrogen Sonata, it seems appropriate to discuss the entire series in addition to just The Hydrogen Sonata. The accuracy of that proposition, hotly debated in the comments on his blog, need not detain us here, but I mention it because I think the Culture universe is a story-making machine…but a very narrow one. You can, of course, tell any sort of story within the Culture setting, but it would contribute nothing more than scenery to, say, a detective story, a comedy of manners, or even a generic SF space opera story. The Culture as an idea has special relevance to two particular themes: the ethics of intervention and the search for meaning in an atheist universe. Even when Banks tries to use the setting to talk about something else, like the idea one might create afterlives The Hydrogen Sonata virtual reality for uploaded minds, the presence of the Culture warps the story back toward its two core ideas. All of which is to say, while each Culture book is independent from the others and theoretically unique in The Hydrogen Sonata concerns, they all tend to be talking about the same things. There must be something that sets them apart, yet in many respects all nine Culture novels have similar qualities. I believe that while every Culture novel discusses intervention, after the first three there was a significant shift. To explain that shift, I have to The Hydrogen Sonata with the observation that in addition to having two themes, the Culture setting presents Banks with two problems. The first is that if Culture Minds are nigh-invulnerable, nigh-infallible, and nigh-omnipotent, what do they need humans for? The trouble is that as readers we enjoy hearing about the exploits of people at least recognizable as humanish if not actually human. Banks begins by resorting to special cases. In Consider Phlebashe posits a planet from which both Culture Minds and Idirians are barred but the human-equivalent protagonist is allowed to land. But already this approach was showing worrying cracks. After all, despite these nitpicks Player of Games is very good and someday I will argue that Use of Weapons is a genuinely great novel. Excession is popular among Banks fans because it foregrounds the Minds and lets them chew the scenery, blowing things up and cracking wise. But it pays a heavy price for what might only slightly unfairly be called fan service. It rapidly becomes obvious that the longer Minds remain on stage and in the spotlight, the harder it is to take them seriously as vast intellects far beyond the ken of humanity. No matter how we might try to forget it, when the Minds move their massive starships, they move them at the behest of the author of the novel, a mere human somewhere between pet and parasite. When they speak, he is throwing his voice to speak on their behalf. Perhaps Banks concluded the same thing, for in the rest of the Culture series he lets human protagonists come back to the fore. In Inversionshe just dodges the utility question and again leaves himself open to nitpicking. If two human operatives disagree The Hydrogen Sonata how best to intervene, why are they running parallel operations instead of having a Mind settle the question for them? Unfortunately, while marginalizing the human characters makes logical sense, it goes a long way toward undermining reader satisfaction in the stories being told. Many great novels have been written in which the protagonists are utterly passive, of course, but the Culture novels are space operas that spend a lot of time on action and adventure. We expect that action and adventure to produce an important outcome, as in Player of Gamesor failing that, to produce genuine insight into character, as in Use of Weapons. In most of the later Culture novels, nothing much comes of it. That brings us to the other problem Banks has encountered with the Culture setting: in the real world, the politics of intervention shifted dramatically over the course of the series. Of course, as soon as the novels were published readers began drawing connections closer to home: the anti-Communist agents of the Western governments, in particular the United States. Whichever model he had in mind, Banks took the idea of a powerful state interfering in a The Hydrogen Sonata one, an idea opposed both by the right when they thought Comintern agents were sabotaging capitalist economies and the left which saw the quagmires of the Cold War as a rebranding of colonialismand presented the strongest possible argument in its favor. How could anyone object to such wise assistance? Right out of the gate, Consider Phlebas gives us a protagonist who does object and starts exploring the consequences. Player of Games and The Hydrogen Sonata of Weapons go considerably farther down this road, and their development of this theme The Hydrogen Sonata much of the reason they are still worth reading two decades later. But after the fall of the The Hydrogen Sonata Union brought about a new, supposedly unipolar world in which intervention became The Hydrogen Sonata linked with American hegemony, Banks no longer seemed comfortable telling stories about perfected intervention. When in Excession depicted a less advanced race, the Affront, unknowingly being used as a chess piece in internal Culture politics, it was the first crack in the idea that Culture Minds are nearly perfect. Matter repositions the Culture as just one of a delicately balanced group of great powers, each supporting less advanced civilizations who themselves have their own spheres of influence including still less advanced cultures. It goes some way towards preventing readers from taking the Culture as an endorsement of the American neo-conservatives Banks loathes, but it does so by reducing the distance between the Culture as an entity and present countries, particularly America. But is the Culture the right The Hydrogen Sonata to examine questions of foreign policy and national guilt? Supposedly it is a democracy, but we never see the sausages actually getting made, and the impression is always that the Minds decide among themselves what to do without much concern for their lovable The Hydrogen Sonata and parasites. Should they become activists and try to convince their fellow The Hydrogen Sonata to their own way of thinking? Should the system be reformed? Sure, that failed intervention has the advantage of having actually happened, but more importantly, we are shown the series of decisions that led to the disaster, allowing us to discuss in concrete terms whether Athens failed in spite of its democracy or because of it. No similar judgment is possible with the Culture. The The Hydrogen Sonata real civic action we ever hear about is secession. Another way of putting this is that the Culture series supports stories about the experience of utopia but not the politics of it. The series The Hydrogen Sonata the impression that the vast majority of Culture The Hydrogen Sonata fill their days with varying combinations of sex, drugs, thrill-seeking, and creative expression. The Culture citizen does not own everything in common with their fellow citizens; they merely can afford to own whatever they want. This strikes me as, if not a capitalist utopia then at least a consumerist utopia. Freed of scarcity, most Culture citizens happily gorge themselves on their preferred mode of consumption no matter how expensive. But although this is generally the part of the Culture people are The Hydrogen Sonata of when they say that, unlike most speculative fiction settings, it would be a wonderful place to live, Banks carefully rations exposure to this side of the Culture and most of his protagonists have an eye-rolling disregard for the intoxicated masses. Another outward option is to serve the inanimate world, but while the Culture are described as fervent environmentalists, in practice this never comes to the foreground in the novels, nor does Banks seem to have ever put much effort into making their beliefs on this subject consistent they oppose planetary terraforming as wilderness-destroying, Banks says in the Notesright after describing how comets and asteroids are strip-mined to create The Hydrogen Sonata orbitals. For the answer to that, we should turn, finally, to the ninth entry in the Culture series, the novel you surely assumed I had forgotten I was reviewing, The Hydrogen Sonata. Or rather, a theoretical intervention, because after much posturing and scurrying around, nothing comes of it. The not-all-that-momentous secret from the beginning of the Culture is discovered, but then not disclosed. Previous Culture novels have ended in whimpering anti-climaxes, but this one is on another level. The matter is decided in an Excession -style Mind conference, with the rhetorical equivalent of unenthusiastic shrugs and mumbling without eye The Hydrogen Sonata. If we intervene we become at least complicit. What can be said objectively is that everything possible is The Hydrogen Sonata to leech the decision of any drama. What do you guys think? So yeah, I guess so. Now Banks has made the obvious refinement and The Hydrogen Sonata the characters themselves to perceive and acknowledge the unimportance of their actions. The novel pays a heavy price in reader engagement for this anti-climax, but in return, it has a clarity to its ideology that was missing from the previous five novels. Against the ultimately intervention-friendly depiction of the first three books, Hydrogen Sonata portrays intervention as a ridiculous, self-centered exercise that gratifies the egos of the Culture Minds in idle moments but is at best without effect and at worst destructive. But rejecting intervention means the series needs a new answer to the search for meaning. No previous Culture novel has given the question such a thorough examination, but none of the answers turn out to be at all convincing. Characters motivated by social concepts, like the Gzilt politicians and its military factions, achieve nothing in their struggles. Characters who pursue experience or art, like QiRia and the sand sculpting drone, have become anti-social almost The Hydrogen Sonata the point of mental illness. Art earns the strongest rebuke, despite being the answer one might expect a novelist like Banks to prefer, in the form of the titular Hydrogen Sonata, a piece of music Vyr tries to play even though no The Hydrogen Sonata, least of all herself, wants to hear it. Humans, we were told, generally live about four hundred years. Natural human lifespans are definitely too short, Banks is arguing, but surely four hundred years ought to be enough for anyone. Regardless, the underlying philosophy here seems to be that the search for meaning in life is hopeless. The Hydrogen Sonata is no real reason for living, and that having at last satiated our inborn drives for pleasure, friendship, and expression, there is nothing better for us to do than die. And so with Hydrogen Sonata the Culture series ends much as it started in Consider Phlebas : mired in bleak despair. From the The Hydrogen Sonata of ideas, Hydrogen Sonata strikes me as the most articulate of the last six Culture novels and the only one that presents a viable argument against The Hydrogen Sonata worldview of the first three. RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI. I really think this blog should get a lot more comments than it does, but perhaps this is the nature of literature-themed sites. I hope the next comes sooner than later! Comment by Yoshi — May 30, Call me The Hydrogen Sonata if you will. It felt like Iain Banks had no interest in engaging the reader at all. Oh well. RIP, Iain. I loved many of The Hydrogen Sonata earlier books. Comment by Robert — September 25, Comment by stevietopsiders — December 1, Oddly enough I agree with practically everything you point The Hydrogen Sonata — and yet Hydrogen Sonata is my favourite Culture novel. The Hydrogen Sonata - Chapter One

The story centres around a civilisation that is going to sublime, and as they approach this point the various factions start to cause trouble. A lady which is implicated in some of this is wanted by Enjoyed this quite a bit, but the end was mildly unsatisfying. Lots of ambiguous evil and folks getting away with various murders. The Hydrogen Sonata. Iain M. The New York Times bestselling Culture novel. The Scavenger species are circling. It is, truly, provably, the End Days for the Gzilt civilization. The Hydrogen Sonata ancient people, organized on military principles and yet almost perversely peaceful, the Gzilt helped set up the Culture ten thousand years earlier and were very nearly one of its founding societies, deciding not to join only at the last moment. Now they've made the collective decision to follow the well-trodden path of millions of other civilizations; they are going to Sublime, elevating themselves to a new and almost infinitely more rich and complex existence. Amid preparations though, the Regimental High The Hydrogen Sonata is destroyed. Lieutenant Commander reserve Vyr Cossont appears to have been involved, and she is now wanted -- dead, not alive. Aided only by an ancient, reconditioned android and a suspicious Culture avatar, Cossont must complete her last mission given to her by the High Command. She must find the oldest person in the Culture, a man The Hydrogen Sonata nine thousand years old, who might have some idea what The Hydrogen Sonata happened all that time The Hydrogen Sonata. It seems that the final days of the Gzilt civilization are likely to prove its most perilous. The Hydrogen Sonata Iain M. He has since gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both his mainstream and his The Hydrogen Sonata fiction novels. The Hydrogen Sonata (Culture #10) by Iain M. Banks

Read the first chapter of The Hydrogen Sonatathe brand new Culture novel from one of the most exciting science fiction writers of modern times — a tour de force of storytelling, world-building and imagination, and always the biggest annual event in British SF. In the dying days of the Gzilt civilisation, before The Hydrogen Sonata long-prepared-for elevation to something better and the celebrations to mark this momentous but joyful occasion, one of its last surviving ships encountered an alien vessel whose sole task was to deliver a very special party-goer to the festivities. The two craft met within the blast-shadow of the planetary fragment called Ablate, a narrow twisted scrue of rock three thousand kilometres long and shaped like the hole in a tornado. Ablate was all that was left of a planet destroyed deliberately two millennia earlier, shortly before it would have been destroyed naturally, by the supernova within whose out-rushing sphere of debris, gasses and radiation it remained, like an arrowhead plunging ever downwards into the rising, roiling heat and sparks of a great fire. Ablate itself was anything but natural. The multi-coloured skies around Ablate, filled with the vast glowing clouds of stellar debris and the gasses and dusts resulting from its own slow wearing-away, were some of the most calculatedly spectacular in the civilised galaxy, and that was why Ablate was a place of special significance to the people who called themselves the Gzilt. The alien ship was an irregular, fuzzy-looking bubble of dark spheres, measuring barely a hundred The Hydrogen Sonata along its principal axis. The bowl was an oasis of warmth, moisture and atmosphere on that cold, dry, airless surface; The Hydrogen Sonata its gauzy layers of The Hydrogen Sonata it held the sort of parks, lakes, carefully proportioned buildings and lush but managed tracts of vegetation favoured by many types of humanoids. The smaller ship waited for some sort of hail from the larger one, as was only polite, but nothing appeared to be forthcoming. It The Hydrogen Sonata to make the initial approach itself:. I am honoured to be invited here and to make your acquaintance. Am I mistaken, or, if I am not, is there a specific reason for this? Also, I cannot help but note that the crater facility here at Ablate, which The Hydrogen Sonata was led to believe would be at least staffed if not in full ceremonial welcoming mode, does not in fact appear to be so. Indeed, it appears to be effectively empty, both of biological and non-biological sentient presences. There are a few sub-AI substrates running, but no more. Obviously one is aware that these are strange times, even unprecedented times for the Gzilt; times of disruption and, one would The Hydrogen Sonata surmise and expect, quiet but purposeful preparation as well as anticipation. Some degree of formality might, therefore, be expected to be dispensed with in the circumstances. However, even so, one—. Times that bring uninvited guests and unwelcome attentions in the shape of those who would exploit our The Hydrogen Sonata numbers and distracted state. We may have experienced a degree of signal outage there, or at least signal protocol disruption, unlikely though that may seem. However, with regard to what you say regarding the unwelcome attentions from others, that is, sadly, to be expected. The preparations for Sublimation tend to bring such — happily, relatively minor — consequences, The Hydrogen Sonata those whose memory I am honoured to represent would The Hydrogen Sonata the first to agree. The Zihdren—. I interrupted you. I am doing so again. Then I was not The Hydrogen Sonata. Well, then — Captain — we appear to have started out from positions involving inharmonious premises. That is unfortunate. I would hope that, nevertheless, you might appreciate my disquiet — one might even characterise it as disappointment — at the fact that we appear to have initiated our association here on such an unfortunate tack. Please; tell me what I might do to help bring us back onto a more agreeable course. Alien presences wishing to profit from our abandonment of the Real, appropriating what treasure we might leave behind. They circle. I am, of course, aware of those you talk of. It was so with those whose memory I am honoured to represent: your flattered mentors and barely required civilisational guides, the Zihdren. And indeed I do. Represent them, I mean. This is scarcely a matter for dispute. My provenance and—. I must say that I was The Hydrogen Sonata no doubt regarding your ship class and martial status. The eight-star, Indefinite Range, Full Weapon Spectrum Gzilt contemporary ship-type you represent is entirely familiar to us. This vessel is four point six centuries old and yet has never fired a shot in anger. Now, with most of our The Hydrogen Sonata already gone, preparing the way ahead in the Sublime, we find ourselves defending the disparate items of our about-to-be legacy from those who would use the fruits of our genius and labour to cheat their way further along the path to this point, a point that we achieved entirely honourably and without such opportunistic larceny. Good grief! Do you suspect I represent such primitive, aggressive forces? Surely not! The Hydrogen Sonata must be obvious; I have nothing to hide and am transparent, all but completely unshielded; inspect me as you will. My dear colleague; if you wish for help confronting those who would steal any part of your legacy, you need only ask! I, rather, represent a link with those who only ever wished you well, and who, to the contrary—. I am deeming you to be doing so at this moment. We have scanned you and determined that you are carrying something which is entirely shielded from honest view. That is absurd! Of course this entity bears a message from the Zihdren-Remnanter to the Gzilt which I am The Hydrogen Sonata privy to! There can be nothing strange, unprecedented or worrying about such a thing, can there? The Gzilt have been party to the relevant diplomatic The Hydrogen Sonata ambassadorial protocols for millennia, without a The Hydrogen Sonata of complaint. A tiny scrap of the Real bids farewell to you while at the same time representing those who would most happily welcome you to the The Hydrogen Sonata I am sorry. I have had enough of this. Your behaviour and demeanour goes beyond even the most cautious and watchful warship-normal and frankly risks slipping into outright paranoia. I am withdrawing; you will have to excuse me. And I cannot and will not. How dare you! We are your friends. That those who have long thought themselves your friends and allies—. You see? Two may interrupt! I refuse to do as you ask. Drop the signal containment around me immediately. And should you make The Hydrogen Sonata attempt to block or prevent my moving off under—. Release in full the information contained within the shielded substrate. Do you. Are you mad? You must know what and who you are choosing to quarrel with here! Fully accepted and accredited heirs to the Sublimed Zihdren, the species many of your people acknowledge as little less than gods; those the Book of The Hydrogen Sonata itself proclaims to be your spiritual ancestors! I must warn you that although I am, to all intents and purposes, unarmed, still I am not without resources which—. Drop the signal containment around me immediately! That my drive components have not just exploded thanks to your unwarranted barbarism is due more to my ability to finesse than your brutal use of overwhelming power. I am, as is now abundantly clear to both of us, effectively helpless. This is a result and a situation that does you no honour whatsoever, believe me. I must — with utter reluctance and under extreme protest, both personal and formal — ask whether, if I do release in full the information contained inside the shielded substrate within myself, you will then drop the signal containment around me The Hydrogen Sonata desist from jamming my engine fields, allowing me both to signal and to depart. Interesting, as you might put it. I see. That is not a message that I would have anticipated. I now appreciate, as I am sure you do, too, why there was a degree of secrecy regarding the contents. While it would not normally be any part of my responsibility to make comment on such matters, I would, speaking personally, argue that said contents themselves constitute a kind of apology. This is a type of admission, even a confession. I understand that such. However, be that as it may, it was my mission only to deliver this Ceremonial Guest entity while being kept entirely ignorant of the content, substance and import of its message. Accordingly, I consider that I have, albeit in most unexpected and trying The Hydrogen Sonata, discharged my duty, and so would ask to be allowed to communicate this bizarre turn of events to those who tasked me so, and to withdraw from Gzilt jurisdictional space to await further instructions. I have held up my end of our bargain and duly released, in full, the information contained inside the shielded substrate within myself. The weapon- pulse was so strong it continued into the surface of the The Hydrogen Sonata fragment to a depth of several kilometres, blasting a brief, livid tunnel a hundred metres across vertically into the rock. Where the little blue oasis of light and life had been there was now a larger, deeper crater, glowing white and yellow and red from its boiling centre to its ragged edge. Of the other ship, apart from a new set of already fading folds of light in the skies above Ablate, there was no trace whatsoever. Search for: Search. One S In the dying days of the Gzilt civilisation, before its long-prepared-for elevation to something better and the celebrations to mark this momentous but joyful occasion, one of its last surviving ships encountered an alien vessel whose sole task was to deliver a very special party- goer to the festivities. Somewhat obviously. And, if I may so claim, both in outward form and unshielded emissive signature. May I make an observation? We await it. We can see it even if you cannot.