FREE THE HYDROGEN SONATA PDF Iain M. Banks | 640 pages | 09 Oct 2013 | Little, Brown Book Group | 9780356501499 | English | London, United Kingdom The Hydrogen Sonata - Wikipedia 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.