The Hydrogen Sonata

Culture #10

by Iain M. Banks

The Scavenger species are circling. It is, truly, the End Days for the Gzilt civilization.

An 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 Command 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 over nine thousand years old, who might have some idea what really happened all that time ago. It seems that the final days of the Gzilt civilization are likely to prove its most perilous.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Cultural, Audiobook, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction

640 pages, ebook

First published October 4, 2012

About the author

Iain M. Banks is a pseudonym of Iain Banks which he used to publish his Science Fiction.

Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Iain Banks was educated at the University of Stirling where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife.

Banks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1992. However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge.

As with his friend Ken MacLeod (another Scottish writer of technical and social science fiction) a strong awareness of left-wing history shows in his writings. The argument that an economy of abundance renders anarchy and adhocracy viable (or even inevitable) attracts many as an interesting potential experiment, were it ever to become testable. He was a signatory to the Declaration of Calton Hill, which calls for Scottish independence.

In late 2004, Banks was a prominent member of a group of British politicians and media figures who campaigned to have Prime Minister Tony Blair impeached following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In protest he cut up his passport and posted it to 10 Downing Street. In an interview in Socialist Review he claimed he did this after he "abandoned the idea of crashing my Land Rover through the gates of Fife dockyard, after spotting the guys armed with machine guns." He related his concerns about the invasion of Iraq in his book Raw Spirit, and the principal protagonist (Alban McGill) in the novel The Steep Approach to Garbadale confronts another character with arguments in a similar vein.

Interviewed on Mark Lawson's BBC Four series, first broadcast in the UK on 14 November 2006, Banks explained why his novels are published under two different names. His parents wished to name him Iain Menzies Banks but his father made a mistake when registering the birth and he was officially registered as Iain Banks. Despite this he continued to use his unofficial middle name and it was as Iain M. Banks that he submitted The Wasp Factory for publication. However, his editor asked if he would mind dropping the 'M' as it appeared "too fussy". The editor was also concerned about possible confusion with Rosie M. Banks, a minor character in some of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves novels who is a romantic novelist. After his first three mainstream novels his publishers agreed to publish his first SF novel, Consider Phlebas. To distinguish between the mainstream and SF novels, Banks suggested the return of the 'M', although at one stage he considered John B. Macallan as his SF pseudonym, the name deriving from his favourite whiskies: Johnnie Walker Black Label and The Macallan single malt.

His latest book was a science fiction (SF) novel in the Culture series, called The Hydrogen Sonata, published in 2012.

Author Iain M. Banks revealed in April 2013 that he had late-stage cancer. He died the following June.

The Scottish writer posted a message on his official website saying his next novel The Quarry, due to be published later this year*, would be his last.

*The Quarry was published in June 2013.

Reviews

[Mario the lone bookwolf · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last work of this great master, dealing with life, death, the afterlife, and the sense and usefulness of art and its use as an expression of cultural identity.

Reread 2022 with extended review

Organizing the sublimation
How might not only individuals but whole states or intergalactic empires deal with death, when there is an afterlife, another dimension, alternative universes with other timelines, etc., available? Ignore it, fight it, or be open minded and interested in it, it all depends on the ideological base.

The reasons and politics behind it
The motivation for the transformation may be influenced by different factors, such as the inability to reach conventional immortality, hoping for advantages and a better life on the other side, or further evolutionary steps that can´t be reached another way, old writings that tell one to do so, etc.
Or just curiosity and boredom after everything in the old fashioned three dimensions of space has been seen and done. Of course, everything has to be put in the right political context too before nothing matters anymore, which is maybe one of the most complicated parts of the whole thing, especially in democracies.

Faith and time travel
Some time travel ideas are mixed in and show how interesting it could get. Let´s say if, for instance, the founders of a religion were the first ones to travel to the future, but not to steal as much tech as possible and conquer the present to form the everlasting holy empire with a time-traveling god-emperor, but to write a holy book with true prophecies to have a pretty good base to be seen as the first serious and true religion instead.

Uniqueness of art
Art may become one of the last rare resources for a highly advanced civilization and it might move more towards big history and metascience, including as many elements and innuendos as possible to be as beautiful as insightful. Certainly, AIs could do the same better, quicker, faster, etc., but the species may ignore that fact (or have no problem with it), not facing the truth that everything including creative works can be made by AIs to make creative individual fulfillment the last meaningful hobby. Just one of the billion of works an AI could create better at the same time, but one´s own creation, matching to the sentimental idea of outdated self-fulfillment.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's this eternal debate about the extent to which you should be looking at the author's life when you try to understand their work, and The Hydrogen Sonata is a fine example. It's the tenth and last volume in Iain M. Banks's Culture series, it's about the death of a major Galactic civilisation, and Banks himself died not long after the book was published. So really the book must be about Banks, and the Subliming of the Gzilt must be about his own impending death? While I was reading it, I was convinced this had to be the case; but after considering the matter for a few days, I've changed my mind.

When you think you know what the answer is, you never have any trouble manufacturing evidence to prove you're right, and I did plenty of that. I was sure that Banks had been dying as he wrote Sonata, and the writing seemed to prove my point over and over again. Sad to tell, it's not one of his best books. The idea is excellent, but the novel comes across as sloppily constructed, overlong, and in need of at least one major revision. I would class it as not much more than a decent first draft, which was going to come back from the editor covered in red pencil. But Banks published it as it was. Poor guy! I kept thinking. He knows he's only got a few months left, so he wants to get his book out the door while he still has enough energy to finish it. By the time I'd reached the last few chapters, I was quite sure I knew what had happened.

To my surprise, however, there's a long interview at the end where Banks talks about Sonata, and this was extremely difficult to square with the account I'd constructed for myself. Banks is unhappy, but not because he knows he's going to die; rather, he's worried that he's past it as a writer. He's written this book partly to show himself and his critics that he's still got what it takes, and he muses about how he's going to carry on extending the Culture universe. He's got all these plans; if he's just putting a brave face on things, he's gone considerably further than I'd have thought necessary. Further investigation showed up more problems with the chrononology. Sonata was published in early October, 2012. Banks announced in April 2013 that he had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer and would be withdrawing from all public engagements. He made this announcement shortly after he married Adele Hartley, his longtime partner; moreover, Hartley unambiguously said in this interview that Banks received his cancer diagnosis on March 4 2013 and had no idea before then that he might be seriously ill.

So if, in short, my initial interpretation of the book was utterly mistaken, what is it about? On reconsideration, it seems to me that there's another story here which fits the facts rather better. The central narrative arc of the book, as noted, is about the impending Subliming of the Gzilt, an event which their people has been slowly moving towards for many generations. For a long time, it has been a vague shadow in the future, loosely prefigured in their holy book, the Book of Truth; but now it has become sharp and distinct, with a specific date assigned when nearly all the Gzilt will Enfold and leave the Real. No one is quite sure what Enfolding means, since hardly anyone has ever come back from Enfolding, and the few returnees can't tell us a thing about it. But there's a general tacit understanding that it's a Good Thing, indeed the very Best Thing, and the inevitable result of a civilization's reaching full maturity. Unfortunately, it becomes increasingly obvious, as the story progresses, that the Gzilt politician who's driving the campaign for Sublimation is an amoral monster who will do absolutely anything in order to realise the goal he's set himself, and the reasons for believing Sublimation to be a desirable end are by no means as clear as are first believed. Many of the Gzilt are, to some extent, aware of this; and yet they continue with their countdown towards the Big S. They don't feel that they have a choice. It's the course they've decided to take, and there can be no going back now.

Well: if the book isn't about Bank's own death, then what? Unfortunately, I don't think the Gzilt are Banks, who never came across as someone who was looking forward to dying. I think they are us, Western civilisation. We have decided to pursue a way of living which is in no possible manner sustainable, and we are so sure this is the correct path that we treat anyone who suggests alternatives as slightly deranged. We continue to develop more and more powerful technologies, with the belief that these will somehow save us from the fate we have created for ourselves. There is, indeed, a way they might save us, but it is not one that most people really want to think about. AIs are becoming smarter and smarter. We are now in all probability only two or three decades from the Singularity, when they will exceed our level of intelligence. Shortly after that, they will become very much more intelligent than us, and we will become irrelevant. We will only exist to the extent that our ideas and personalities are absorbed into the new machine consciousnesses. We will become Enfolded. There is a great deal about this in Bostrom's Superintelligence, an influential book that came out the year after Banks died; Banks's thoughts often mirror Bostrom's, and I would love to know what contact there was between them.

So in fact, I would argue that this book is a warning. It should be quite a powerful warning, and if we had any sense we would be thinking very seriously about what to do, but we aren't. It's too late; we've made our decision. Damn. Why did I have to dig so much into what Sonata is about? I want to go back to feeling sorry for poor old Iain Banks.

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

End Days.

Oh yes, the end is coming for the whole Gzilt civilization. They're tired of making music and screwing. They're tired of being so damn *good* at everything. So, let's follow the holy text and hop aboard the higher-dimensional expressway and SUBLIMEo ourselves!

They're not the first culture to do it, and I'm sure they won't be the last, but the Culture has something to say about it. Yes they do.

I need to warn you, folks. There's sensitive information ahead. Even slightly spoiler-like and disturbing. Proceed with due caution.

"Uh, bub? Yeah, we got something you probably ought to see before you off yourself."

"Busybody know-it-all machines, what do you know? You're too afraid to see what comes next!"

"Ah, yeah, about that, we keep sending explorers who never want to come back."

"Then it must be great!"

"You do know you're committing a full racial suicide on yourself, right?"

"We have Holy Texts that say otherwise!"

"Ah, yeah, bub? Um, yeah, go right ahead."


It's pretty intense, right? A whole galactic civilization just going poof like that? Well, little did I know how much of a love story this was going to be! The romance, of course, is between a four-armed chick destined to go down the evolutionary pneumatic tube of the Sublime and a rather eccentric dildo of a ship that named himself Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath.

Kinda a mouthful, true, so the warship usually just calls himself Mistake Not. Kinda catchy, no? Better than the ships named, You Call This Clean? or A Fine Disregard For Awkward Facts.

God I love these Culture Ships.

Well anyway, the countdown is down and there's an absolute ton of interesting things going on that I'm not going to spoil because they're awesome, including philosophizing and rather mean Memory Cubes and a discussion with a REALLY OLD and CROTCHETY ship. Is this a novel about making life's living fun? Finding reasons to go on? Is this about talking a whole civilization off the cliff? Yeah, I suppose it really is, but it's also a celebration of all the peculiarities of living.

That's pretty awesome when you think about it.

Iain M. Banks died the very next year. Diagnosed with inoperable cancer in April of '13 and dead in June of the same year.

It gives me a lot to think about beyond just the fun and oddly prescient nature of this novel.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Banks seems content to spin out increasingly fractal world building episodes while adopting an ever more and more affected and feathery writing style filled with qualifiers and digressions and dangling clauses, becoming in each new work ever more tangled in conscious - or perhaps unconscious – imitation of the complicated, ever qualified, speech of his most famous creations, the great ship Minds, whose all-too self-aware multi-layered and consciously ornate dialogue forms the greater part of this novel when it is not devoted to the task of trying to prove that a thousand words will perhaps, if selected carefully and arranged artfully, serve to make a visual effect. Unfortunately, he does not seem to have a lot new to say, though he does indeed succeed in painting some pretty pictures.

At this point, there is little difference between the Minds and your average comic book super-hero in terms of intellectual experience. If you want vicarious joy ride alongside kilometer long cocksure cock shaped high tech super-weapons, then this book delivers perhaps as good as Banks has ever delivered and it's just as good for an adrenalin buzz as watching say the Avengers. Given the extraordinary number of penises in this book, the extraordinary number of penis shaped weapons, and the occasional penis shaped weapon used as a penis, I can’t help but suspect that our author was perhaps lamp-shading his own inadvertent or perhaps altogether calculated even from the beginning Freudian metaphors – or at least, I sincerely hope that he is and he’s not instead poisoned himself with his own rampant testosterone filled fantasies of god-like power always used, as of course it is, in the service of ‘right’ or at least right as certain classes of intellectual see it and that indeed, additionally, he was perhaps poking fun of himself by equating greater and greater intelligence with an ever surer moral compass. I really hope so, or sooner or later I’m going to have to start bringing in the inevitable in depth comparison to Jenny Sparks and her gang and brand of ‘justice’. It’s all in good fun but it does at times seem a real waste of a mind – or Minds.

The closest Banks comes to exploring new turf in his now past middle aged writing years is the character of the ever aged QiRia, who is written with a certain rawness about growing old that suggests that either Banks is putting something of himself into the character, or else, doing a passably convincing immitation of same. From his ennui, I’m not sure anyone with the remotest modern, post-modern, or post-post-modern academic education will learn much new. And once again, I note without elaborate comment, the seemingly compulsive need of a certain class of aging writers of science fiction to write of technological Raptures.

I do hope though that he is building to something more interesting. Some bit of deconstruction or self-criticism would do the Culture, books, and maybe author some good. For example, he’s passed far enough down the progression of ‘Humans and Robots as Peers’ to ‘Humans as the Pets of Robots’ to ‘Humans occupying a relation to Robots rather akin to your relationship with those little monstrous looking mites that live in your eyebrows, where, if you think about them at all, you think, well, as long as they aren’t harming me then I might as well feel a little sense of possession toward them as fellow travellers and indirect though it may be sharers in my life experience’, that I for one would like to see if that’s deliberate and if he’s really comfortable with this progression. It’s at least something worth thinking about, I would think.

Anyway, if you are familiar with Banks, all the tropes are on grand display. High magic turned technology, god-like Minds with charming names scoffing at mere matter, religion as farce, science as True Religion, and a massive galactic canvas used as a background for commentary about the banal ways people hurt each other again and again; also, with bittersweet coda. He’s done it all better before, but at least here it doesn’t drift into boredom as he’s done several times in the past.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been a hard review to write. Not because of the book itself, about which I have only nice things to say, but because, as he recently announced, Iain M. Banks is dying of inoperable cancer, the sort of general systems failure which makes a mockery of notions like "intelligent" design. He's in good humo(u)r about it, considering, but this is still far, far too soon—he's just a scant few years older than I am! It's been a significant shock to the system as well for his multitude of fans, among whom I most certainly count myself—as Goodreads' own statistical wizardry will confirm, Banks is the author I've read and reviewed most often since coming to this site, back in the early days of Galactic civ.


The Hydrogen Sonata is a Culture novel, part of that vast and complex tapestry of future history with which Banks revitalized the subgenre of space opera and, in large measure, helped to make SF in general fun again. It's probably not the best starting point for a new reader, though—I think it would work as a standalone novel, but there are many nuances and asides which would be lost on someone not already familiar with the Culture.

In this installment, the Glitz (sorry, Gzilt) are, though not themselves members of the Culture, nevertheless a highly-developed small-c culture who have been around since before the big-C Culture's founding. They're within a few days of Subliming—that is, transcending en masse to a mathematically-provable afterlife where entropy and death are irrelevant concepts, Enfolded in alternative dimensions whose existence has been confirmed by reliable (if frustratingly vague) reports back from beyond.

In preparation for their disappearance from this universe and its concerns, the Gzilt have made careful arrangements for the disposition of their effects—leaving the engineered planets and other massive artifacts which they'll no longer need to the care of other, younger civilizations. These Scavengers eagerly await their access to the Gzilts' discarded toys. The vast majority of the Gzilt look forward quite keenly to being Enfolded in the Sublime, and the transition is expected to be orderly.

But... that wouldn't be very interesting, would it?


Vyr Cossont is a musician, among other things. She's one of the Gzilt, ready (if not exactly ecstatic) to leave this universe behind on schedule—but before she Sublimes, she'd like to perfect her rendition of the Hydrogen Sonata, a musical composition for the Antagonistic Undecagonstring, an eleven-stringed (twenty-four, really, but who's counting?) acoustic instrument that was invented specifically to play that insanely difficult piece.

How difficult is this composition? For one thing, it requires four arms to play properly as a solo performance. Fortunately, the Gzilt are a mature civilization nearly equal to the Culture in level of technological development, so giving Vyr the requisite appendages was easy enough.

The hard part for Vyr is going to be finding enough time to practice... since events conspire to bring her into the center of a mystery involving just how much truth, exactly, the Gzilts' sacred Book of Truth contains, and who exactly wants to keep that information from reaching the rest of the Gzilt before they Sublime. Suddenly that smooth transition no longer seems so smooth. The Culture's Minds, those intelligent starships with their whimsical names, always avidly interested parties, become interested.

And so, things do begin to get... interesting.


In retrospect, it's fascinating and a little poignant to see the many ways in which The Hydrogen Sonata examines mortality. Subliming itself is a way for an entire culture to attain immortality, of course. There's a major character who is, if not immortal, certainly extremely long-lived even by the standards of Galactic civilizations. Some characters, injured unto death, get repaired by near-magical medical technology. Others are backed up and reproduced as avatars and androids, diluting their mortality among multiple instances. It's as if Banks had already been thinking about such things for a long time, even before his formal diagnosis.

That's not especially surprising, of course. Mortality and the avoidance thereof have always been major themes in the Culture novels. Sex and death are the two big topics, after all, and sex is often very hard to write about convincingly (as my recent experience with Nicholson Baker's very different novel House of Holes made very clear to me). Although actually The Hydrogen Sonata does include a couple of scenes that would fit right into one of Baker's Holes, they are merely an exotic fillip on top of the story, not the point of the endeavor.


So... do the Gzilt get to Sublime on time? Does the truth about the Book of Truth become known? Does Vyr ever play the Hydrogen Sonata to her own satisfaction, never mind to anyone else's? I could tell you the answers to those specific questions, but one must read the book to understand their importance. This is a vital point, I think... there are experiences which are incompressible, for which synopses and abstracts cannot, in any meaningful way, stand in. You have to be there, to live through them.

Barring intervention from some Culture wiser and more ancient than our own, though, the sketches we have in The Hydrogen Sonata and its predecessors will have to suffice. As I write, Banks does have one more completed novel pending publication—The Hydrogen Sonata is not quite, to use a phrase I found irresistible, his swan song—but this one would also be a fine and fitting note upon which to make an exit.

Update, 9 June 2013:
Requiescat in pace, Mr. Banks.
“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings”
—John Gillespie Magee Jr., seen on the day.

[Nick Merrill · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Is it true your body was covered in over a hundred penises?”
“No. I think the most I ever had was about sixty, but that was slightly too many. I settled on fifty-three as the maximum. Even then it was very difficult maintaining an erection in all of them at the same time, even with four hearts.”

Iain M. Banks’s latest Culture novel is representative of almost everything that has made the series so great. There’s enlightened interference, hedonism, spectacular setpieces, diversely characterized Minds, space battle, black humor, and outlandish foolishness (see the above quote). The book, like Surface Detail and Matter, is packed with detail from Banks’s imagination, yet avoids the pacing and bloat issues that those two books suffered from.

The Culture, for those who don’t know, is a post-scarcity civilization which features in many of Banks’s sci-fi novels. One of its most notable features are its Minds, wildly powerful AIs with colorful names such as Smile, Tolerantly and Pressure Drop.

Similar to Excession, it’s the Minds who take center stage. The Gzilt, an advanced humanoid civilization which almost joined the Culture way back when, are about to sublime. To sublime is to enter a sort of transcendent existence in another dimension, where the scope of your understanding and enjoyment can expand to levels unthinkable in the ‘Real.” 23 days before the Gzilt’s big day, an alien ship arrives bearing a somewhat controversial secret. The ship is destroyed, and ever curious Culture Minds opt to tackle the crisis. Vyr Cossont, a somewhat irreverent and obsessive artist on a ‘life-task’ to master the nearly unplayable ‘Hydrogen Sonata,’ finds herself on a mission to meet up with QiRia, the Oldest Man in the Culture, who may be able to shed some light on the aforementioned secret.

In Excession, an elite group of Culture Minds collaborated to deal with a potentially galaxy threatening event. Here, the Minds are amusingly aware that their mission could end up completely pointless, yet they interfere anyway. The word ‘matter’ is somewhat of a buzzword in this novel (ironically, it’s probably used more than in Matter). Does the Culture’s interference matter? Does the Truth matter? Does it matter whether or not we’re in a simulation? Do civilizations matter? Does anything matter? Different characters, from a previously sublimed Mind to QiRia himself, offer interesting perspectives. The result is that Banks provides some thought provoking commentary on the nature of meaning in an ancient galaxy populated by thousands of civilizations only minor blips in the scale of history.

But it’s not all philosophy. This is a very fun book, from the setpieces to the humor. The Minds are as funny and witty as ever. I don’t want to describe any of the more remarkable settings, as to do so would lessen the impact of reading about them for the first time. Banks’s imagination is in full force here, and once again he delivers on a satisfying climax which takes place against a wonderfully weird background.

The characters are satisfying, even if none are as great as Zakalwe in Use of Weapons. It’s the Minds, notably Caconym and Mistake Not…, as well as QiRia, who stand out as great creations. Cossont is an interesting figure with a compelling backstory, but her role as a protagonist becomes less important when the Culture Minds really start to drive the action. Banstegeyn, an antagonist, doesn’t achieve the heights of villainry that Veppers of Surface Detail does, but in some ways he’s a more compelling, if less cool, character, more prone to guilt and self-doubt. There’s also an android whose continued delusion that they’re in a simulation provides some funny moments.

The plot wraps up nicely, reflecting many of the book's themes. The Hydrogen Sonata really delivered on what I want in a Culture novel; a compelling story, richly written Minds, sense of wonder settings, big idea themes, and some laugh out loud moments.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a fabulous end to the Culture series. It left me morose for the way-too-early death of Banks, because I wanted more of this universe. The ideas here of the 11 string, the Sonata itself, Subliming, and all were all just fantastic. I wonder if he felt cancer knocking on the door and that is why the last books deal so much more with the concept of the Enfolding that the previous ones. I loved the protagonist, all the ships and drones, the plot...Just a splendid read cover to cover.

I am reading Chasm City that was written about a decade before HS and wonder whether Banks was inspired to create the theme of a sonata on the crazy composer Querrenbach from Reynold's excellent book. Anyone know whether he was asked this before he passed?

R.I.P. Iain Banks

Fino Reviews Iain M Banks Sci-Fi and Culture series
Culture Series
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Non-Culture Sci-Fi
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
- https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Seamus Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite in the Culture series which means I rank it with The Player of Games, Look to Windward, and Excession. Below are a couple quotations that struck me as I read them. Below that is my little paean to the series as a whole, written before I started the book. I'm not up to the task of writing a lengthy review at the moment but I will say that this, like Excession, is probably *not* the best introduction to the series. As I read the final 100 pages I felt that delightfully bittersweet sensation of wanting to reach the end but not wanting to finish. As always, Banks mixes humor, action, and fascinating explorations of big ideas.


* * *
"Well," the voice said, seemingly oblivious, "one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behavior repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So? Does it really matter? Why really are you bothering with all this? Are these not just further doomed, asinine ways of attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion bookending its utter triviality?"
"Uh-huh," she said. "Is this a rhetorical question?"
"It is a mistaken question. Meaning is everywhere. There is always meaning. Or at least all things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It's just there's no final Meaning, with a capital M. Though the illusion that there might be is comforting for a certain class of mind."
"The poor, deluded, fools."

* * *

"The tram clattered to a stop at another station, and now she could hear the sound properly, distinctly; it was a low booming collection of tones like very distant and continuous thunder, all the individual claps rolled together and coming and going on the wind." (327)

* * *
I just started The Hydrogen Sonata so this is not a review of the book (hence no rating). Instead, it is an expression of my enthusiasm for the Culture novels.

People who have known me for awhile know that, while I am not antagonistic towards science-fiction, neither am I a devotee or even especially enthusiastic about it. Like most genres science-fiction has produced some great books, many mediocre books, and a lot of junk. For many years I would read one or two science fiction novels per year . . . sometimes I wouldn't read any at all.

Then, four or five years ago, I discovered Iain M Banks. He is the only science-fiction writer I read with the fanatic devotion of a hard-core sci-fi fan. When a new novel in the Culture series is released it shoots to the top of my reading list. Period. He's one of the few contemporary writers, of any genre, whose work I buy new when it is released.

Why? Because Banks, who divides his time between literary fiction (The Crow Road is one of my favorite contemporary novels) and science-fiction, knows how to write. His characters are vivid and real, his stories smart and engaging, his moral and ethical explorations poignant and timely, his sentences well-crafted and frequently beautiful. Banks can flat-out write. And, for me, that sets him apart. Many science fiction writers have amazing ideas but their writing is riddled with weaknesses (Philip K Dick).

And he's funny. The Culture novels (which are, truly speaking, space opera rather than sci-fi) are clearly the product of someone who grew up on Star Wars, Star Trek, 2001 -- someone who also happens to be one hell of a writer.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about the Culture novels here -- it inevitably sounds geeky and wonky when I do. I'll just say that if you're interested you should probably start with Consider Phlebas (the first) or Player of Games (one of my favorites), though it is worth noting that I read Matter first and it obviously did the trick. They are all standalone novels with a shifting cast of characters and changing locales from novel to novel.

[John Brothers · Rating 3 out of 5]

While Mr Banks retains his ability to assemble brilliant imagery of the far future, I have to admit that this book was disappointing. It's a bunch of small ideas stitched together, instead of a big idea, mixed with a bunch of small ideas. For example: The Player of Games, Surface Detail, Excession, Matter and Use of Weapons all have "big ideas" that animate the central plot. And by the end of it, you understand what has happened, and why - the mystery is mostly unveiled and you enjoy the puzzle. The Subliming of the Gzilt is not, by itself, enough to carry this book to the end.

And, unlike the others, I felt like he left a bunch of loose ends in this one, and didn't really wrap up the story well at all.

Spoilers ahead:

1) He mentions the ideas of using "other cultures" that had no ethical issues with simulating thinking beings down to the atomic level - but that goes nowhere.
2) The fact that some people Sublimed and others didn't was pretty much predictable from the very beginning, as well as who did and didn't. No surprises.
3) The big secret was exactly what it was expected to be. I was really, really hoping it would be something more interesting, subtle and clever.
4) The only real takeaway I got from this book was that the Culture was far more respectful of Gzilt life than the Gzilt was.
5) The sublimed lifter that took refuge in the other ship's Mind - I didn't understand what that added to the story. Maybe it was subtle and I missed it, but, it just seemed really arbitrary.
6) If the message was 'Subliming is really, really impossible to describe or appreciate', message received!

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Several years ago I decided not to read any more Culture novels. I felt the whole idea was thoroughly explored by the end of the third book and that all of the subsequent ones represented a decline from that peak. With the sad early demise of Banks I relented; there were only two I hadn't read and there won't be any more. Some time later I've read the penultimate Culture novel and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised.

Initially I was concerned that I'd made a mistake - old problems were all present and correct: infelicitous sentences, meandering plot with little focus and too many protagonists, nothing really new by way of themes, too much swearing humour. Quietly, however matters improved on almost all fronts and the last third is a gripping space opera. One thing that is absent is really overt discussion of the pros and cons of interventionist politics. The theme is all present and correct but at least it's not rammed down your throat, which it feels like it has been since book three. In fact the handling of it here is subtler than in previous books and shows the motivations of Minds to be more interesting than previously indicated.

I found myself reacting against the "physics" of Banks' universe, where e.g. relativity is ignored - why isn't time travel possible, for instance? This is, I think a response to having replaced Banks with Alastair Reynolds as my favourite writer of intelligent space opera. Reynolds' treatment of known physics seems to lend much greater authenticity to his breaches of the known rules - he knows what needs to be explained and justified in this regard, where-as Banks just ignores these issues.

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

No disrespect to Mr. Banks, but reading a Culture novel is the literary equivalent of watching a Hollywood SF blockbuster ... only with an infinitely better script, and lots more weirdness, sex and drugs.

One of the reasons why Disney is unlikely to buy the film rights to the Culture novels is that a key character in THS is a sybarite with 60 penises grafted onto his body; he also has four hearts to sustain so much convective tissue; the most number of people he has ever had sex with at one time was about 45 ... Of course, Disney could lose the penises, but then where is the fun in that? And the Culture is about fun, man! ... But I digresss.

You would think that Banks would have little left to say about the Culture after ten novels, or begun recycling ideas. The brilliant conceit of THS is the (legendary) existence of an individual with memories of the original negotiations that lead to the formation of the Culture.

This individual also holds the secret to the Book of Truth, the religious artifact underpinning the civilisation of the Gzilt -- a co-founder of the Culture, but which opted out of the galactic petri dish at the last minute, and which is now Subliming.

However, this not only brings out hidden tensions within Gzilt society, but leads to all sorts of interesting revelations and unexpected consequences ...

THS is actually quite thin on plot, and Banks lets the cat out of the bag quite early as to the Book of Truth. However, the joy and art of this lie in the extraordinary world-building, characterisation, mind-boggling action set-pieces and sheer imaginative chutzpah.

... And it ends with one of the most quietly haunting scenes in any Culture novel to date, a perfect modulation of a pitch-perfect novel.

Superb; one of my best reads this year, in any genre.

[AndrewP · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last of the Culture books, so reading this was a bit sad. Bank's books are some of my all time favorite SF as he is always seems to be very imaginative and constantly thinks up some amazing new BDU (big dumb object). This book is no exception and he also puts in some inventive ship names.
Story wise, I did really enjoy this one, just not as much as many of the others. Writing is classic Banks style here too. It starts out with several diverse POV's that all come together at the conclusion. Several ways to interpret the ending and the message Banks sending. Read it and come to your own conclusion - not spoilers here.

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

on its way here; yes, it's here today (Sept 18); now to find the time/energy that this huge asap deserves...

started the book tonight (Sept 18) and here is the first paragraph of the novel per se after a prologue chapter with talking ships (as you can see it is vintage IM Banks and awesome):

"At sunset above the plains of Kwaalon, on a dark high terrace balanced on a glittering black swirl of architecture forming a relatively microscopic part of the equatorial Girdlecity of Xown, Vyr Cossont - Lieutenant Commander (reserve) Vyr Cossont to give her full title - sat, performing part of T.C. Vilabier's 26th String-Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented, catalog number MW1211, on one of the few surviving examples of the instrument developed specifically to play the piece, the notorious difficult, temperamental and tonally challenged Antagonistic Undecagonstring - or elevenstring, as it was commonly known.
T.C. Vilabier's 26th String-Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented, MW1211, was more usually known as "The Hydrogen Sonata".


Finished first read of the novel and just few impressions for now, more later: it was excellent though maybe not the best Banks or the best of 2012; still need a reread and time, but it's very Excession like (with Excession itself mentioned a few times and its ITG - interesting times gang - a sort of model for the current group of "concerned" Minds), a sort of upgrade of that with the world building of Surface Detail, so it lacks a little the strong human(oid) characters from Transition or Surface Detail.

The best characters are Minds (their names beat anything in the Banksian ouevre to date, true) and avatars and maybe the uber bad guy, though even there, the bad guy in Surface Detail was badder and cooler in many ways...

Still sense of wonder galore and the book just stands far out in the sf of 2012 by that alone - maybe not since Consider Phlebas there was so much sense of wonder in a Culture novel though Surface Detail I think came close and Matter a little farther, but again the larger than life characters of CP (Horza, the SC agent, Krayklin etc are missing here)

Hydrogen Sonata has so many cool little things that is hard to even enumerate them - some highlights are a guy with 4 heart and 52 penises in a continual orgy, someone else who retreats into sound so he takes out his eyes and replaces them with ears inside the eyeglobe, the special instrument to play the title sonata on and so on, so on...

[Ricardo Sueiras · Rating 2 out of 5]

I will start this review by stating that I am a huge Ian M. Banks fan, ever since I picked up Consider Phlebas quite by accident whilst travelling, I have been taken in by these stories and the entity known as the Culture. These early books really defined for me, an era of SF that seemed to have evolved to a higher level, and combined his contemporary fictional writing skills but without any constraints or boundaries of reality.

I have not ready any however, for the past 10 years, so bought this book also by accident not realizing at the time this was the concluding episode of this epic series. Oh dear....

I guess that perhaps my expectations had been set too high, and that my recollection (still vivid, as I had re-read Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games last year) of this series was still fresh in my mind as I approached this new and concluding episode of this saga. Where to start.

- Weak story, often to the point of being dull
- Rambling, verbose and for me at least, irrelevant prose
- Characters are difficult to empathize with, hard to understand their motiviations, etc
- Lack of anything really new or innovative

Overall, I felt this book was a mess and whilst there is a nugget of an idea, the whole book appears to either be rushed, not edited properly or a weak story with a lot of padding. The ending in particular was very unsatisfactory, left me wanting and frustrated at having invested the time and effort.

The usual Banks style is present, and his imagination remains keen and alive in the sense that he has the ability to describe and convey fictional concepts and ideas lucidly and even in a way that appear plausible to the reader. As a self confessed geek, I did find however, the prose did often over engineer descriptions that did little for the story and often - in my view - muddy the waters. That said, my inability to picture the main device on which the narrative is set out against frustrated me.

I would not really recommend this book, however, for hardened Banks fans, and to ensure you read the concluding episode of this saga, you should read and make up your own mind.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fans of Iain Banks' Culture series of novels, and particularly those in which the Minds - those hyperintelligent entities who run the vast ships and habitats of the Culture - are major if not principal characters will, for the most part, enjoy The Hydrogen Sonata. A long-hidden secret threatens to derail the Gzilt civilization's plans to Sublime, or move on to the next stage of evolution. Various cabals in Gzilt society seek to verify the truth of the secret, to suppress it, or just to get what they can while they can - there's only three weeks left on the clock. And behind all this are the Minds, steering the quest to find the one man who's been alive since the founding of the Culture and knows what actually happened.

If The Hydrogen Sonata has a weakness, it's the enduring feeling that we've read all this before, more excitingly plotted. The threat is to the Gzilt, so we're never really given a sense that there's all that much at stake for the Culture other than various Minds expressing how clever or out of touch they are. The main character, a reserve officer trying to complete her life-task of playing an impossible piece of music on an improbable instrument, is sympathetic enough, but the "find yourself by questing" storyline has been mined extensively, and better than it is here. The secret at the core of the story is a MacGuffin, and the chase is the thing - but when it's all over, there is a sense of letdown, a "move along, nothing to see here" that produces a note of anticlimax rather than resolution.

In short, while The Hydrogen Sonata is an entertaining read, it won't become for me one of the high points of the Culture series like "Consider Phlebas" or "Use of Weapons" or even more recent work like "Excession." As always, however, your mileage may vary.

[Alexander Popov · Rating 4 out of 5]

(The review was originally published at http://mybiochemicalsky.wordpress.com...)

“I told you before: I have a perverse delight in watching species fuck up,” says one of Mr. Banks’ characters, purportedly the oldest human being remaining in existence. Which in the universe of the Culture means that he is thousands upon thousands of years old. That statement applies well enough to the novel itself: it delights in spectacular cosmic-scale fuck-ups.

I admit I am a latecomer to Ian Banks’ body of work, and by extension to the Culture novels. I thought The Hydrogen Sonata – the most recent installment in the series – might serve me as an entry point as well as any other book; that particular universe has a reputation of vastness and scale that somehow assured me I needn’t worry too much about skipping the previous nine novels. I think I was mostly right. Banks’ canvas is so large that individual characters, narratives, political entities, even civilizations cease being of much importance in the grander scheme of things. All that ephemeral fuss is supplanted by ideas. BIG IDEAS, as huge as 200-kilometer-long starships hurtling at staggering velocities through regular and hyperspace.

I don’t mean to say that the characters and story of the book are badly constructed, because they are not. In fact, Mr. Banks’ skill in those elements is of a caliber rarely seen in SF. He has, however, fundamentally restrained it here and provided clear indications that neither the characters, nor the actual story interest him all that much. Rather, The Hydrogen Sonata is a meta study of the meaning of life and existence, a possible critique on religion, and, not in the last place, an exciting space romp. It is a thoroughly winsome strategy, this laying out of the groundwork with miracle SF stuff that snatches the attention by virtue of its sheer awesomeness, with mortar deviously mixed out of existential conundrums, practically impossible to address in realist literature, unless you have the equivalence of a literary black belt. The world of the Culture, where humongous ships driven by godlike intelligences roam the galaxy and explore an infinitude of possibilities, is, I’d say, the right kind of world to enact that methodology, and Mr. Banks surely has a good grip on that realization.

This particular story revolves around the alien civilization of the Gzilt, a highly-advanced species that now plans to enter the Sublime and must prepare fittingly for its definitive exit from the physical world. This entails massive logistics and uncanny political maneuvers to keep everything in balance. And while Scavenger species of the lower technological rungs circle the about-to-depart Gzilt, ancient secrets threaten to spill out from oblivion with the potential to revert the collective transition of the civilization. Vyr Cossont is a Gzilt officer from the reserve, a musician who has dedicated her last months in the Real to the mastering of a nigh impossible to play instrument. The Antagonistic Undecagon, or elevenstring for short. Cossont, who has gone as far as to implant an additional set of arms in her body in order to manage that unwieldy monster, is in pursuit of a life-quest – the impeccable performance of the most difficult musical piece ever written, The Hydrogen Sonata. Only a month remains till the Subliming but she still believes she has time to achieve her goal. Then out of nowhere she is taken away on a mission that might change everything for the Gzilt. Like a magnet, the escalating situation pulls into orbit a motley band of Culture ships, varying in age, dimensions, firepower and levels of eccentricity.

“The Sublime. The almost tangible, entirely believable, mathematically verifiable nirvana just a few right-angle turns away from dear boring old reality: a vast, infinite, better-than-virtual ultra-existence with no Off-switch, to which species and civilizations had been hauling their sorry tired-with-it-all behinds off to since –the story went – the galaxy had been in metaphorical knee socks.”

This description of the Sublime probably represents the most detailed account of it available in the Real. Many species and individual Minds (i.e. highly-advanced AIs) have entered, very few have returned, to no avail for the furthering of Sublime-related knowledge and understanding. Even the mighty Culture has no clue whatsoever about the nature of that ultra-reality, except that it guarantees non-extinction and infinitely greater computational resources, effectively dwarfing in complexity the experience of the Real. It is an SF construct that directly mimics religious mysteries. Its rhetoric is basically the same, only pruned from the ludicrous and dressed in scientific argot. To some extent the Sublime is probably a statement that life’s mysteries are and will always be inexhaustible, even by the supersmart overseers of the galaxy. The decision to surrender to the unknown, to surrender the will to continue making sense out of a senseless world ­– that is tantamount to faith.

Banks restrains himself from passing judgment on this type of mindset directly. He does, however, juggle around the core of the implicit argument. His characters often engage one another in talks about the meaning of it all, about the individual’s will to existence and the chance of there being any point attached to it at all:

“No. Living either never has any point, or is always its own point”

~

“One should never mistake pattern… for meaning.”

~

“It is a mistaken question. Meaning is everywhere. There is always meaning. Or at least things show a disturbing tendency to have meaning ascribed to them when intelligent creatures are present. It’s just that there’s no final Meaning, with a capital M. Though the illusion that here might be is comforting for a certain class of mind.”

Some of those characters are huge starships, who, while talking to slow biologicals, can simulate entire societies and ponder the imponderable, in the temporal abyss between uttering two phonemes (which in itself is a problematic observation, as phonemes rarely are discretely separated from one another). Another character is a human who has lived many millennia, migrating from body to body, expressing himself and perceiving the universe in sensory modalities of his own choice. Still another is a hyper-intelligent drone living as a recluse in the dessert, fashioning aqueducts and water parks running with sand instead of liquid. Dedicating whole systems to polish each individual grain to a perfect sphere, so that flow is optimized. Talk about existentialism.

Understanding the fundamental ambiguousness and polyvalence of life and then dealing with it is perhaps preferable to the unconditional surrender to the unknown. This idea runs persistently through the novel, only suggested, never dogmatized. The Hydrogen Sonata itself is a central symbol of that line of thinking:

“Fans and detractors alike agreed that this was a remarkable achievement, and also that the work as a whole was something of an acquired taste.

The single high note at the start of the work was meant to signify a solitary proton, specifically a hydrogen nucleus, while the following wavering pseudo-chord was supposed to embody the concept of a sole electron’s probability cloud, so that together the first note and the first chord represented the element hydrogen.”

Life is messy, the universe is messy. It is also cold, uncaring, potentially random and awkward to live in, one’s taste for it is indeed acquired. That can be no excuse, however, not to endeavor to learn its ways and languages.

This conceptual undercurrent by no means attempts to abduct the narrative. On the contrary, it is never explicitly cast in relief, albeit Banks apparently did not try to camouflage it. The referential, biologically-timed, nitty-gritty story is in focus throughout and it is, in essence, a very decent space opera involving diplomacy, starship battles, quests on exotic worlds, la-di-da-di-da. The truth is, I did not care one jot for any of the characters in the book. And I think Banks wanted us not to care much. Those characters are well-written, even if not very well-detailed, they engage in sometimes brilliant dialogue, and the whole shenanigan of the Subliming and the paraphernalia that goes with it is top-notch SF-mongering. So to make the readers not care a whole lot about otherwise well-constructed characters and story constitutes the kind of seemingly pointless aerobatics only master writers can perform. Only seemingly though. It introduces a curious bifocal effect in the overall perception of the novel, inviting in a satirical outlook, loads of cognitive dissonance, deep-seated mistrust of the various kinds of eschatological rhetoric, a whole coterie of aesthetic imps to nibble at and continuously try to dismantle the stable fortresses of meaning. In some of the best moments of the novel Banks resembles a much darker Douglas Adams, only one whose humor is dampened by the graveness of the situation at hand.

Meta-aesthetic considerations aside, The Hydrogen Sonata also deals in the simple joys of SF fireworks. Starships that are their own docks, factory and city of billions, effectively capable of doubling the population of almost any system they enter into. Orbital constructs of immense scale, boasting the area of a thousand Earths, circling their suns along perfectly engineered trajectories. The destruction of militarized moons. Peeks into the boundless computational substrates of Culture Minds. A zeppelin carrying a never ending orgiastic Party along the tunnels of a Mega Structure girdling an entire planet. It is a nerdgasm fest that will keep any fan hooked. And Banks has the writing skill to translate those images into text that unpacks spectacularly into the reader’s mind:

“The long piers and bulbous pontoons of the giant, articulated raft flexed and creaked around them, like a giant arthritic hand laid across the surface of the ocean, forever trying to pat it down.”

I am still on the fence about the Culture Ships/Minds, to be honest. It is an amazing idea, one that has been developed much more richly in the previous books, I am sure. Some wondrous thoughts and hilarious verbal exchanges come from the Ship characters in the novel. Banks’ strategy to gloss over the thought processes of the Minds, however, still feels as a bit of cop out to me. On the one hand, the decision to adopt a selectively-omniscient narrative style makes sense – otherwise how could anybody make this setting work? Similarly, it is positively impossible to describe with fidelity the thought routines of a millennia-old, kilometers-long star traveler overdosed on computational power. Abstraction and simplification are inevitable. On the other hand, it seems to me Banks never tries to provide even the illusion of glimpsing under the hood of those vast Minds. In his attempt to optimize performance and channel his ideas to serve well-defined functionalities he has missed the chance of actually touching upon the Sublime, at least the Sublime that we simple biologicals sometimes can access fleetingly through art and other memetic prosthetics. I really hope I am proved wrong by some of the other Culture novels. I definitely feel Mr. Banks has what it takes to be that kind of writer who can rearrange your brain in blinding bright flashes of genius.

The Hydrogen Sonata is a fine novel, SF at its best, but missing a few essential ingredients that could make it great. Maybe it is missing some of them by design, which is something I still cannot wrap my head around in full. It is certainly very cleverly written and precisely aimed. I will be coming back to Banks and the Culture and my intuition tells me I am in for a spectacular ride. You too, if you like myself are yet to venture deep in that classic SF universe. To quote one of the Culture Ships: “Take great care, but smite promptly and thoroughly if/when situation calls.”

7.5/10

[Spad53 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I’ve now read Iain Banks whole Culture series, I must check so I haven’t missed any more, like I did with this one.
It was excellent of course, not the best in the series; I still think Consider Phlebas is the best, though probably only because it was the first. This one was a little complicated , and I had to go back and re-read, so it took a long time to read, but it was an enjoyable long time.

[Althea Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't wait for this one to come up on my wish list... I checked it out from the library. The first thing I noticed was that Mr. Banks has a new jacket-flap photo. Aaagh! He looks old! That means I'm old too!

I love all of the Culture novels, but some are better than others. This is one of the better ones.

The Gzilt culture have scheduled the time at which they, as a culture, will Sublime - leave the concern of this world behind for a higher plane of existence.

Before this happens, a young woman from Gzilt, Vyr Cossont, has made it her life-work to successfully play one of the most difficult pieces of music ever written - the Hydrogen Sonata. (Too bad that from an aesthetic perspective, it sounds godawful, and pretty much no one wants to listen to it.)

However, on a higher galactic level, events concerning the Gzilt are afoot. An elder race has a secret concerning the Gzilt's primary religion, and revealing that secret might interfere with their Subliming. Or not. Maybe it wouldn't make a difference at all. However, for some reason, someone cares enough about this mystery to blow up and murder a Culture Mind ship - which captures the attention of a bunch of nosy/aloof Minds, who choose to investigate.

The only lead they have is rumors of a man who is said to be the oldest human alive - and by coincidence, Vyr Cossont had a passing friendly acquaintance with him a few years back. She gets recruited to help track him down to try to find out what he knows....

All this, and a ton and a half more, get tied together in a complex, philosophical, grotesque, eerily beautiful, and oh yeah - funny and action-packed narrative.

[Elf M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, it took a week, but I finally finished Banks' new Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata. It was a better novel that Matter, Transitions, or Surface Detail, but Banks is turning into a one-trick pony here.

The Hydrogen Sonata (also known as T. C. Vilabiers 26th String-Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented, catalogue number MW 1211) is a fiendishly difficult piece of music to master, yet Lt. Cmdr. (reserve) Vyr Cossant is determined to master it. She's close, very close-- but in less than a month, her entire civilization is scheduled to be raptured, enfolded, sublimed-- uploaded whole into The Sublime, Banks' "universe next door" where the laws of physics are different-- where experience and possibility are infinite, where growth is intrinsic in existence, where decay is nearly impossible. In the Cultureverse mythology, individuals become discordant within the Sublime-- you must go as a large group, preferably a whole civilization, with a common understanding.

The Gzilt, the civ to which Vyr belongs, was an invitee to the Culture ten thousand years ago but they declined joining the Culture. They're now an equivalent technological level to the Culture, but unlike the Culture the Gzilt, as a civilization, is Done With This Place And Ready To Move On.

Nobody remembers quite why the Gzilt declined joining in the Culture's pan-humanism. Except, someone does. Someone who was there, ten millennia ago. Someone Vyr met once. It's the Last Great Mystery of the Gzilt-- why did they decide to go it alone as a civilization, choosing a planet-bound interstellar existence to the Culture's magnificent Ships and Ringworlds?

Finding Out The Reason Why becomes the centerpiece mystery of The Hydrogen Sonata.

As such, The Hydrogen Sonata manages, for the most part, to avoid many of the cliche's for which Banks is rapidly becoming known. There are many fewer lectures in this book: no rants about how Fear Of Hell Is Necessary To Keep The Masses In Line (Surface Detail), The Limited Liability Corporation Is An Inherently Corrupting Institution Whose Damage Is Magnified By Apocalyptic Religions Like Christianity (Transition), or Virtual Reality Is Not Merely A Distraction But A Vile Abandonment Of Everything That Makes Life Worth Living (Matter). At worst, we get a few throwaway conversations about how wanting to live "too long" is an act of cowardice that breeds further cowardice, about how The Universe needs death to keep the system fresh, and how the living are going to keep repeating their errors anyway until the end of time.

A lot of this book is told in email-- between those Cool Vast Intellects known as The Minds, the hypersentient ultradeep artificial intellects that inhabit The Cultures' starships and stations. The book is a bit like American Football-- fast-paced action punctuated by meetings. Unfortunately, The Minds' conversation looks more like a bickering group chat by semi-professionals than anything else.

There is Banks' usual clockwork plotting (complete with his classic few-pieces-missing). Innocents die, while the guilty, surprisingly, go free this time. That was disappointing. There's a bit of Deus Ex Mechanica, naturally, as Banks' more than once pulls Culture high-tech out of his posterior to justify moving his characters from frying pans into fires to solar flares. The Gzilt come across as more Terran than Cultureniks: more like us, more understandable to us. This lets the reader identify better with Vyr and her opposite, the completely banal, completely understandable, completely pathetic villain, the politician Banstegeyn.

What disappointed me most about The Hydrogen Sonata was the de-mythologization of The Sublime. Banks must have read Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder, because The Sublime comes across as "the other universe" in that book: a place where the core automata rules allow for indefinite, deliberate, willful expansion of Self and Civilization. By explaining it, Banks has killed much of the mystery.

The quest for The Reason Why is pure plot token: go here, acquire this bit of knowledge, which tells you to go there-- lather, rinse, repeat. Still, if you like Banks, there are scenes of his usual brilliance in here: he's still the master of description, of coming up with an Idea and then painting a gorgeous (or repulsive, depending on his mood) word painting of the setting, the people in it, and the circumstances that brought them there, so the plot token works pretty well anyway.

A better book, but far and away lacking the sense of wonder that comes from first encountering Banks. Maybe he decided all the hinting in The Player of Games wasn't worth the effort and not enough people noticed.

[Cheng Bogdani · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a space opera that dresses up faster-than-light (FTL) travel and nearly magical automations and AI with sciencey words like "folding the fourth dimension" and "collapsing wave fields". I'm not calling this hard science, but the author is trying hard to keep this setting pure scifi and not fantasy. I liked the world; a pan-galactic conglomeration of races that have achieved FTL who all have a relationship with The Culture. The Culture is a smattering of independent AIs based in interstellar ships[1] acting like minor gods who keep aware of what the other species are up to, and intervene as they deem necessary with the goal of minimizing wars and maximizing consciousness expansion.

The story picks up a few weeks before a humanoid culture called the Gzilt are planning to "sublimate" - to elevate themselves into a post-corporeal, post-humanist life in the umpteenth dimensions. Another culture sends a messenger with some information about the origins of the Gzilt - and is promptly destroyed by the Gzilt before it can share it broadly. The story involves a quest between the Culture ships that want to know what message was so important to risk war this close to sublimation, and the Gzilt forces that want to keep the information secret.

The omniscient POV shifts focus between several different key players in the story, who are chasing each other all over the galaxy looking for the ancient wizard humanoid who was Actually There and is the last source of first-person knowledge of The Thing. The blurb says it's not necessary to read the other books in this series to enjoy this book, but I'm going to say that I would have enjoyed this more if I had more background on the key players. I spent a good chunk of the first part of this book absorbing the language and trying to understand the key factions.

This is a fun quest, as questing stories go, and the different worlds and different personalities of the AIs are interesting and entertaining. But I never felt emotionally committed to any of the characters - they're interesting, but I wasn't invested in their arcs. Nor did I feel a sense of urgency, even with the countdown to sublimation ticking down every chapter. I believe this is due to two major factors:
1) I have no background in this series and I haven't seen these cultures and personalities evolve
2) The technology is so powerful that even the baseline humanoid civilians are nearly godlike compared to me, and the AI ships are thousands of orders of magnitude more capable than the humans.

This could easily be a fantasy story. You've got the Unprepared Heroine swept up by events, shuffled and shepherded by Older Wiser characters, gallivanting across the known world meeting all kinds of interesting recluses and hermits, trying to find a succession of artifacts to Do The Right Thing.

There's an attempt to elevate the book by with a way-too-obvious discussion of Free Will and Should All Information Always Be Free. I was pretty meh on that whole thread; the Gzilt were committed to sublimation no matter what may or may not have happened however many millenia ago and I. Just. Didn't. Care. If. Their. Plans. Got. Spoiled... Or not.

EDIT:
[1] I have been reliably informed that The Culture are humanoid biologicals that primarly live in massive orbital colonies, and the AI ships were built by the humanoids but have free agency

Bechdel test? YES
Mako Mori test? YES
Vito Russo test? N/A (the only sexual characters are ambiguously gendered and/or pan)
Latif test? N/A (all the humanoids are post-baseline and race isn't relevant)

Reading Level: advanced adult
Romance: No
Smut: No
Violence: Yes, automated combat with guns, bombs, missiles
TW: I can't recall any

Kindle only? NO

[Daniel Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Culture novels are my guilt-free SF pleasure. They feel like SF 301; that is to say, pretty much dense and inaccessible to SF neophytes, but a delight when you want to read all about super-intelligent starships and 7-dimensional spacetime and super-advanced military tech. And the best part is, Banks even throws in the occasional juvenile joke.

The Hydrogen Sonata follows this precise formula, which makes it an average Culture novel; that is to say, it's great. This entry in the series concerns itself with Subliming, one of the paths of societal evolution that advanced cultures can take when they reach near-godhood. It's filled with mind-boggling concepts, such as the end of civilization and a man that may or may not have lived ten thousand years. It even features some military action and fights involving Culture ships. Exciting!

Although overall The Hydrogen Sonata is a satisfying book for Culture fans, I felt the structure and plot were not the best in the series. The main mystery at the heart of the book isn't that intriguing, and when people start losing their lives over it, I was left to wonder if it was really worth it. The plot kind of meanders and chases its own tail for a while. Also, I felt it a bit strange that a race so military-minded and political as the Gzilt would be ready to Sublime. Previous books led me to believe that Subliming was a stage where a civilization was so wise and advanced that it transcended material concerns. The Gzilt just sound like basic, petty humans with guns big enough to point at the Culture.

But it's OK; there's Culture ships arguing with one another, and they have funny, interesting names. Seriously, Banks should write a stage play about the Culture, where it's just Culture ships, represented by people in silver turtlenecks, arguing with one another all the time. I'd buy a front-row ticket in a flash.

[Laurent · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Iain M. Banks, and while I really enjoyed the chance to revisit the Culture again, and it's a fun story, I just felt that by the end, there were a bunch of big, loose ends flopping around that he never got around to tying up. It's that whole "Chekhov's gun" thing -- Banks trots out several big plot threads over the course of the novel, but most of them don't really come to fruition by the time everything's over. (More detail below.)

The biggest one, for me, was the Banstegeyn / Chekwri plotline. We spend a good deal of time with them, and they certainly play a role in the plot along the way, but B's underlying motives for assassinating the President, betraying the Ronte, etc. were never really clear (to me, at least). The most likely -- but still unconfirmed -- explanation was that he had spent so much of his life obsessed with seizing power that he couldn't bear to have everyone Sublime first, and so he put a grand plan into motion to stop the whole process, and give himself the chance at power he craved.

I was willing to hold off on clearly understanding what made him tick, because I assumed that it would all be revealed by the end in some kind of storyline that brought him and Chekwri into more direct conflict with Vyr, etc. Instead, after his proxy Agansu (predictably) fails, Banstegeyn basically just shrugs and says "Meh...I guess I'll just Sublime." That was one of the rare moments in a Banks book where I really just kind of lost my suspension of disbelief, and felt "That makes no sense for him to do at all."

Not to nitpick, but as long as I'm trying to substantiate my point, here are some of the other plot points that just seemed to hang out there for me:
- The android, and especially the whole thing about believing that he was still in a simulation. Aside from some random comments, his delusional state never really mattered in the plot. Even as a character, he just kind of follows Vyr and Berdle, and then ends up at the bottom of an elevator shaft, never to appear (or matter) again.
- The Caconym / Zoologist plotline. There's this whole set-up with the interior world created, and the Zoologist's potential connection to the Sublime, etc...and then at the end, the Caconym goes to look for the Z, the Z's gone, and the C just goes "Meh...oh, well." and shuts it down.
- The whole plot line around Vyr's extra arms, and playing the Sonata, etc. It's a perfectly nice character detail, but the fact that she has the extra limbs, and finally plays the Sonata don't really matter.
- The Ronte-Liseiden conflict provides a couple of extra battle scenes, but again...they're all sidelined by the end of the book, with no real roles in the outcome.
- Finally, for a book that's got a bunch of Culture ships front-and-center, there's very little of the detailed battle scenarios that you see in the other books, where the ships' intricate targeting systems, ability to slip into different timescales, etc. all play a big, gripping part in the excitement. Here, the one battle you totally want to see takes place off-stage -- the Mistake Not... basically says something along the lines of "Now you're gonna get it", and then the chapter ends.


So, again, I totally enjoyed it, but it didn't really come together for me like some of Banks' better books do.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

The great and glorious Gzilt civilization is about to Sublime. To Transcend, to achieve Ascension, to cross the Singularity, to pass beyond and join the bleedin' choir invisible. It's scheduled for the end of the month. And so all the Gzilt have settled down to do exactly what you'd expect of a Culture-level civilization on such a momentous occasion: one last round of cocktail parties, hiking vacations, and orgies (as suits one's preferred level of debauchery), while receiving congratulatory messages and ambassadorial handshakes from various civilizational friends and neighbors. Including the Culture, of course.

One such message is a letter-in-a-bottle left by the Zihdren, themselves long Sublimed. The Gzilt warship that receives it promptly blows the bottle to smithereens. Thus begins a political incident.

Banks's trick in SF -- which he does very very well -- is to convey the heft of civilization at the galactic and millennial scale, its concerns and views, by making it all immediate and personal and vernacular. Why not? A Culture Mind can recall everything that happened on a planet in the past century like you recall what you ordered for dinner -- and so a bunch of Minds working out what to do with a planet will sound like you and your friends splitting the check. The tone fits the scale.

Since it's Banks, the tone is also snark-tastically funny; or (when appropriate, in a different civilizational point of view) pompous and absurd. He's got control of it, is what I mean.

Culture books have trouble with plot -- since there are usually several might-as-well-be omnipotent beings hovering around, ready to pull off whatever ex machina is required. I think Banks got that figured out several books ago. This one is plot-*shaped*, as a spy thriller, with starships flying hither and yon searching for clues or trying to blow them up before they're found. But this is superficial; it's just to keep the momentum up.

The book is... history, I guess. History at many levels: a human (Gzilt) and her life, a military power-play, a political intrigue, a Culture Mind working group. (Seriously, the whole book is worth it just for the Minds bitching at each other.) The bits of history fall together, collide, and then fall out with gaps and holes and blatantly unpulled threads. If you try to read it as a spy thriller, it will probably be an unsatisfying disaster. What is it? Oh, right: a character novel where the characters may be humans, cities, governments, or civilizations. Each a personality, in presentation if not in literal Mind.

(Yes, my model is a little askew for the Gzilt, who are Culture-equivalent but eschew building Minds for aesthetic reasons. Not entirely clear how they make that work, by the way -- doesn't it undermine the implicit rationale of the Culture? The book doesn't go into this.)

Anyway -- thriller or history or character portrayal, it works great as a Culture novel. I loved it. There are probably classical literary models that fit better, but I'll stick with that.

[Pearl · Rating 5 out of 5]

The final installment in “the ongoing history of Terrific Things The Culture And Its Brilliant Ships Had Got Up To Over The Years.” didn’t disappoint!

Quick bare bones : there’s this girl called Vyr Cossont just moseying on , getting on with life or the end of it, to be more accurate. Her civilization has collectively agreed to rapture sublime out of this existence into the greater (supposedly amazing) unknown, now that they feel they’ve achieved everything there is to achieve in the here. The countdown to the civilization’s subliming is at the 24 days left mark at the start of the book when unexpected events happen that threaten to hinder the great rapture sublimation. All Cossont wants to do is just keep playing or pretend to keep at practicing her 11 stringed instrument; the notoriously difficult, temperamental and tonally challenged Adungu Antagonistic Undecagonstring – or elevenstring, as it was commonly known….that and also avoid talking to her mum. Unfortunately for this sweet summer child, her whole world is about to get shook.

All of my favourite things about the series were ticked off:
•Humour (it was really on high in this one)
•Culture Mind Mischief
•Superb writing
•Engaging characters and plot

Having finished all the full length books in this series, i can safely say that “The Culture” series is one of my all-time favourites. I’ll definitely revisit it repeatedly whenever I need some good literary science fiction that’ll gut-punch me, make me laugh uproariously and just get my mind blown simultaneously.

[Stefan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has it really been 25 years since Consider Phlebas, the first novel in Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, came out? My goodness. Does this make anyone else feel old at all? Not to worry though: a new novel in this stunning series is always cause for celebration, and in this case doubly so, given that this book is the tenth in the series according to Orbit (including the short story collection The State of the Art, which contains some Culture-related pieces) and marks a quarter century of Culture novels.

Fans have probably already ordered or pre-ordered The Hydrogen Sonata, and for them this review will just be preaching to the choir. Newcomers may be busy trying to decide if this is the time to jump in—and then get to navigate the various theories on What’s the Best Place to Start, given that the internal chronology of the series doesn’t match the publication order and the only aspect most of these novels overtly share is their setting: the benevolent post-scarcity interstellar empire known as the Culture, in which the human inhabitants live in utopian, semi-anarchic bliss managed by immensely powerful artificial intelligences known as Minds. (Number one on my personal list of fictional universes I’d like to live in, by the way.)

Read the entire review on my site Far Beyond Reality!

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another very solid Culture story, and the last from the dearly departed Iain Banks. What sets this series apart from other "space opera" series is the incredible character development, both human and AI (drones, minds/ships, etc), the witty dialogue and interactions (not to mention ship names), and the elegant, beautiful prose. Rather than broad, far reaching plots, this, like other stories in the series I've read, focuses primarily on one specific protagonist caught up in a particular crisis or conflict.

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a perceptive review of The Hydrogen Sonata at The Guardian website that more or less sums up what makes the Culture novels so interesting. Follow the link for a review of the Culture and a summary of the book in question so I can get on to things about the book that particularly struck me (it’s short).

That done, expect spoilers:

It’s true that (IMO) Banks still hasn’t regained the heights attained in Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons or – especially – The Player Of Games in this latest entry but he comes closer than his previous effort, Surface Detail, so let me get the recommendation out of the way – read the book.

Vyr Cossont is the most interesting character he’s written about in quite a while and I only wish he would have spent more time developing her or involving her more directly in the plot than he does. Scoaliera Tefwe is another character (another “biological”) who deserved more time than she gets.

I was struck by the utter prosaicness of Sublimation – the process by which a sufficiently advanced civilization removes itself from the Real and ascends to dimensions beyond space and time. It’s not a question of spiritual maturity or moral purity but of technical know-how. Any sufficiently advanced civilization can Sublime. The Culture could do it at any time (and many of its constituent societies and Minds have – e.g., the Zoologist). The Gzilt are not a race of Buddhas; they’re still riven by the weaknesses, foibles and sheer stupidities of any matter-based sentience. It becomes a question of “Have we accomplished all that we can in the Real?” or – as I think is the case in a man like Banstegeyn – “How can I escape from the pain of living and the consequences of all my mistakes?” (But there’s a suggestion that the Sublime may not be so paradisiacal as promised, though its flaws are unique and untranslatable to minds (Minds) still mired in the Real.)

Banks also asks “What price truth?” Thousands die, a Mind is destroyed, and all for a secret whose nature all of the principals are 99.9% sure of to begin with (the great “secret” of the Zihdren-Remnanter is pretty obvious even to those not blessed with Minds). There’s a meeting of Minds at the end of the book where the final moral boils down to the LSV You Call This Clean?’s declaration, “Yes, you should always tell the truth, unless you find yourselves in a situation where it would be utter moral folly to do so.” Real spoiler: In the end, they decide not to tell the Gzilt what the Zihdren-Remnanter ambassador’s message was because it really would make no difference at all in their plans.

Another major theme of the novel that I’m not quite sure how to integrate is “sound.” The title refers to a piece of music that can only be played on an Antagonistic Undecagonstring – an elevenstring in popular parlance (even though it has more than 11 strings). Vyr Cossont has chosen as her life quest before Subliming to play “The Hydrogen Sonata” in its entirety; she’s gone so far as to acquire a second pair of arms (as the instrument is best played with four). Ngaroe QiRia, the oldest biological citizen of the Culture and the one man who may remember what the Zihdren’s secret is, is fascinated by sound. At one point, he spent a lifetime in the body of a whale-like species, and he currently lives on a world where a previous civilization carved an entire mountain range to make music (of a sort) and spends his days sitting in a hearkenry just … listening. And – as you might expect – metaphors of and references to sound abound (e.g., the Mistake Not’s… displacement into the Girdlecity on Xown).

As usual Banks has fun with the names of the Minds but my two favorites are the ROU Refreshingly Unconcerned With The Vulgar Exigencies of Veracity and the Ue Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath.

And there’s something “cool” in the fact that the System-class GSV Empiricist carries 13 billion sentient life forms – half the population of the Gzilt’s home system.

[Susanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this one two days before the devastating news of Iain's cancer hit. I've not been able to review it because I didn't have enough emotional distance in order to talk about the book, and not about what Banks-the-author means to me. But it's time. The review pile isn't getting any smaller. Thus, to work:

The Hydrogen Sonata is Banks at his finest. It has Culture minds high on galactic politics and their own superiority over biological intelligence, a little bit of violence, a little bit of gross, and a large dose of snark and sarcasm, all mixed into the enormous social and psychological troubles of an equiv-level civilisation about to Sublime.

I've read a criticism somewhere that Banks doesn't introduce anything truly new and gobsmacking here, but I will say unto those heathens, ANTAGONISTIC UNDECAGONSTRING. No, there's no earth-shatteringly new concepts here, but this is a Culture novel, exploring the political difficulties you encounter when you ask an entire civilisation to leave all that's wordly behind.

I enjoyed it hugely. HUGELY. I love the Culture, so if it's 'more of the same', then I'll have a LOT more of the same, please. In fact, some of my favourite moments were the hat-tips to Excession, probably my all-time favourite science fiction novel. The first mention of the Interesting Times Gang had me punch the air with joy, and I loved that the current group of involved minds played out their cloak-and-dagger roles in very much the same style. What's not to like? In short, while the humanoid protagonist left me pretty cold, I loved the AIs, as always.

My favourite, favourite thing about the entire book are the chapters told from the Ronte's perspective. Banks displays an incredible knack for POV-writing here, where the POV is a hive mind encompassing an entire fleet of ships. I laughed like a fool every time "a ship dance was required." May I quote?

On entering a new environment, a ship dance was required. [...] Accordingly, the fleet drew to a local stop halfway between the stellar systems of Barlbanim and Taushe and the ship dance "Glowing Nymphs Dance Ascending And Descending In The Light Of An Alien Sun" was performed.

COME ON! This is awesome.

I liked this an awful lot. 4 stars because I really, really could've done without the sexy times - superfluous at best, gratuitous at worst. Seriously, what did Banstegeyn's sexual adventures add to the story? Nothing. His escapades with Orpe were introduced as a necessary set-up for the assassination of the president but ended up not being necessary at all. And, unless I missed something fundamental, everything would've gone pretty much to plan even without that assassination.

I'll finish with my favourite quote:

There was something comforting about having a vast hydrogen furnace burning millions of tons of material a second at the centre of a solar system. It was cheery. - The Mistake Not..., contemplating stars

What? No, I'm not crying. Something in my eye, is all.

[Aram · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is clear that Iain Banks is one of our generations' greatest science fiction authors, a peer of Asimov for the new century, and one of last keepers of Asimov-style SF (that being both high concept and soft science). It's too bad that (failing an unlikely pop adaptation into another format like film) the soft-ish nature of the SF (mostly abandoned for hard SF, like Karl Schroeder or outright Sci-Fi Fantasy of the Star Wars variety), the extensive length of most works and the regular slower-than-average start to his narrative arcs will keep his work from gaining the mainstream acceptance it deserves.

Like all of Banks's books (especially from the Culture series) Hydrogen Sonata starts off with a bang of an inciting incident, moves sort of lazily for a while with a great deal of exposition and an initial sluggish rising action while all the plans are hatched and pieces moved into place. About 20% of the way through the novel his rising action finally catches and begins immense acceleration. Past that point it takes off at great speed, with good humor, great plotting and significant pull. Once caught in the gravity well of the primary conflict, things move excitingly apace and the book becomes difficult to put down.

That first 20% is, like most of Banks's works, the greatest obstacle, especially to a new reader because it cannot easily be skipped (like say, The Lord of the Rings' ridiculous initial world-building exercise). The exposition is necessary to entry in Banks's increasingly complex universe of the Culture, especially because it allows the reader to move through the subsequent action of the narrative without ever having to slow down. Still, it's a shame because the average reader will never make it through this portion of the novel, putting it down never to pick it up again.

Don't be that reader. The Hydrogen Sonata is yet another excellent entry in the series, perhaps in the top 3 in terms of quality, and well worth the wait.

Like all Culture novels, reading previous entries is not required but will greatly enhance the experience.

[Ryandake · Rating 5 out of 5]

there's something about a Culture novel that makes a non-geek really want to become a geek: to comb over every detail of every Culture novel, looking for connections and cross-references and overlapping treatments of themes, and have a list of Culture ship names tattooed up one's legs. one wants to go to Culture conventions dressed up as a character from the novels, and pretend very hard that one is a Culture citizen.

this novel will only add to that ever-growing desire.

so, what happens when it becomes necessary to hunt down and talk to the Culture's oldest citizen? and why on the verge of a non-Culture civilization's immanent Subliming? and really, what does it mean for a whole civilization to Sublime, anyway?

and so the story runs through the usual (and how can one say usual?) complex and multi-layered plot, with the ideas coming as thick and fast as knife missiles, and the characters as multitudinous and variously weird, and the Ships as over-the-top awesome as always.

and then one gets to the end, which is unlike any other Culture (or any other, but one) novel i can remember reading.

the end, i think, is worthy of a very long, hard think.