The Hydrogen Sonata (Culture, #10) in Beyond Reality

Mar 13, 2013 Matt rated it liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

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 th 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.
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Sep 18, 2012 Stefan rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction, advance-reading-copy, far-beyond-reality-review

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 nov ...more

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Sep 16, 2024 Kathi rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 52-book-club-2024-challenge, science-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Aug 17, 2012 Edward Butler rated it it was amazing

This had everything in it that I like in a Culture novel, and was a distinct improvement over Surface Detail, which I couldn't finish. It fell just a little bit short for me, though, inasmuch as the Gzilt were all dull and irritating, except for the protagonist, who is dull and lacking in curiosity, though not unsympathetic. Hence I found myself impatient to get back to the ships, their chatter and peculiarities.

This was the first Culture book that for me really gets the message across that as This had everything in it that I like in a Culture novel, and was a distinct improvement over Surface Detail, which I couldn't finish. It fell just a little bit short for me, though, inasmuch as the Gzilt were all dull and irritating, except for the protagonist, who is dull and lacking in curiosity, though not unsympathetic. Hence I found myself impatient to get back to the ships, their chatter and peculiarities.

This was the first Culture book that for me really gets the message across that as time goes on, the Culture just is largely of, by and for these hyperadvanced AIs. We never meet any biological crew of a Culture ship in this book, which speaks volumes, in a book which is centrally concerned with the decision by a non-Culture humanoid civilization to "Sublime". This is particularly interesting insofar as a ship's eccentricity is at one point explained by others as being due to having too small a crew component, while another's conservatism is due to its very large population of biologicals. So the relationship of sentience to a substrate is clearly the main problematic. Underscoring this is the presence of a humanoid who has chosen, eccentrically, to maintain himself in the same substrate for an inordinate length of time, and who thus embodies a control, as it were, in this grand experiment.

None of the themes raised in the book--and there are a host of them--reach even a provisional conclusion, however, or even feel as though they've actually been considered, rather than just raised, and this is why I can't rate the book higher, though I enjoyed it. It's not that I'm expecting closure, but it seemed as though the book could having been making better use of some of its length. There are too many interesting things that come up and are let to pass by while tedious matters are taking center stage. And it's a cop-out to say that the pointlessness of various issues is the point; in fact, one of the characters even says something very much to this effect. So a bit of frustration, but I'm keen to read more of these books. ...more

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Oct 03, 2012 Richard rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

Well, it took me over three years from greedily collecting my preordered first edition to eventually catching up on all the preceding Culture novels and finally reading The Hydrogen Sonata. In the mean time Iain M. Banks sadly passed away; all too soon for those of us who loved his work. So it was with the concrete knowledge there would never be another original Culture novel and this would be the last time I would newly experience Iain's wonderful SF writing, that I slowly read and savoured thi ...more

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