We’ve now had 25 years of Iain M. Banks’ Culture and The Hydrogen Sonata is the ninth novel to be set in this universe. There is much here that is familiar – Bank’s literary language sets out a widescreen Baroque space opera with gobsmacking Big Dumb Objects peopled with aliens both relatable and oblique, clever drones, even cleverer Minds and ordinary(ish) humans. We have a crises that multiple protagonists react to, with some humans being manipulated by their artificial superiors. However things pan out in an interesting and unexpected way, especially when it comes to the ending. But more of that later.
Banks has touched on subliming before but here it is the centre of the novel. Subliming is one of the options for when a spacefaring civilisation, as a whole, wants to retire. By burrowing down into the extra hidden dimensions, that quantum string theory suggests are tightly wrapped around our more familiar four, they can enter into what is basically heaven.
The Gzilt are in their final days of preparation for the event. They were once involved in the founding of The Culture but stepped back from actually joining it at the last minute and the Culture themselves are watching on now.
Vyr Cossont is spending the time left to her trying to make a flawless rendition of The Hydrogen Sonata (or to give the full title T.C. Vilabier’s 26th String-Specific Sonata for an Instrument Yet To Be Invented) – a fiendishly complicated (if apparently not exactly tuneful) piece of music. She’s even got two extra arms in order to play it on the Antagonistic Undecagonstring (aka elevenstring) – that basically seems to be two oversized cellos (plus a few extra bits) melded together. However before she can perfect the piece she is snatched away from her music practise and sent on a mission to find the oldest person in the Culture when events look like preventing the Gzilt Sublimation.
There’s a couple of things here that seem to be nods to Douglas Adams – there’s massive flying party that had been running for year and a plot point that’ll redact because it’s too spoilerish. In fact that’s plenty of the free-wheeling humour that’s common to both Adams and Banks – such as the Hydrogen Sonata and its playing as I’ve indicated above, plus in the reactions of an android who thinks the real world is just a simulation and the personality of Vyr’s effervescent artificial ‘scarf’ familiar, and a running joke involving an old punk band jacket. Banks also gives us usual nasty bits (a redacted bit of body horror), sexy/ pervy bits (there’s a man with multiple penises so as to better enjoy the orgies of the endless party) and a nice bit of literally allusion (a Mind that compares its fascination with close orbiting stars with a human warming itself by an open fire.) And, unless I’m seeing things that are not there, there is a very clever in-joke involving multi-dimensionality and Google Maps.
So the ending. Lets just say it builds up what is looking like a great crescendo but then sidesteps into something much more diminutive. It’s actually a clever twist on the familiar tropes of space opera, and the idea of the Hero, that in a way refers back to the book that started The Culture off all those years ago, Consider Phlebas.
Anyway Bravo! Encore! Here’s to another twenty-five years!
