There’s something about Look to Windward that feels like dusk. The hundred-million-year perspective of the behemothaurs does not only tell us, heart-achingly, that the Culture won’t be along forever; it also brings into relief, by virtue of its estranged historicizing, all the farewells we have had to bid throughout the tale. Banks’ narrative voice carries quietude within itself, an exhausted peace with the terrors of loss and fracture that every major character has had to negotiate lest they lose the will to live, and those who haven’t carried out such negotiations are gone. Ziller’s symphony climaxes at the moment the second star’s light flares in Masaq’s sky, and then silence descends over the living, the dead, and the memory of what came before. And it almost feels like the Culture will soon be part of that expiring light.
Some fans may in fact have wondered, after turning Look to Windward’s last page, what the future would hold for the Culture, and they would have had some justification for such wondering. In the 1998 SFX interview conducted on the occasion of Inversions’ publication, when asked what was next as far as the Culture was concerned, Banks had replied: “Oh, not very much. I think there might be one more novel and that’ll be it. In theory, you could write about it forever, but you’d end up going over the same ground, I think. I don’t know. You never know” (Brown 1998, 56). That one more novel was now done, and it had ended in elegy.
Indeed, throughout the eight years Matter (2008) took to appear, it seemed that there might not be any more Culture stories. During this time, Banks’ deteriorating domestic life conspired to slow down his literary production: he wrote two non-genre novels (2002’s Dead Air and 2007’s The Steep Approach to Garbadale), one non–Culture space opera (The Algebraist; 2004), and one non-fiction book (Raw Spirit; 2003); he cut up his passport and sent it to 10 Downing Street; he publicly advocated Blair’s impeachment for his role in the Second Gulf War; and then he and Annie announced in 2007 that their marriage had ended. “It was quite traumatic,” he told The Independent’s Liz Hoggard in February of that year. “For the first time I had to ask for an extension. It was like being a student again … obviously things weren’t going right in my marriage. I didn’t feel I was under strain, but clearly I must have been” (n.p.).
However, by the time of his Independent interview, Banks was on the mend. He “casually mention[ed] a new girlfriend” to Hoggard and described her as “an elderly male novelist’s wish fulfillment”; this new girlfriend, the founder of the Dead by Dawn film festival Adele Hartley, would remain with him for the rest of his life. Also, The Steep Approach to Garbadale “is being hailed as his best book in years” (Hoggard 2007, n.p.), and Matter’s publication in February of 2008 returned Banks to his train set, as he’d described the Culture stories in 1996 (Branscombe 1996b, 25; see also Jeffries 2007, n.p.). Things were looking up.
In his review of Look to Windward for SF Site, Nick Gevers advanced the opinion that the novel could be seen as “the third book in a trilogy on the theme of perspective”:
Excession (1996) is the view from above: Banks affords the reader some comprehension (insofar as that is possible) of how the Culture seems to those elevated far above it … Inversions (1998) is the view from below: when two human agents of the Culture find themselves functioning incognito as counsellors to the rulers of a medieval-level planet, their struggles to apply Cultural ethics are highly revealing, even though the primitive narrators of their careers have little notion of what they truly represent. And now, in Look To Windward—the direct, horizontal view—Banks anatomizes the Culture from the purview of its equals [2000, n.p.].
It’s unlikely that Gevers meant the Chelgrians as equals, but the Homomda and the behemothaurs certainly are. If the point holds, then we have the chance to look at the whole Culture series under a new light: a three-stage process of progressive refinement parsed by two long periods of reassessment. The first stage involves the Culture’s creation and setting up, and it encompasses the period between 1974 and 1990; the books that comprise this first stage are those Banks wrote in the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s and then published after revising them: Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, The State of the Art, and Use of Weapons, all of which appeared within a period of three years.1
After Weapons saw publication, Banks stopped writing Culture stories for six years, during which he composed many non-genre novels and two non–Culture space operas—plus “A Few Notes.” Once he was ready to push the Culture universe beyond its long-gestated early steps, he plunged into a bout of creativity that saw the appearance of three Culture stories within four years. If we follow Gevers’ reading, we can say that these three novels are part of an overarching narrative strategy aimed at describing the Culture’s ethos—and the practice of this ethos—from three different power-related viewpoints: Excession is the glimpse from greater power, Inversions from lesser power, and Look to Windward from equal power.
Then came another hiatus, this time eight years long, during which Banks went to work on the problem he’d set for himself in that SFX interview—how to continue telling original Culture stories. The developments in his private life probably played a relevant role in his creative process, although it’s difficult to say in what way and to what extent (aside from slowing down his writing), but in any case, the hiatus ended with another period of intense literary production: another three Culture novels—Matter, Surface Detail (2010), and The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)—in another four years.
Had Banks not died so early, what more would we have seen him do with his train set? In the interview he gave Kirsty Wark of the BBC a couple of weeks before dying, Banks said that he’d “try and get the plot for the next Culture novel together so that, just in case there is some sort of miracle cure or whatever, I don’t get to the end here going ‘Aha, beat you cancer […] oh, God, I don’t have a book today!’”2 Would that have been the fourth and last in this iteration of Culture stories (so, 4-3-3-4), or would Banks have broken the pattern and just kept on writing them? Would this seemingly sequential progression of bouts of writing and pauses have become something to remark on when, at the ripe age of 85 in the year 2039, Banks published his new Culture novel—the third in his latest trilogy after a hiatus of, say, another six years—before returning to a holding pattern?
We’ll never know for certain, and Banks himself wasn’t one hundred percent clear on the matter when he commented on these long pauses. In 1994, he’d told Sally Ann Melia of Science Fiction Chronicle that his next SF story after that year’s Feersum Endjinn would be a Culture novel, but he’d been uncertain as to the reasons why; “I keep telling myself this is because I miss the Culture,” he’d said, “but possibly I’m kidding myself and really it’s because people keep coming up at signing sessions and asking when the next Culture book is coming” (42). But two years later, when SFX’s Mary Branscombe interviewed him on the occasion of Excession’s publication, he told her: “I always enjoy writing Culture novels. I feel at home…. That’s why I deliberately took two books away from the Culture [Against a Dark Background and Feersum Endjinn] to reassure myself that I wasn’t so besotted with it that I couldn’t write science fiction elsewhere” (1996b, 25). And when in 2012, fourteen years after musing that the Culture novel after Inversions might well be the last, Banks did another interview with SFX, he repeated that line of reasoning:
I’d like to pretend this is all part of some grand architectural plan, but it isn’t. After the first few Culture novels I just wanted to pull away a bit and write some SF that wasn’t about the Culture [The Algebraist], mostly to prevent that one-trick-pony impression, but I kept on having more ideas about the Culture and was always going to go back to it [Wright 2012, n.p.].
It’s not particularly surprising that Banks should have issued somewhat self-contradictory statements at different points in his career—such shifts were likely to be a normal part of his process—and there’s no doubt that he always meant what he said when he said it (and there was that “You never know” at the end of the quote from the 1998 SFX interview). More importantly, he recognized the reoccurrence of those Culture-free periods as something that was in some way part of his creative process, so it’s fair to say that he was probably aware of a certain rhythm to his Culture-related production, even if he may not have been purposefully thinking about it.
If the common characteristic of the first four novels was inception and early development while the common characteristic of the next three was, in Gevers’ term, perspective, what’s the common denominator now? What do Matter, Surface Detail, and The Hydrogen Sonata share?
Speaking about Matter, Banks said:
I wanted to put the Culture more in context. There have always been hints that it’s not the only sophisticated society in the galaxy; I’ve made it very clear from Consider Phlebas onwards there are lots of other societies out there. But with Matter I decided to make it much more clear about all these levels of civilisation, to demonstrate the Culture has peers. Beyond that there are also the Elders, the older civilisations—I first mentioned them in Consider Phlebas too so it’s not like I just brought them all in…. The indications were there all along. But with Matter I definitely wanted to make it much more clear about where the Culture stood, that it’s not omnipotent [Golder 2010, n.p.].
In fact, Matter’s added context was rich enough that Banks felt the need to include an appendix at the end of the book featuring a general glossary, a list of species and characters, ship names for every civilization, a roll call of Culture names, a key to time intervals, and a list of the inhabitants of the Shellworld Sursamen’s sixteen levels (567–586). This list is of considerable use.
Detail and Sonata further expand the Culture’s context, introducing more species, more civilizations, and a few quiet but important changes to Contact and SC. The overall effect of this shared enlargement consists in making this triad of books noisier, busier, perhaps less lonely, and more engaged in cultural/civilizational negotiations of all kinds (including the occasional high-energy scrap). The focus is far less on the Culture as the proactive Mary Worth of the earlier stories and much more on it as a participant in a complex web of largely peaceful relationships whose import extends across vaster volumes of space and greater numbers of sentients than before. In fact, each of the three novels presents a developing situation that, at the beginning, is neither of the Culture’s making nor the Culture’s problem. As Banks had pointed out in 1998, there was only so much he could have said about the Culture’s good works for the less fortunate before the stories started repeating themselves, and this shift of focus introduces new dynamics into the dramatic setup of the series: the self-assessing, self-correcting processes of the critical utopia are still at work in Matter, Surface Detail, and The Hydrogen Sonata, but the work they perform is less arduous because the Culture’s status as a utopia and its place in galactic affairs is a settled issue, both within and without the civilization itself. The Culture is now something of an elder statesperson within the galactic community.
We begin with Matter. Sursamen is a Shellworld, “an 800-million-year-old construct consisting of concentric layers, built for unknown purposes by a long-vanished race and retrofitted for habitation by successive wave of squatter species” (Letson 2008, 23). This long-vanished race, the Involucra, disappeared about a million years after building Sursamen and the other four thousand or so Shellworlds like it. Nobody knows where they went, why they built those artifacts in the first place, or why the remnants of a species called the Xinthian Tensile Aeronathaurs (similar to Look to Windward’s behemothaurs) have decided to make the Shellworlds their home—one Xinthian per Shellworld, and always at the artificial planet’s Machine Core. Not all Shellworlds have a Xinthian, but many among the squatter inhabitants of those that do worship their Xinthian as the “WorldGod” (100). Such is the case of Sursamen’s human populations, who reside on the Shellworld’s eighth and ninth levels (62–71). In addition, nobody knows the reasons why another vanished species, the Iln, spent millions of years finding and destroying as many Shellworlds as possible before disappearing, with the result that, at Matter’s opening, little more than twelve hundred remain (63).3
The main body of the novel starts inside Sursamen’s eighth level. Prince Ferbin, the gormless, Bertie-Woosterish heir to the throne of the Sarl, the humanoid population that lives on the eighth, witnesses the murder of his father, King Hausk, on the part of the King’s trusted second in command, Mertis Tyl Loesp. The Sarl have been at war with the Deldeyn, the humanoids occupying the Shellworld’s ninth level, since Elime, Hausk’s eldest son and original heir, had died defending a Sarl outpost on the ninth level from a Deldeyn punitive attack (240). But Hausk, otherwise a proper mensch King with all the characteristics of the type, was wise and not particularly interested in revenge—his plan was to defeat the Deldeyn and rule over them, yes, but not as a tyrant. He had therefore taken a dim view of after-battle reprisals and post-hostilities purges, reasoning that treating the Deldeyn as an honorable foe would prevent resentment among the civilian population once the war was over. Tyl Loesp, for the moment acting as regent, is not that kind of man, though; he rules with fire and steel, and under his guidance the war turns much bloodier.
Declared dead, hunted by Tyl Loesp’s assassins, and accompanied only by his pragmatically sharp-witted servant Choubris Holse, Ferbin has no other choice but to ascend all the way through Sursamen and to the surface. He seeks the help of anyone who will give it, and he trusts that at least one of the overseer civilizations presiding over the Shellworld’s safety will oblige. In the specific, however, his best hopes reside with two people: Xide Hyrlis, a man working for Special Circumstances who, during his stay on Sursamen, had substantially contributed to increase the power of the Sarl through technology trading—thanks to his suggestions, the eighth is now at the early industrial stage from a musket-and-bayonet state of the art (190–195)—and Djan Seriy, his sister who, many years before, had gone away to become a Culture citizen first and an SC agent later (72, 92–93).
Djan Seriy, in the meantime, has heard of her father’s death, so she decides to take a break from her work with Special Circumstances and return to Sursamen to pay her respects. She doesn’t know of the exact dynamics involved in Hausk’s passing, however, and believes that Ferbin is dead as well (84–88, 94–97). Through their travels across the length and breadth of Matter, the two siblings describe the overall trajectory of the plot, which is shaped, as John Clute observed, like a pincer (358). They won’t meet until the novel is two-thirds over, but their progress encompasses the very heart of the book—which, perhaps putting it in too glib a fashion, is this: the matter of Matter is that matter matters, and doesn’t.
This last sentence requires some explaining. Irrespective of technological/industrial advancement, social and ethical state of the art, and sheer political throw-weight, every civilization inside Sursamen is aware of the multiple layers of agency both inside and outside the Shellworld. Sursamen is under the direct supervision of two relatively low-level species, the Oct and the Aultridia. They, in turn, report directly to the Nariscene, an insectoid species a couple of rungs further up in civilizational advancement, and the Nariscene report to the Morthanveld, a High-Level Involved—i.e., the equivalent of the Culture and therefore one of the major players on the galactic scene. Originally an aquatic species, the Morthanveld are the senior civilization in overall charge of affairs on Sursamen. The Culture, for its part, has no current jurisdiction on the Shellworld, and its delicate (if generally friendly) snarl of political relations with the Morthanveld makes the notion of a fully-fledged SC agent traveling through the latter’s space a sensitive matter (86–87, 89–90, 173–177, 569–571).
This pecking order, designed to make sure that everyone plays nice and nobody suddenly advances a low- or zero-level neighbor by, say, giving them hyperspace capabilities, high-performance AIs, or thermonukes, works in both directions along the civilizational ladder, so that a complex protocol of intervention/non-intervention laws applies to everything happening inside Sursamen. This protocol gets in Ferbin’s way at every stage of his search for help: throughout the novel, the Oct first, the Nariscene next, and the Morthanveld last tell him that they cannot interfere directly in the affairs of other civilizations inside Sursamen—just one exception, however well-intended and morally justified, would open the door to other, substantially less healthy interventions (270–277). Frustrated at his interlocutors and apprehensive for the fate of his younger brother Oramen, whom Tyl Loesp has no intention of allowing to reach maturity and therefore the throne, Ferbin fumes as he and Holse are transferred, kindly but firmly, from one civilization to the next like the mildly warm potato they are. Belonging as he does to a society still clinging to the belief that there is a God in the world (literally, in the case of Sursamen’s Xinthian), and therefore a divinely inspired ethical framework generating moral absolutes like a tree grows branches, Ferbin constantly argues the righteousness of his cause in the following terms:
I would have thought that the brutal and disgraceful murder of an honourable man … would seize at the heart of any creature, no matter how many layers and levels distant from such humble beings as ourselves they might be. We are all united, I would hope, in our love of justice and the desire to see evil punished and good rewarded [273].
But when Ferbin talks about justice, evil, and good, he is automatically utilizing the Sarl-specific meaning of these words, and that is the same meaning that has created the kind of top-down society where one has servants and women are second-class citizens because there is a God-given order to the world and it’s not the fault of God’s subjects that this is how things are. Holse, on the other hand, plays Jeeves to Ferbin’s Wooster and does most of the sharp thinking and the appropriate talking, including the all-important discussion he has with his lord concerning what Ferbin sees as the self-evident duty Holse has to follow him wherever he goes. Holse rightly points out that his duty extends only so far as the geographical limits of the eighth and ninth levels, beyond which the laws of other societies apply over which the Sarl have no agency (99–100). Holse reasons this way because he has understood much more quickly than Ferbin that every place and every volume of space is a shellworld; the species inside Sursamen have received the admittedly dubious favor of being able to actually see the partitions, but that’s the only difference. Outside, in the galaxy at large, the same classes of laws of intervention/non-intervention apply to everything that happens, which is why Ferbin’s requests fall on sympathetic but not very proactive ears. In the grand scheme of things, he and the Sarl don’t Matter much.
The Prince is particularly frustrated at the Morthanveld’s inability to assist, which he once again reads as unwillingness. Throughout the long process of appeal for help, rejection of the appeal, and transfer to a higher authority that would perhaps be able to do something for him, Ferbin had kept the hope alive that the progressively greater power of his interlocutors would at some point translate into an embrace of his viewpoint as the only valid one. But then he reaches the top and finds that Director General Shoum, the highest Morthanveld authority in-system, is no more forthcoming than the Oct or the Nariscene have been, and his bitterness gets the better of him. “Justice is justice, ma’am. Foulness and treachery remain what they are,” he tells the Director General before pointing out that, while effects of a commoner’s death involve only those in his immediate vicinity who depend on him,4 “When a king is murdered and the whole direction of a country’s fate is diverted from its rightful course, it is another thing entirely” (274). It is Ferbin’s own establishment of a pecking order that voids the very argument he is foregrounding: if a man matters more than a woman and a king matters more than a commoner, then the interests of every civilization more powerful than the Sarl—that is, every other civilization in the novel except the Deldeyn—matter more than the king and his people. Director General Shoum does try to explain this situation to the Prince, but unlike his father (116–120), Ferbin does not understand that greater power, when inscribed in the web of relationships that applies in the galactic community outside of Sursamen, often translates into the inability to act, not into a license for doing whatever one wants.
It is the meeting with Xide Hyrlis that drives home to Ferbin and Holse the crux of the problem. Hyrlis, whom they have been able to find through the only favor Director General Shoum could do them, receives the news of Hausk’s death with altogether too little outrage for Ferbin’s taste and quickly reveals himself as yet another party unwilling to return to the eighth with Ferbin and exact revenge. When the Prince reiterates his argument in favor of the primacy of his WorldGod-given viewpoint, this is what the other man replies:
If we assume that … history, with all its torturings, massacres and genocides, is true—then, if it is all somehow under he control of somebody or some thing, must not those running that simulation be monsters? … What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? … God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale … only reality—produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw—can be so unthinkingly cruel … we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility, no appeal to a higher power that might be said to have artificially constrained or directed us [340].
Hyrlis’ statement of moral responsibility is the interface through which the major characters in Matter receive meaning, agency, and the readers’ empathy, which is predicated on what they do with that moral responsibility. The novel’s third-person narrative voice scrutinizes every main figure in the plot, and each has a take on the notion of being one’s own moral agent that identifies him/her as either a negative or a positive figure in the story’s dramatic balance.5
Djan Seriy, for starters: her role as privileged visitor to the Culture’s critical utopia makes her at once the most physically powerful and the wisest among the novel’s flesh sentients. Matter, in fact, opens with a prologue in which she, along with her drone companion Turminder Xuss, is doing SC’s angel-work on a planet hosting a medieval-stage humanoid species that lives in circumstances not dissimilar from the one in Inversions (1–8); this prologue does not offer any obvious hints as to Djan Seriy’s origin, and her behavior establishes the entirely correct impression that she is a quintessentially Culture personality. Indeed, her exchanges with Xuss indicate a relationship reminiscent of that between Diziet Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw, albeit fraught with considerably less asperity.6 When we get to find out where Djan Seriy comes from and how she came to be an SC agent, we also receive a history of her progress as a moral entity through her gradual introduction to the Culture across a period of several years: the physical amendments, the Culture shock of finding herself within a world of absolute plenty and no suffering whatsoever, the perspective on gender relations that comes with becoming a man for a year before returning to being a woman, the silly ship names (which she finds irritating), the AIs, and so on (163–172).7 And then there are the history lessons—galactic history, that is, complete with a full case study of Sursamen and its people that drives home to her what matter really amounts to:
Life buzzed in, fumed about, rattled around and quite thoroughly infested the entire galaxy, and probably—almost certainly—well beyond. The vast ongoingness of it all somehow put all one’s own petty concerns and worries into context, making them seem not irrelevant, but of much less distressing immediacy. Context was indeed all, as her father had always insisted, but the greater context she was learning about acted to shrink the vast-seeming scale of the Eighth Level of Sursamen and all its wars, politics, disputes, struggles, tribulations and vexations until it all looked very far away and trivial indeed [167].
And like everyone else in the Culture, Djan Seriy has drawn from this context the conclusion that, if the value of things is only what we are prepared to assign to them, then one might as well choose the path leading to the decision that things do in fact Matter.
There are others, however, who have seen the same thing and come to a wholly different worldview. Mertis Tyl Loesp is not a fool: despite remaining inside Sursamen throughout the novel, he can see how much everything—anything—actually Matters. But because he is a villain and a bad man—he enjoys power, likes to see others subjected to his exercise of it, and draws an unseemly amount of residual satisfaction at the memory of the look on Hausk’s face when he realized his trusted friend of twenty years had been lying to him all along (192)—he has decided that “there was no right and wrong, there was simply effectiveness and inability, might and weakness, cunning and gullibility. That he knew this was his advantage, but it was one of better understanding, not moral superiority—he had no delusions there” (190). Except for his lack of belief in any divine authority, Tyl Loesp would have made a pretty passable Idiran; just as they had, he draws from his realization of his comparative helplessness (the Idirans because they suffered an invasion; he because he knows the reality beyond Sursamen) a might-makes-right determination to use others in whatever way and at whatever time best suited him in order to grow in power, and in this sense his thinking truly is great: he knows that the Oct are using him and the Sarl, but he goes along with this state of affairs because he can see a day when this usage will translate into an advancement of the Sarl people—with him at their lead, of course (194). “Ruthlessness, will, the absolute application of force and power,” he reflects at one point. “These were what secured authority and dominance” (191).
Ferbin and Holse, on the other hand, have to labor a great deal more to throw off the weight of the cultural assumptions they were born with. The former unquestioningly welcomed being raised as the next-to-most important figure among his people, and the latter fatalistically accepted his status as a person without an identity of his own choosing. From opposite sides of the spectrum of matter, both have embraced their roles to the point where those roles have become part of them, and while both can rationally see that their assumptions don’t really hold up to reality on any meaningful scale external to the eighth level, neither finds it easy to actually let go of them. Ferbin repeats his litany of Matter to everyone within range, and Holse, looking at the rapidly dwindling Shellworld on the screens inside the Nariscene ship that is taking them to meet Xide Hyrlis, thinks back to his past life, his family, his wife and children, and resigns himself to the near-certainty that they won’t meet again. “In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it,” he concludes (281).
So, there are no gods. Only matter. And matter suffers, but it’s also the case that matter makes matter suffer. And does all this Matter, in absolute terms?
The answer is not at all. And also yes, completely. The voices of the people in previous Culture books, now sunk into the past of the most terrible one hundred years mankind has managed to visit upon planet Earth, return to us here in the new century: the man cleaning the table in Use of Weapons, who tells Zakalwe that even universes die in the end, so what does signify in the long run? Fal N’geestra in Phlebas, who muses that “matter in the raw changes, progresses in a way” and that “everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing” (335–336); Li’ndane in The State of the Art, who tells us that everything in the universe is there when we are rather than because we are, so that we don’t get to claim that we Matter more than others; and finally we have the voice of John Clute, who points out that the warp and woof of Matter revolves around the passage quoted above because “Banks models his description of the hierarchies of civilizations responsible for Sursamen over eons in terms that clearly echo his description of the Shellworld itself: so that the shell game of matter and the shell game of life are modelled as one Matter” (359).8 And as well they should be: given the fundamental sameness of hierarchies within and without Sursamen, no other outcome obtains.
Ferbin and Holse discover the import of this hierarchy of Matter when they finally meet Djan Seriy. His sister’s SC connections have reported strange events happening on Sursamen’s ninth level, where the victorious Sarl now rule the Deldeyn after one last massive battle in the latter’s own capital city. The Oct have been helping the Sarl all along, using the higher command echelons of the Sarl military and political systems as a thinly veiled pretext for a technically legal exploration of the so-called Nameless City, a huge settlement millions of years old buried in silt that the titanic waterfalls of the Hyeng-zhar have been gradually stripping away over all that time, revealing the onyx-black, alien features of the mostly broken buildings (237–239). The Oct also call themselves the Inheritors, owing to a largely unproven belief that they are the rightful heirs of the Involucra’s bounty of Shellworlds—yet another claim to primacy that is valid only within the species issuing it or within the civilizations that don’t have the power to object—and the heart of the Nameless City, they think, contains an eons-buried treasure of Involucra origin. The Aultridia, who have been at war with the Oct for a while at the time Matter begins, also believe they have claim over Sursamen: they started out as parasites on the skin of the Tensile Aeronathaurs before evolving to the point where they Mattered enough to induce the High-Level Involveds to grant them civilizational status and a degree of technological fast-tracking, so they believe they are WorldGod’s children (again, a species-specific claim to primacy; 86–87). Both the Oct and the Sarl, on the other hand, despise the Aultridia precisely for their origin, and a virtual state of war exists between the Sarl and the Aultridia because of the humanoids’ alliance with the Oct.
Eventually, the Sarl archeological teams reach the treasure just as Prince Oramen manages to survive an assassination attempt and realize who organized it. Now a state of war exists within the Sarl people, half of whom are under Tyl Loesp’s command while the other half has sworn allegiance to Oramen—more claims to primacy, progressively more fragmented and inconsequential. The only intervention that could stop a massive conflagration cascading from that flawed network of relationships would have to come from a High-Level Involved, but the galactic protocols of intervention/non-intervention ensure that none will be forthcoming (although the Oct have violated these protocols by assisting the Sarl against the Deldeyn).
The situation grows worse from there. The treasure inside the Nameless City is not Involucra—it’s an Iln god-machine, whose sophistication is at least a match for both the Morthanveld and the Culture (538). As soon as it’s reactivated, and just when Tyl Loesp has arrived at the head of his army to catch Oramen’s forces by surprise, it issues one verbal communication in the languages of both the Oct and the Sarl: “‘Thank you for your help,’ it thundered. ‘Now I have much to do. There is no forgiveness’” (530). Immediately thereafter, a nuclear explosion engulfs the Nameless City, evaporating those in its immediate vicinity and killing the rest through massive levels of radiation poisoning.
Ferbin’s quest has been for nothing. It hadn’t mattered much in the grand scheme of things to begin with, and now it’s also a handful of days too late—others are here when we are, not because we are, and Ferbin, Holse, and Djan Seriy were somewhere else when everyone the Prince wanted to save and everyone he wanted to condemn died in the radioactive bubble. Also, the ultimate enemy, the one that Matters the most because it has the power to wipe out the entire Shellworld along with its hundreds of billions of living creatures, is the real reason they have returned: while en route to Sursamen, Djan Seriy had told Ferbin and Holse that the recent developments on the ninth had turned her trip to Sursamen from a personal venture to an official, SC-sanctioned operation aimed at forestalling world-wrecking events, not at seeing justice done in a private matter between the rulers of one backward species (428–429, 465–466).
But despite that, and despite the grief and the horror of the now dead Nameless City, Ferbin and Holse stick with SC’s mission; between the day they left Sursamen and the day of their return to the ninth level, each has carried out his fair share of growing up. The Prince now believes more in his sister’s mission than in what the Sarl propaganda machine is saying about him (463)—something that would previously have made him blow a fuse—and even after seeing his brother’s ravaged corpse, he is able to prioritize his grievances and assist Djan Seriy. Djan Seriy herself at one point looks at him and muses that “he seemed more serious, less self-obsessed and much less selfish in his pleasures and aims now. She got the impression, especially after a few brief conversations with Choubris himself, that Holse would never have followed the old Ferbin so far or so faithfully. What had not changed was his lack of desire to be king” (466). Indeed, Ferbin has never wanted the throne, and the knowledge that, should he survive the battle with the Iln god-machine, he would have nothing but years of ineffectual, unhappy drudgery to look forward to, helps him make the decision to lay down his life when the battle has gotten bad enough that the only chance left to stop the sentient device is a sacrifice play (562–564).
Holse, for his part, now looks at his erstwhile master and at the Culture people in a very different complexion from that which his earlier self would have conjured up. Watching the others get ready to face the Iln machine, musing on the old Warrior Code of the Sarl higher classes, he reflects:
Behave honourably and wish for a good death. He’d always dismissed it as self-serving bullshit, frankly; most of the people he’d been told were his betters were quite venally dishonourable…. [But] these Culture people, bafflingly, mostly chose to die, when they didn’t have to. With freedom from fear and wondering where your next meal was coming from … came choice, and you could choose a nice quiet, calm, peaceful, ordinary life and die with your nightshirt on…. Or you could end up doing something like this [549–550].
And at the end, Choubris Holse is the only one left alive of the group that set out to fight the Iln. Choubris Holse, the one who, within the purview of all applied taxonomies, should Matter the least. Ferbin, Djan Seriy, Turminder Xuss, the avatar of the Culture ship Liveware Problem, and the ship itself have all died in the battle. The war between the Oct and the Aultridia, which the waking of the Iln had triggered, still rages, and has now expanded to include the Nariscene in the wake of the latter’s belated attempt at restoring order inside Sursamen. In the meantime, not a peep from the Morthanveld, whose compromised hardware had assisted the Iln device in the battle. Slowly, things return to a state of nervous quietude, and it’s during this lull that Choubris returns home to his wife, after a year of absence without communication (589–593). He looks different, fitter, and his teeth are alarmingly white and regularly spaced. He brings with him another avatar of the defunct Liveware Problem, now an individual Culture citizen, and a boy Djan Seriy had saved on the planet she’d been nursing toward better behavior at the beginning of Matter (72–78). The boy will stay with them, Holse tells his thunderstruck wife, and so will the avatar. The whole family is about to move to much better, more spacious quarters thanks to “a fund set aside for special circumstances by some new friends I’ve made” (591), and money won’t be a problem for them anymore. Choubris Holse is going to go into politics.
“[W]hat makes the book stick in the mind after the adrenaline of the special-effects sequences has been metabolized,” Russell Letson writes, is the “thread of interest in the claims and limits of moral responsibility in a world filled with beings with godlike knowledge and power” (57). It’s their assessment of their own moral responsibility within their civilizational context that makes positive characters and good people of Ferbin, Djan Seriy, Holse, and every one of their companions in the battle against the Iln machine. From the inside of the Shellworld-within-shellworld hierarchies in Matter, every turn of story seems to conspire to make them give up and walk away—and especially Ferbin and Holse, once the true scale of events on the ninth becomes known. Djan Seriy herself suggests to them that they should take refuge elsewhere while the problem persists (429); there would be no dishonor in that, since both are very far outside their appointed context, and the spacescapes that present themselves before their eyes contribute to driving home a sense of their true size relative to other galactic realities. Ferbin’s first look at the Morthanveld nestworld of Syaung-un is emblematic of this reduction:
This was, Ferbin thought, the equivalent of a whole civilisation, almost an entire galaxy, contained within what would, in a normal solar system, be the orbit of a single planet. What uncounted lives were lived within those dark, unending braids? … What lives, what fates, what stories must have taken place within this star-surrounding ring, forever twisting, folding, unfolding? … We are lost here, he thought as Holse chatted with the machine and passed on to it their pathetically few possessions. We might disappear into this wilderness of civility and progress and never be seen again. We might be dissolved within it forever, compressed, reduced to nothing by its sheer ungraspable scale. What is one man’s life if such casual immensity can even exist? [393].
But neither Ferbin nor Holse abandons their quest, which is a happy thing because, as it turns out, one man’s life is the difference between the continued existence of billions of sentient beings and their painful death at the hands of a monstrosity. The immensity of the world outside Sursamen triggers a profound growth in Ferbin, whose expectations of Matter had started out as lofty as their reality was puny. On the other side of this growth, he is able to ultimately sacrifice himself for the good of sentients he has never met, just as he had eventually come to accept Holse’s increasingly independent-minded evolution. Holse himself, born and grown into a context where his Matter was established by the decisions of his self-described betters, ends up freely deciding to follow Ferbin precisely because of the changes he has witnessed in his erstwhile master.
We also get to witness the Culture characters’ sense of moral responsibility. Everything matters, and nothing does; the decision is up to the individual, and within the dramatic balance of the novel both choices are perfectly defensible and equally meaningful. The SC mission on Sursamen is in poor shape from the outset: the Iln machine is waking up too fast, the Oct/Aultridia war is too quickly fanned into eruption, and the idea of warping a fleet of Culture assets right inside Morthanveld jurisdiction is too risky for a proper preparation. The few Culture personnel who do get there—Djan Seriy, the Liveware Problem with its avatar, and Turminder Xuss—can do so because they had already been going to Sursamen anyway; their reason for going, not their destination, has changed. And they could have decided not to do anything; the Shellworld would have been destroyed, but what of it? Next to the quintillions of sentients in the galaxy and the twelve hundred remaining Shellworlds, what would that have Mattered?
But they do go, the Culture people and the Sarl people, together; and as events turn out, looking at their last battle from the viewpoint of the Warrior Code Holse was thinking about earlier, everyone does behave honorably, and everyone but Holse does attain a good death by its definitional standards—and by the standards of the Culture’s intervention policies as well. There is no view of the main body of Culture life in Matter, and precious little of Culture environments of any kind; the vast majority of the characters aren’t even from the Culture. This doesn’t mean, however, that the critical utopian processes of the series as a whole are not present. Those processes operate through the viewpoint of people born elsewhere—people who, after experiencing the warp and woof of life in the great galactic lens, come around to a world view that sees Matter for what it is, decides that it does Matter, and acts accordingly. In this sense, the actions of Djan Seriy, the barbarian princess who took a trip, of Ferbin, the barbarian king who didn’t want the throne, and of Holse, the servant who found that his own good deeds elevated him beyond his wildest expectations, encompass the moral core of this novel as pervasively as Diziet Sma’s evolving consciousness traces out the twinned paths of The State of the Art and Use of Weapons. Matter matters to her too, and in her moral world nobody is expendable or cheap; Sma weeps for the good and for the bad, and her choice to continue recruiting for SC doesn’t alter the price she pays. Holse’s trajectory through the plot of Matter, in fact, brings him very close to the perspective of Mr. Escoerea, the legless young man whose services Sma tries to enlist at the end of Weapons. But unlike Escoerea, Holse was never grievously wounded, and his outlook is substantially happier than that of, say, Zakalwe/Elethiomel. He is an altogether kinder man with an altogether healthier psyche, which bodes well for the people of the eighth and the ninth. There’s angel-work to be done.
For all the traveling the various characters in Matter do, the novel feels almost cozy in its circumscribed involvement with and ultimate focus on the events on Sursamen’s ninth level. Just as the plots of Consider Phlebas, The State of the Art, and Look to Windward had described paths that, however circuitously, ended up converging on one single planetary location, so the plot of Matter slingshots us away from the Shellworld only to return to it at the end.
Banks’ next Culture novel, Surface Detail (2010), is an altogether different ball of yarn.9 Its first four chapters introduce us to four different groups of protagonists before scattering these characters’ trajectories to the solar winds, letting them describe the sort of aerobatics for which the equally numerous plotlines in Excession had made that novel famous. In fact, Surface Detail is closer to Excession than it is to any other previous Culture books, especially in the way its peripatetic plotlines diverge, explode outward, and ultimately reconnect in a number of unexpected configurations.
The thread of story all these plotlines share is the creation and maintenance of the Hells, virtual afterlives designed to replicate in a subset of the real a given civilization’s myths of a place of eternal punishment:
The hells existed because some faiths insisted on them, and some societies too, even without the excuse of over-indulged religiosity. Whether as a result of perhaps too faithful a transcription—from scriptural assertion to provable actuality—or simply an abiding secular need to continue persecuting those thought worthy of punishment even after they were dead, a number of civilisations—some otherwise quite respectable—had built up impressively ghastly Hells over the eons [132].10
Of all the crimes flesh sentients have ever committed, torture is probably the one the Culture is most vehemently against (133); indeed, it’s not wrong to say that Contact and SC were originally created to stop this institutionalized form of suffering in its every shape. However, when a virtual war begins between the anti–Hell and pro–Hell factions in the galactic community—the war is also known as a “confliction” (169), its conduct carefully regulated and arbitrated to make sure its parameters reflect the actual strength of the participants in the real (134)—the Culture is forced to sit it out because “At the point when the war began, [it] had been in one of its cyclic eras of trying not to be seen to be throwing its weight around. Too many others of the In-Play Level Eights11 had objected to the Culture being involved with the War in Heaven for it to be able to do so without looking arrogant, even belligerent” (172). But now, after decades of fighting in a bewildering variety of virtual spaces, the war is coming to a close, and it looks like the pro–Hell side will win. The anti–Hell side, unwilling to accept the verdict, has decided to cheat, first by hacking into the substrates holding the Hells themselves in order to free those trapped within and later, after the hacking attempts fail, by taking the confliction into the real and turning it into all-out war. The lives and trajectories of the four groups of characters in Surface Detail are all connected to this burgeoning war, which if unchecked promises to engulf half the galaxy.
Those characters have one thing in common: in their respective introductory chapters, they all die (Letson 2011, 21). The first is Lededje Y’breq, an Intagliate. In her civilization, a relatively low-level commonwealth called the Sichultian Enablement, the Intagliate are “trophies … the surrendered banners of defeated enemies, the capitulation papers signed by the vanquished, the heads of fierce beasts adorning the walls of those who owned them” (71), and the fantastically complex network of tattoos that cover every inch of their bodies down to the molecular level is the seal of that surrender. In the specific, Lededje and her mother became Intagliates because of a business debt their father owed Joiler Veppers,12 his former partner and the man who betrayed him for financial gain. Stabbed in the back by his friend, with his wife and daughter marked for life as property, Lededje’s father killed himself, followed by her mother some years later. After that, Lededje spent years trying to escape, always unsuccessfully, and her latest attempt, at the beginning of chapter 1, proves fatal: Veppers, who has been using her as a sex slave as well as a status symbol to be displayed at public functions, murders her. As soon as Lededje’s life leaves her body, however, her consciousness awakens inside a simulation substrate in the Culture GSV Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly—years before, Lededje had been visited by the avatar of a Culture ship with an interest in talking a 4-D image of her intaglios in exchange for whatever favor or service it could provide. When Lededje told the ship’s avatar to surprise her, the Mind obliged, growing inside her brain a neural lace with the ability to transmit her consciousness to the computational substrate of its home GSV—the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly. Duly “revented” (i.e., reincarnated; 149) by the GSV’s Mind, Lededje now wants to return to Sichult, the Enablement’s home planet, and kill Veppers right back (1–16, 57–94).
The second character is Vatueil, a soldier in the anti–Hell faction. He and his fellow comrades have been fighting, dying, and re-embodying within the virtuality for decades now, and the death he suffers at the end of the second chapter of Surface Detail is the latest iteration in the process (17–29). Throughout the novel, Vatueil continues to die and reincarnate and fight and die again, all the while taking part in the workings of the strategic council that decides to extend the virtual war into the real (115–145, 245–267). Eventually, he confesses to an SC-sponsored quorum of Minds, one of whose members calls him a traitor; Vatueil doesn’t deny it, and disappears from the virtuality where the meeting is taking place. There are hints that we may have known this man for quite a while (541–547).
The third character is Yime Nsokyi. She pretend-dies during a virtual worst-case-scenario annihilatory drill she and her cohorts are running on the Orbital where she lives. Yime is something of a throwback by Culture standards (more so than Jernau Gurgeh, who would be her closest character pattern in the Culture stories): she doesn’t much like biological or technological augmentations, she cherishes discipline in a society where that is a dirty word, and she adopts toward such matters as love, sex, and having fun a somewhat austere attitude, preferring to arrange her body as gender-neutral and cultivating a few quiet friendships (31–44). Yime is also a member of Quietus, one of the three Special Circumstances offshoots the novel introduces; Quietus “dealt with the dead. The dead outnumbered the living in the greater galaxy by some distance, if you added up all those individuals existing in the various Afterlives the many different civilisations had created over the millennia … the sheer scale of their numbers ensured that important issues involving the deceased still arose now and again” (167).13 As soon as Lededje wakes up inside the virtuality onboard the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly, Yime is tasked with making contact with her and awaiting for further developments (166–179).
Finally, there are Prin and Chay, two academics belonging to the Pavulean species, one of the pro–Hell civilizations. When their story opens in chapter 4, they are technically dead—in the sense of having downloaded themselves into the Pavulean Hell via a pirate connection. Their mission is to spend a month or so inside the Hell and record everything that happens in there, so that the recordings can be presented to their civilization’s courts as evidence to strengthen the position of the abolitionist faction among the Pavulean people. But virtual or not, the Hell is a terrifying place, and while Prin retains his grip on reality, Chay loses it shortly before they are due to be reuploaded. As a result, convinced that the only reality there ever was is right there, she fails to trigger the recall signal together with Prin, and while he ascends back up to real life, she remains in Hell, prey to the Pavulean demons’ savagery (45–55, 95–100). But even in Hell, and albeit only once in a very long time, irony applies: Chay’s very lack of faith in any reality beyond that of her charnel house conspires to spare her the full extent of the punishment. “There is always hope,” a titanic demon-lord tells her, “and there must be hope. To abandon hope is to escape part of the punishment. One must hope for hope to be destroyed. One must trust in order to feel the anguish of betrayal” (285). And so, while in the world above Prin testifies to the courts concerning what happens in the Pavulean Hell, Chay is subjected to a strangely pain-free game of develop-your-faith in another virtuality, where she spends a lifetime in a place called The Refuge as part of a religious order of which she eventually becomes the Mother Superior, just so that she’ll develop the faith necessary to be fully punished in Hell (341–353).
While the plotlines of the various characters in Surface Detail become infernally entangled across a narrative of the same brazen intricacy as that of Excession, the moral conundrums in this new novel are, from a critical utopian perspective, a lot less problematic than they’d ever been before. First, the Culture isn’t involved in the confliction, and does intervene to prevent it from spilling over into the real; second, the notion that actualizing eternal suffering for billions of flesh sentients represents acceptable behavior on the part of a self-respecting galactic civilization is so awful that, were the Culture to intervene militarily on the largest possible scale to close the Hells and stop the suffering, we readers would have a hard time not cheering it on. That the Culture doesn’t, that it moves with the usual caution and respects the boundaries to whose observance it has agreed, becomes almost frustrating.
Thankfully, you can always count on the villains. The Culture, it turns out, has a groupie—the Geseptian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy (GFCF), a Level-Seven civilization whose often cringe-worthy attempts at emulating its role model do not prevent it from paradoxically working against them, “as though they so much wanted to be of help they needed the Culture reduced to a level of neediness that would make such aid something it would genuinely be grateful for” (171). The GFCF—which unsurprisingly belongs to the anti–Hell faction—is the architect behind the multi-civ initiative to convert the Tsungarial Disk, an entire system’s worth of high-tech factories, into a gigantic production facility for an enormous fleet designed to attack and destroy the physical substrates housing the Hells. Joiler Veppers’ Veprine Corporation, which had long ago bought most of those substrates, is part of the venture, and the GFCF has already ensured him and the rest of its allies that none of their actions will come back to haunt them because “we intend to frame the Culture for everything!” (385).
Most of the sub-plots and the contortions in the main plotlines are the result of the Culture’s responses to the developments in the GFCF’s plan. Initially in the dark concerning their fans’ intentions, SC and its offspring organizations quickly gain a fairly comprehensive picture of the situation and dispatch their various assets to unravel the conspiracy and bring matters to a satisfactorily peaceful end. Among those assets is the Abominator-class warship Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints, with which Lededje strikes an odd sort of friendship—odd because the war craft, which goes under the inoffensive-sounding designation of picket ship, is the last word in large-scale mayhem the Culture has to offer. The ship’s avatar, Demeisen, describes it/itself as “a borderline eccentric and very slightly psychotic Abominator-class picket ship” (409), and throughout the narrative it certainly behaves with the manic spikiness that is typical of Culture entities built to perform exceptionally well a job that the society as a whole deems unworthy of a decent civilization. Like every SC operative and every other dedicated military asset in the Culture, the FOTNMC is perfectly capable of detecting the schizophrenic attitude other Culture people/drones/Minds adopt toward it, and as a result it behaves like the stereotypical uninvited guest at the party—it appalls other Minds, irritates drones and flesh sentients, and shamelessly takes advantage of everyone around it. But Lededje ends up developing an exasperated kind of fondness for the ship,14 a fondness that begins when she realizes that it’s the only Culture entity willing to take her anywhere near Veppers. So she takes up Demeisen’s offer to go with it, and on the way to Sichult the two get into a good deal of trouble; or rather, they would if the FOTNMC weren’t the monstrously powerful ship- and planet-wrecker it is.
There are two main sources of critical-utopian critique in Surface Detail: one is Yime Nsokyi, who often finds herself irritated at what she sees as the excessively easy-going nature of her society and joins Quietus because the members of the organization “were expected to be sober, serious people while they were on duty, and to dress appropriately” (168). Yime, who dresses appropriately and behaves soberly all the time, finds herself right at home. Her trajectory through the novel, however, belies the initial impression of her role, and it almost feels like Banks meant for that to happen: at every turn, Yime and the ships/drones/people with her are subjected to near-death attacks, conflagrations, explosions, and other pointedly not sober events (329–330, 411–416), as if the narrative had decided to play trickster to her nature and aspirations.15 When Yime does finally get to meet Lededje, it’s the end of the novel and the only thing left for her to do is participate in a slightly illegal scheme to allow the Sichultian woman a chance to get her revenge—which she does get, with a generous amount of help from the FOTNMC (599–617).
The other critical utopian perspective belongs to Lededje and the Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints. The Sichultian woman finds the Culture as fascinating as it is frustrating—fascinating because it is a far better place than the Sichultian Enablement, which is virtually run by Veppers, and frustrating because the very ethics that make the Culture what it is get in the way of her revenge. This is why she and the FOTNMC get along well: each sees in the other a topsy-turvy mirror version of themselves—Lededje because the ship is the kind of warrior she wishes she were, and the ship because Lededje is, like it, the offspring of a social system that first created her the way she is and then treated her like something of a pariah, at once admired and rejected. The Culture is obviously not the Sichultian Enablement, which is why Lededje becomes a citizen of it at the end of the novel, but there are enough philosophical and existential commonalities for the two to establish a baseline of mutual understanding.
This baseline becomes apparent when a GFCF fleet intent on preventing the Culture from finding out about the factory complex in the Tsungarial Disk fires on the FOTNMC. At the news that something bad is going on in the Tsungarial Disk, Demeisen displays an amount of glee so unseemly that Lededje scolds him for it. This how the avatar responds:
I am a warship. This is my nature. This is what I’m designed and built for. My moment of glory approaches and you can’t expect me not to be excited at the prospect. I was fully expecting to spend my operational life just twiddling my metaphorical thumbs in the middle of empty nowhere, ensuring sensible behavior amongst the rolling boil of fractious civs just by my presence and that of my peers, keeping the peace through the threat of the sheer pandemonium that would result if anybody resurrected the idea of war as a dispute-resolution procedure with the likes of me around. Now some sense-forsaken fuckwit with a death wish has done just that and I strongly suspect I shortly get a chance to shine, baby! [469].
As indeed it does: when the GFCF carries out a full-on attack on the FOTNMC, the subsequent action is so fast and brutally one-sided that Lededje can only catch what happens by looking at a recording once everything is over and done with (505–507). The irony here is that, badly behaved as it may claim to be, the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints never actually falls outside normal moral constraints; it scrupulously observes SC’s rules of engagement, and for all its talk of craving a scrap with anyone who will oblige, it forgoes a number of opportunities to do precisely that. It even gives the approaching GFCF fleet every chance to resolve the dispute amicably before their unambiguously destruction-oriented behavior forces it to respond in kind—which it does with a clear conscience and an abundance of enthusiasm. Lededje’s discomfort with Demeisen’s happiness at the thought of the coming scrap is partially directed at herself—her own murderous impulses, however understandable and to an extent justified, place her on shaky ground when it comes to claiming the high road (499–509).16
The Culture in general can act with a clear conscience as well. There are few moral ambiguities in Surface Detail, and none that it generated, plus the behavior in which Veppers indulges throughout the novel is repulsive enough that we don’t really get bent out of shape when Yime Nsokyi and the FOTNMC, with the assistance of the Culture ambassador on Sichult, help Lededje get her revenge. As for the Hells, they all go up in smoke during the early stages of the battle with the fleet built in the Tsungarial Disk. Chay and the rest of their prisoners are now free. After everything that happened in the virtuality, she decides to remain in it, this time as “a creature of ending and release in the Virtual; the angel of death who came for people who lived in happy, congenial afterlives and who—tired even of their many lifetimes lived after biological death—were ready to dissolve themselves into the generality of consciousness that underlay Heaven, or who were ready simply to cease to be altogether.” Prin, whose testimony before the courts was crucial in the Pavulean people’s decision to never rebuild their Hell, meets her many lifetimes later, when the angel of death comes to give him his eternal rest (622–623).
The other main characters and plotlines receive similarly happy resolutions—except for Veppers’ legacy, irredeemably compromised after the previously buried evidence of his many cruelties comes to light (620). Lededje becomes a Culture citizen, travels across the galaxy onboard the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly, and then settles on an Orbital where “She had five children by as many different fathers and ended up with over thirty great-great-great-grandchildren, which by Culture standards was almost disgraceful” (623). Yime Nsokyi returns to her home Orbital and begins a successful, if entirely honorary, career in politics (620), while the Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints becomes the envy of the whole Abominator-class fleet for its actions around the Tsungarial Disk; the ship also spends a lot of time with GSVs—“just for the company. Its avatar Demeisen continued to behave appallingly” (620). Already drastically reduced in number after the events in the novel, the Hells vanish from the galaxy within one bio-generation, “their very absence [becoming] accepted almost without question as part of what constituted being civilised in the first place. This made the Culture very happy” (623).
Only Vatueil is left now; the novel’s epilogue focuses on him. He truly was a traitor: the pro–Hell faction had planted him into the ranks of the anti–Hell faction at the beginning of the decades-long war to do precisely the job he did: cause disruption and chaos. Vatueil, we are immediately told, is not the man’s actual name; he has another he likes to go by and that he has now readopted—but that, significantly, isn’t his actual name either. The man formerly known as Vatueil had originally espoused the pro–Hell cause “partly out of sheer contrarianism and partly out of that despair he felt sometimes, periodically—during this long, long life—at the sheer self-hurtful idiocy and destructiveness of so many types of sentient life, especially the meta-type known as pan-human, to which he had always had the dubious honor of belonging. You want suffering, pain and horror? I’ll give you suffering, pain and horror […]” (625–626). However, over the course of the long confliction, Vatueil changes his mind and betrays the pro–Hell faction as well: he comes clean and implicates everyone he can. After that, he “had been quite pleased to see so much of what he had pledged to fight for crumble away into disgraced and piecemeal nothing. Hell mend them” (626).
This does feel like the behavior of someone we’ve met before, and the progression of the epilogue strengthens that feeling: Vatueil is sitting at a table in a restaurant somewhere we’re not told, waiting for a woman; a poet. Attentive readers will also remember, in this gradually clearer context, the words of one Mind among the quorum to which Vatueil had confessed the anti–Hell faction’s decision to escalate the confliction: “That errant, ramshackled ghost…. He’s known of old; I doubt he even remembers who he used to be, let alone what he believes in or most recently promised” (547). The revelation of Vatueil’s true identity, which we will probably have guessed by the time the restaurant’s maître d’ calls him by name, still comes as something of a shock—the name is the last word in the novel: “Your table is ready, Mr. Zakalwe” (627).
There is a strange, lop-sided appropriateness to the fact that Surface Detail, a story about the elimination of suffering and the freeing of those who are prisoner inside hells not of their making, should feature the crucial agency of—and end with—the man who will always live inside a hell very much of his own making. Zakalwe is no more forgiven now than he had been at the end of Use of Weapons, and we know this because, had Livueta finally absolved him of his burden of guilt, he would have stopped trying to carry out his own dysfunctional brand of angel-work. Indeed, the distorted perspective that brought him to first support and then betray the pro–Hell faction feels very much like the product of an agonized conscience, especially now that, hundreds of years after the events in Weapons, Zakalwe is still alive while Livueta is, in all likelihood, dead. Inside the virtual Hells, time flowed more slowly than in the real (476), and it’s safe to assume that the same circumstances obtain inside the biological substrate housing Zakalwe’s conscience. And there’s no closing down that virtuality, nor is it possible to free the soul trapped within; Zakalwe is his own jailer, demon-lord, and violator all at once, so that for as long as he lives there will be one virtual Hell left in the galaxy.
We now come to the tenth and last Culture novel. Within six months of The Hydrogen Sonata’s appearance, Banks had divulged the news of his illness; within eight months he was gone. A certain frisson of something that feels a bit like awe attends the realization that, like its immediate predecessor, this last Culture book deals with passing away or removing oneself from the life of the universe as we know it—if Surface Detail featured virtual afterlives, the dramatic engine of Sonata’s plot is the Subliming of a whole civilization.17
Banks would have laughed at the suggestion that the predominantly death-oriented outlook of three among his last four novels—besides Surface Detail and Sonata, we have The Quarry18—indicated the presence of some premonitory faculty in him. Virtual afterlives are pointedly not death, and neither is Subliming; the fun of having a non-mimetic universe to write in is precisely that you can set up the ground rules to allow yourself the freedom of featuring death-defying technologies without having to explain them away as metaphors or symbols for actually dying. The problem is, as usual, people. We are pattern-seekers, all of us, and we have a tough time letting go after we’ve found those patterns—even when, as in this particular case, there were none to begin with. It’s difficult to read The Hydrogen Sonata, with its pervasive atmosphere of demobilization, and resist thinking of Banks himself as preparing to leave at his space-opera version of the Grey Havens. To an extent, and provided we don’t carry it too far, this may actually be a healthy exercise.
As the book opens, we find the Gzilt civilization only twenty-four days away from Subliming.19 The Gzilt, a Level-Eight Involved, has been a respected, peaceful member of the galactic community for thousands of years, and its relations with the Culture have always been amicable. In fact, the Gzilt came close to actually being Culture:
Nearly founders, though not quite, [the Gzilt] had been influential in the setting up and design of the Culture almost ten thousand years earlier, when a disparate group of humanoid species at roughly the same stage of technological development had been thinking about banding together. Amiable enough, if somewhat martially uptight due to an unusual social set-up that basically meant everybody was presumed to be in a single society-wide militia … they had made significant contributions to the establishment and ethos of the Culture while it was still at the being-talked-about phase but then, almost at the last moment … they had decided not to join the new confederation [66].
The reason for the Gzilt’s decision to go it alone was rooted in their well-rewarded reliance on their Book of Truth, the one holy tome in the history of the galaxy that “gained in credence as science developed” (67). Throughout the history of the Gzilt civilization, the Book of Truth’s predictions concerning all the relevant scientific and technological advances that go into making a spacefaring commonwealth proved to be exactly correct, without fail or necessity for amendment. Together with those exact predictions, the Book of Truth also delivered the standard set of moral/ethical commandments, which gained enormously in righteousness for being written next to, as it were, the right stuff. Thus, the Gzilt found it easy to take seriously the Book of Truth’s claims “that [they] were a people favoured by fate, by the universe itself, as part of an ongoing thrust towards a glorious, transcendent providence. They represented the very tip of a mystical spear thrown by the past at the future, the shaft of that spear being formed by a multitude of earlier species which existed before them and kept on serially handing on the baton of destiny to the next, slightly more exceptional people ahead of them” (71).
The Hydrogen Sonata is a Banks novel. If anything in it is certain from the outset, it’s that any claim to universal primacy or conceit of being creation’s darling is emptier than the void between the stars, and the Gzilt’s own set of beliefs is no different. Banks lets the genie out of the bottle early on: “the Book of Truth is a lie” (111). The purportedly holy tome is a hoax perpetrated by the Zihdren, the civilization that, according to the book, “were the last handers-on of the baton, the final stage of this rocket ship to the sky that would put the actual payload—the Gzilt—into the glory of eternal orbit” (71). There is no tip of the spear because there never was any spear, and there’s no payload because there never was any rocket; there were only the Zihdren, long since Sublimed, and the cultural experiment a tiny faction of academics within their civilization decided to conduct just to see what would happen. All those correct guesses were a clever trick of reverse-engineering: by announcing in the Book of Truth the relevant sequence of scientific and technological discoveries, the Zihdren essentially put the Gzilt on a purely applied research path carefully designed to direct their scientists’ attention in the correct direction every time (112).
All this may not have mattered much to those the Gzilt are about to leave behind, except that the Zihdren have to spill the beans—it’s tradition. One of the many niceties the galactic community observes when one of its members Sublimes consists in a fare-thee-well-and-let-me-come-clean protocol: a given civilization’s messages of appreciation and wishes of Godspeed and good luck may also contain “the odd admission that actually we’re responsible for rubble-ising your moon while you guys were inventing the wheel but we were having big exciting space battles with the neighbours, or it was us what nicked your first space probe” (67). Through their Remnanter section—the part of their civ that, for a variety of reasons, did not sublime along with everyone else—the Zihdren have sent a ship containing a Ceremonial Guest whose task is to tell the truth about the Book of Truth. One of the few remaining Gzilt ships—if everyone in their civilization is also part of their military, every one of their ships is also a warship—duly meets the Zihdren-Remnanter craft at the appointed place, and upon hearing the message of the Ceremonial Guest, annihilates the vessel in a burst of destructive energy so violent that the small Gzilt settlement on the planet below is also destroyed (1–9). The higher echelons of the Gzilt government, afraid that the revelation will shock the bulk of the civilization into refusing to Sublime, has decided to suppress the truth by every means available—including killing its own people, if there’s any danger they may have somehow intercepted the Zihdren-Remnanter’s signal (hence the destruction of the settlement). Led by a Septame named Banstegeyn20 and Marshal Chewkri, a woman embodying the quintessential military mindset of the tough-as-leather, follow-your-orders-and-shut-up persuasion, these higher echelons spend the time left before Subliming attempting to scour every corner of the galaxy clean of the Zihdren message, following the entirely correct assumption that the Remnanter Ceremonial Guest was not the only entity to know its import (45–57).
This is where the Culture and one of the few Gzilt citizens who do not seem that sold on the whole idea of Subliming, a reservist called Vyr Cossont (11), come in. One of the people currently aware of the Book of Truth’s falsity is the oldest Culture citizen, a man by the name of Ngaroe QiRia; QiRia is ten thousand years old, and one of the participants at the conference that gave birth to the Culture. Aware that the knowledge he possesses could mean danger to him and everyone around him, QiRia has stored the information somewhere safe, carefully hidden under multiple layers of deceit and misdirection. Cossont had met the man himself twenty years before, while on a sabbatical with the Culture, and now the commanders of her original regiment, the Socialist-Republican People’s Liberation Regiment #14, recall her to service to find this man. The 14th knows about the Book of Truth, and its leaders want Cossont to contact QiRia and bring the evidence to them so that they can broadcast it to the whole of Gzilt civilization. Before Cossont can even accept the mission, however, another Gzilt warship destroys the HQ of the regiment, killing everyone except her and a few others, and even they would have ended up dead if the Culture ship Mistake Not… hadn’t rescued them at the last minute. The Mistake Not…, an unclassified craft with a buried, much longer name that seems to indicate an advanced capacity for mayhem, had been following its own trail of clues after detecting from a nearby star system the energy signature of the Zihdren-Remnanter’s destruction, and now it decides to help Cossont carry out the mission, with the result that the forces commanded by Banstegeyn and Marshal Chewkri are now hunting both (96–134, 175–185).
In the meantime, the Zihdren-Remnanter have contacted the Culture and asked its help in bringing the incident to a satisfactory—and most importantly quiet—ending. An event committee very similar to the Interesting Times Gang from Excession duly forms, complete with the funky ship-to-ship dialogue we first saw in that novel21; the Mistake Not… is part of the committee, and through it Cossont as well. Aside from dispatching the Gzilt woman and the Mistake Not… on a variety of frenetic trips from one side of Gzilt space to the other in search of QiRia’s elusive information on the Book of Truth, the committee appoints some of its members to the investigation into the attack on the 14th Regiment’s HQ, some others to patrol duty to safeguard the integrity of Gzilt space against opportunistic Scavenger species, and a couple more to accompany the Ronte and the Liseiden into Gzilt space. These two Level-Five civilizations are the remaining candidates for the role of official Scavenger species (37–39), potential heirs to whatever bounty of Level-Eight tech will remain after the Gzilt have Sublimed.
The aggregate of these plot-vectors constitutes the totality of the action in Sonata. Like Excession and Surface Detail, this novel too is full of energy and speed, featuring a variegated cast of highly kinetic characters describing hyperspace doodles entangled in such a mess that the whole thing would be infuriating if the proceedings weren’t this much fun. The two previous books, however, had woven their webs of plot around trajectories aimed (however circuitously) at objects relevant to and isomorphic with the story told: the eponymous black-body sphere in Excession is a conduit to other universes, and its relevance is not affected by the three-men-in-a-boat handling of the situation that the Interesting Times Gang becomes ultimately responsible for. Surface Detail, for its part, is an arrow pointed at Hell itself, and the successful demise of the nightmare afterlives at the end of the novel becomes one of the great moments of joy in the whole Culture series. Sonata instead weaves its web around nothing at all: every plotline in it, from the Zihdren message to QiRia’s information to the unmasking of Banstegeyn and Marshal Chewkri, is pure McGuffin—wormholes to nowhere. Which doesn’t mean the trip itself isn’t worth embarking on:
The Hydrogen Sonata is a 500-page scherzo, a joyful progress vibrating with momentum, a triumph of continued focus, a shattai garden and echolalia of the remembrances and vistas accorded by the preceding quarter century of Culture tales. It can be read as an almost totally unguarded paean to the deeply conjoined joys of making something and finding something out: all in the full and explicit realization that in the end nothing means squat, in the explicit understanding that doing meaning is to make meaning last, but only until you stop [Clute 2014a, 163].
And that’s the problem with the Gzilt: they’re Subliming on the say-so of false prophets and in the conviction that, once they are on the other side, they won’t have stopped making meaning last—they will be meaning, forever. The Book of Truth tells the Gzilt that their arrival in the beyond will herald a momentous change for the better in the fabric of the Sublime itself (72), so that the whole civilization believes that, far from removing itself from the meaning-making elite of the real, it will actually become the transcendent head of that elite. But the Book of Truth is a lie. It’s nothing but noise, and noise is all we get as the engine of Sonata rapidly clanks into high gear and its various characters react to the news the Zihdren-Remnanter brought.
Vyr Cossont’s personal story yells to us in microcosm the same thing the novel is whispering in macrocosm. One of the many things many people whose societies are about to Sublime do is carry out a life-task, something meaningful to complete right before the great jump to let the universe know you were there after all. Cossont’s own life-task is to play perfectly, without a single note falling out of place, “T. C. Vilabier’s 26th String-specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented … on one of the few surviving examples of the instrument developed specifically to play the piece, the notoriously difficult, temperamental and tonally challenged Antagonistic Undecagonstring—or elevenstring, as it was commonly known.” Vilabier’s piece, tellingly composed ten thousand years before, “was more usually known as ‘The Hydrogen Sonata’” (11). The Sonata’s author perversely designed it to be so challenging and difficult that, to be played properly, the average number of limbs in a humanoid is not enough, which is why Cossont had to have two more arms added to her normal complement of two. Even then, and even when the Sonata is played perfectly, the sounds the elevenstring produces are essentially awful. This is how Cossont describes her life-task to the 14th-Regiment colonel who comes to her house to recall her back into service:
“Never heard of it.”
“More commonly known as the Hydrogen Sonata.”
“Still never heard of it.”
“No great surprise, sir. It’s a bit obscure.”
“Renowned?”
“The piece?”
“Yes.”
“Only as being almost impossible to play.”
“Not, like […]?”
“Pleasant to listen to? No. Sir.”
“Really?”
… “An eminent and respected academic provided perhaps the definitive critical comment many thousands of years ago, sir. His opinion was: ‘As a challenge, without peer. As music, without merit’’’ [33].
To review: the Hydrogen Sonata is almost impossible to play, unpleasant anyway when played perfectly, and designed to be performed on an instrument that didn’t exist when it was composed by people who didn’t have enough limbs to do the job properly. This is probably the reason why it’s not one bit surprising to find out, as we do shortly after the revelation about the Book of Truth, that the Hydrogen Sonata is also a hoax, a joke Vilabier perpetrated at the expense of the universe (127). It’s also completely unsurprising, for the purposes of the twin dovetailing processes of meaning-making in the novel, that it’s QiRia who delivers the news—not only had he known Vilabier personally; he’d also helped compose the Sonata (126).22
Thus, everything is noise, from the Book of Truth to the Hydrogen Sonata to the contortions everyone has to go through to perform, in a context increasingly leeched of valid signifiers, what they think will make everything mean something. There is a lot of fury tied to the sound, too, because Banstegeyn and Chewkri won’t stop, and the Mistake Not…, engaged in the last of a long sequence of battles with murderous Gzilt ships, finally gets mad enough to tell the Gzilt warship 8*Churkun, the vessel responsible for the destruction of the Remnanter ship at the beginning of the novel, its full name: 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 Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans of Wrath (502). Which is noise too, of course, except that the Culture ship means it as a threat and the AI inside the 8*Churkun decides to pay heed to it and breaks off the engagement—a small moment of making meaning last between you and someone else until you both get to go home safely. This the Gzilt do at the end, when they Sublime despite everything; the truth is known, but it turns out they don’t much care, and all the deaths Banstegeyn and Chewkri caused, including that of Banstegeyn’s pregnant lover, have been for nothing at all. The Culture walks away with its cachet as the good guys intact, partly because of the sacrifice of the Beats Working—a tiny, virtually unarmed GCU that elected to fight a hopeless battle on the side of the Ronte fleet when the Liseiden decided they didn’t want to share the spoils of the Gzilt. Vyr Cossont, for her part, does not Sublime. Instead she accepts the invitation of the Mistake Not… to go tramping across the galaxy and visit Ngaroe QiRia on his current planet of residence—as soon as she finishes her life-task, that is. The end of the novel sees her in the room where we’d met her at the beginning as she finally plays the Hydrogen Sonata from start to finish, note-perfect, after which she abandons the elevenstring where it is and leaves onboard her flier (513–517). The noise is over, and we readers “return to the sense that what we are being told in this novel is that the search for meaning is inherently a McGuffin Search. That Sublimation may be an option: but not here, not in the phenomenal world, which we meat folk experience through the prim ridiculous reticule of the seven senses, plus augments. So let us go then…. At the very end of this novel whose joy is wrested from nada, Cossont leaves ‘The Hydrogen Sonata’ behind, just as we leave The Hydrogen Sonata: in order to start again, failing better” (Clute 2014b, 165). But this time, we’ll have to start again by ourselves. The song is over, and these are the novel’s last words:
The Antagonistic Undecagonstring, caught in the swirling breeze produced by the flier’s departure, hummed emptily. The sound was swept away by the mindless air [517].
The Culture series ends here, on what is safe to describe as a meaningful note. The random eddies of displaced atmosphere playing equally random notes on a musical instrument, notes that the very breeze that had produced them then sweeps away forever, is a good image for the meaning-making and pattern-recognition scaffold Banks erected across ten books, twenty-five years of publishing, and thirty-eight years of writing practice. The Culture stories are an eminently useful retelling of our efforts, here and now on planet Earth, to make meaning last at least as long as we’re around, and if we’re lucky beyond that. But to reach past the envelope of our biological spans, we’ll need the same thing the Culture needs to make meaning last: each other, and those who will come after us. Banks wrote the last trilogy of Culture books with the assumption that a healthy life for any commonwealth, and especially for a utopian one, must involve the presence of others and arrange that presence into shapes that, however complicated they become, tie civilization together. That’s because civilization needs telling, all the time and every time, otherwise it slips away into ennui and dreams of empire. The galaxy, we’ve been told since Phlebas appeared in 1987, is a titanic meta-biosphere teeming with life in myriad forms, and it’s only appropriate that these myriads should eventually come to sing part of the song.