| Title | : | Surface Detail (Culture, #9) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0316123404 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780316123402 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 627 |
| Publication | : | First published October 7, 2010 |
| Awards | : | Locus Award Best Science Fiction Novel (2011), Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis Bestes ausländisches Werk (Best Foreign Work) (2012), Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire Traduction (2012), Tähtivaeltaja Award (2013), Goodreads Choice Award Science Fiction (2010) |
With the assistance of one of its most powerful - and arguably deranged - warships, Lededje finds herself heading into a combat zone not even sure which side the Culture is really on.
A brutal, far-reaching war is already raging within the digital realms that store the souls of the dead and it's about to erupt into reality. It started in the realm of the Real & that is where it will end. It will touch countless lives and affect entire civilizations, but at the center of it all is a young woman whose need for revenge masks another motive altogether.
Surface Detail (Culture, #9) Reviews
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Thought experiment time: Would a hardliner faith culture with high tech create a virtual hell to stay in power and make everyone afraid of getting inside that creepy, artificial purgatory if they misbehave?
Reread 2022 with extended review
Illustrative presentation for mind control
This idea could be expanded, for instance with school excursions to hell to show the pupils what happens if one is nasty or for the permanent display of how hellish the sinners are suffering. Sending the one or other poor soul back to earth to tell about the cruelties may be a fine psychological warfare trick against the own population too.
Fear and terror are always the answer
All of this could be seen as an allegory of each time when anachronistic power structures meet technological advancements and aren´t shattered and destroyed by enlightenment and democracy. For instance, a tool like the internet that is so downgraded and censored in dictatorships that some of its core functions, the connection of people and the spreading of ideas, pull media concepts, are eliminated or forced into line. Or to take genetic engineering to awake old eugenic ideas and realize them. Or commercialize hell like a bloody amusement park. It might get quite a long list and that just with using nowadays humans.
Clarketech vs ideology to illustrate the ridiculousness
With the help of time and expansion into the universe, new and old ideologies can be mixed with Clarketech to truly bizarre constellations. Give aliens with different physiology and mentality such as hive minds to the mix and it gets bizarre, freaky, funny, perverted, and entertaining.
Some explicit stuff
A warning, some passages are really sick hardcore, sure, duh!, it´s hell, I didn´t expect it from Banks and it might be too extreme for some readers, quite reminded me of extreme horror, just much better written of course.
Sell me your soul
In such a setting souls, be it in a fleshy, short-lived, poorly constructed (shame on you, nature!) shell or better digitally and multi-dimensionally stored, could become a real, manifested immortality chip and the gateway to power. This would get even more complicated if one would assume that there is not just the real, stored, digital 011001, etc. alter ego, but a real metaphysical being that should reincarnate, change the form or be immortal and is incarcerated in silicon instead. I should be friendlier to my computer and start collecting souls from atheists who think that the whole concept is stupid.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph... -
A war in hell, for the fate of hell?
What? Is this a Culture novel, one of huge Space Operatic dimensions, Ship Mega-Minds, nearly ascendant alien cultures and encroaching afterlifes?
Wait. Afterlife? Sure! Virtual hells made for elephantine aliens with enormous virtual wars to take up their attention so it doesn't have to spill over into the real.
It's civilized, don't you know?
Of course, you can't say that for the people being TORTURED FOR ETERNITY within them. *sigh*
This one happens to be my absolute favorite of all the Culture Novels. I haven't read the 10th yet, but it's going to have to work double-time to beat this one.
I love all the characters, from the Eccentric Drones to the debt-enslaved victim of hell and her lover of oh so tragic fate. (Learning how to become a demon to escape the victim's-fate is pretty tragic, after all.)
And through this, the Culture sits and watches and makes noises that they'll never get involved in other species's conflicts unless ordered by Culture, proper, and yet they always seem to find ways to stick their noses in and make epic struggles and full-blown wars out of molehills.
Got to love it. :)
War For Hell! And as always, the ironic humor of the ships, their names, and the situations is all sheer delight. :) I mean, after all, the setting is, in fact, in an Elephant's Graveyard. :)
Lol. Great stuff! -
I was surprised to find that this book presents an almost perfect example of a philosophical problem that's been bothering me recently, to the extent that I even wrote a short paper about it. Briefly, and without giving away any spoilers, the core thread in Surface Detail is about the ethics of inflicting pain, or what looks like pain, on simulated beings. The conceit is that many societies in the Iain Banks "Culture" universe have traditions of an afterlife which resembles our idea of Hell. Their advanced technologies have made it possible actually to construct these infernal realms in simulated form, copying the mind states of deceased beings to them so that they will undergo a simulation of eternal punishment.
In the book, Galactic society is sharply divided concerning the morality of the idea. Some societies take the traditional line that "Hell" is needed in order to frighten people into behaving better while they are alive; others think that the notion of eternal punishment is barbaric and inhumane. But it seems to me that these are not the only ways to view the issues. Here's my little paper:
Is "mind crime" a coherent concept?
In his influential book
Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom several times refers to a concept he calls "mind crime". By this, he means inflicting the analogues of pain or death on entities which do not exist in the real, physical world, but only in worlds simulated inside computers. For example, Bostrom at one point suggests that a rogue superintelligence could use mind crime as a form of blackmail, creating simulations containing large numbers of simulated intelligent beings and then threatening to "kill" them by closing down the simulation. Later, he wonders whether it may be unethical to run certain kinds of reinforcement learning algorithms, since the nature of reinforcement learning is such that one is in effect inflecting pain on a simulated being. I think it is reasonable to say that these claims, at least at first sight, are extremely counterintuitive, and I will here argue that they may indeed be incoherent when more closely examined.
The point on which I disagree is whether there really can be anything morally wrong with creating a simulated intelligent entity which feels pain, or in terminating a simulation which contains intelligent entities. Now I can of course see the outlines of the argument in favour of these claims: the intuitive picture is that a simulated intelligent entity is in some (functionalist) sense just as "real" as an intelligent entity in the physical world, a simulation is in some sense a box containing the entity, and it's morally wrong to cause the entity to suffer pain or to throw away the box, which amounts to killing it. But does this argument stand up to critical examination?
It seems to me that there is an important point here which is perhaps being obscured. If the simulated entity is causally connected to the physical world by means of sensors and effectors, then I'm completely happy to grant the claims. In this case, the entity is in effect just another physical being which happens to be implemented in silicon rather than in protoplasm, and the same moral principles should apply to it as to organic entities. But I don't think it's so clear if the entity lives in its own self-contained simulated universe. In this case, I think one can reasonably apply another intuitive picture: the simulated universe, including the entity, is just a mathematical object, and running the simulation amounts to no more than applying a method useful for studying that mathematical object.
Now I am aware that this is dangerous philosophical territory, and one can wonder if it's basically recapitulating some version of the Chinese Room argument. But it seems to me that it's not really the Chinese Room in disguise. I'm not questioning whether the entity is in a valid sense conscious, or whether it has valid moral rights. I'm happy to grant all that. I'm just questioning whether the moral rights have any connection to us. If we think of intelligent entity X as part of a mathematical object, then it seems to me that all the moral issues are internal to that object, by virtue of the supposition that the simulated universe is self-contained. If the entity feels (functionalist) pain, and there is some causal reason in the simulated universe which explains why it's feeling pain, then we may legitimately take a moral position, and consider that it was wrong, say, for entity Y in the simulated universe to have caused entity X to feel pain. That much seems quite reasonable.
But we're outside the universe, so in what way can we say there is anything morally wrong with the fact that this mathematical object has certain properties? It has the properties it has: we can't affect them in any way. All we've done is choose to study this mathematical object rather than another mathematical object. Running the simulation doesn't cause it to exist "more"; it just helps us understand the mathematical object's properties more clearly. We can imagine different ways of studying it. Our initial intuitive picture of the simulation is probably that it proceeds, in some sense, a step at a time in a forward temporal direction, which feels like we're in some way helping it to exist. But we might also in principle perform some kind of integration which reduces the simulation to a closed-form solution. (Of course, in practice this would be extremely difficult). If we have a closed-form solution, we can use the simulation to read off the state of the world at a given time, or along some space-like surface, or whatever. We're just studying it, and there is little temptation to say that we are causing it to exist. If we stop reading off states at space-like surfaces, the only effect is on us.
All of these arguments involve concepts which are outside our normal experience; we have never seen an intelligent entity in a self-contained simulated universe, so our intuitions may be confused. As a reference point in a more familiar domain, it seems to me that the status of characters in a novel has useful commonalities. If Marianne in Sense and Sensibility feels pain, we may reasonably blame Willoughby for his heartless behaviour towards her. But it's not reasonable to blame Jane Austen. Willoughby is part of this universe and has both a casual and a moral relationship with Marianne, but Jane Austen has neither. She's outside the universe of the book. We can, if we like, blame her for causing us pain when we read the novel, but we can't seriously blame her for causing Marianne pain.
To conclude, it seems to me that the above arguments cast some doubt over the validity of "mind crime" as a legitimate concept. -
Iain M. Banks was taken away from us too soon. He was a genius of prose, structure, characterization and all kinds of SFnal ideas (by all accounts his mainstream fiction – published under the name of
Iain Banks with no M – is also so great).
Reading Iain M. Banks is more challenging than most sci-fi authors though, his novel’s structure and plotline are often very complex, byzantine even; but the reader’s effort is always rewarded. With Surface Detail Banks takes about 70 pages to set up the pieces and introduce the characters before the narrative settles down enough for me to familiarize myself with the characters and the situation. Having said that, the first few chapters are immediately interesting though a little perplexing. In this early section of the book Banks introduces quite a few point of view protagonists in mysterious and weird locations. Banks clears up most of the perplexities by gradually unfolding his more outlandish ideas without the expositions reading like dry infodumps.
As with most
Culture books there are multiple plot strands that Banks skillfully juggles and gradually weave together. The main plotline is to do with “Hell”, which is a virtual environment where digitized mind-states (consciousness) of dead people (souls of sorts) are put into perpetual punishment. The virtual Hell depicted in Surface Detail where one of the protagonists spend her time is indeed a very miserable and violent place where death is not an end to the torment as it is immediately followed by reactivation.
In spite of the very dark theme the novel is at times very humorous. The humour mainly comes from the dialogue and behavior of the Minds, the uber AI that controls the Culture civilization. I can't show you examples of the more comical moments out of context though. There is a large element of cyberpunk in this book. Fans of
Neuromancer and
Altered Carbon should find a lot to enjoy in this book. If
Redshirts or
The Martian represent your preferred flavor of sci-fi this book may not suit you. Beside great characters, ideas, humour, prose and dialogue, Banks is also brilliant with nomenclatures, the very long ship names and drone names are awesome yet subtly meaningful.
If I have one complaint it would be that the pace sags a little after the half-way point of the book, especially as one character is negotiating to buy a top of the line spaceship. However, the novel’s pace soon picks up again, in fact one confrontation scene between a protagonist and her arch enemy almost had me jump out of my seat. Surface Detail is highly recommended for anyone who enjoys Banks’ Culture series books, I am not sure it is the best entry point into the series,
The Player of Games would be better for that I think. I already bought
Look to Windward so I am looking forward to that. -
How do I love thee, Culture universe? Let me count the ways by playing--
Culture bingo!
Awesome tech: check
For starters, we have the standard fare of neural laces, AIs, drug glands, etc etc, everything that makes the Culture a level 8 civ. Today's main course is a Bulbitian, an ancient ship and a talking singularity. For desert, have a virtual Hell. Oh my.
Cool aliens: sorta-check
A clear majority of pan-human players this time, but you gotta love the GFCF. Plus, the Pavuleans are like...elephants or something? I can't quite remember.
Best AIs in science fiction: check
The Culture ships will never not be amazing. And funny. Oh to be on a GSV just once.
Humour: check
Demeisen, anyone? Banks should get awards for the way writes human/machine interaction. (Minor niggle: Not enough drones this time!)
Physics I don't get: check
Come on. There's a Talking. SINGULARITY. Boom.
Unputdownable: BINGO.
Also, if you, like me, have a habit of browsing the final pages of a book before you're even half-way through? DON'T. Not this time! Or if you must, don't look at the final word of the book. (HOW'S THIS FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL TORTURE). I, for one, didn't, so I didn't see it coming, and my jaw dropped about a mile. Now to read it again, knowing what I do.
Loved this. Despite some slow bits and some characters whose purpose still isn't clear to me (e.g. Yime), I still worship at Banks's altar. -
Well, it was better than 'Matter'.
But to me at least, Banks flaws are really beginning to start to irritate.
Banks seems completely unwilling to let anything actually challenge his precious 'Culture'. The typical story arc is to develop some sort of nominally galaxy threatening challenge to the Culture, which, near the end of the book, he'll reveal to be pathetically overmatched by the most trivial exercise of Culture might which arrives to aid the protagonist in all of its omnipotent dues ex machina glory right at the end thereby killing the tension he developed so carefully as easily as it kills the mustachioed scenery chomping one dimensional villains.
I mean seriously, Banks would hardly be more transparent if he had Gandalf riding in on the back of some giant eagles. I know what Tolkien is trying to say, but what is Banks trying to say?
Banks stories have become so stagnant and the Culture so impervious to change, that I'm beginning to really sympathize with the in story Sublimed that think the Culture needs to get out of perpetual adolescence and finish growing up. Can't we do at least one story that isn't a zero sum game? I mean these are novels written by one of the greats of modern science fiction, and not episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. At least, I think that they are. Is this 'Culture' really an end state past which no thought is possible? Can't anything even shake their apparently untouchable assumptions? The stories are even beginning to undermine themselves. Supposedly the Idrian War left half the ship Minds involved in it suffering from some cybernetic Post-Traumatic stress disorder and that's been hitherto one of the series major themes; but, it doesn't seem to me like the current generation of Culture Minds is going to have that problem given the relish that they now have for killing things. Is that or is that not positive more civilized growth in The Culture's perspective indicative of a maturing civilization? And at what point is Banks going to end up being as unreflective as the writers of 'The Authority' comic books?
I couldn't tell whether or not Banks was deliberately opening up more and more about the true second class citizen status of humans in the Culture in this book deliberately, or whether the fact that the minds really deep down don't consider humanity to be anything more than beloved, potentially disposable pets (not really persons the way Ships are) had ceased to bother him. And for all the fact that he's getting more explicit in his comparisons to the culture and its enemies to modern political systems or beliefs, he seems for me to be more and more deeply muddling his utopia vs. dystopia comparisons. Is that deliberate, or has he simply ceased to question his own framework?
The more he travels from his initial point of humans and AI's working as legal and moral and even in some cases utilitarian equals to humanity as beloved pet, the more lie it gives to the understanding of the characters in the story to how their world actually works. Take the 'given' in the story that the Culture has no currency. We are told again and again that the Culture has evolved past the need for currency. But if you actually try to examine the text to find out how the seemingly informal currencyless, lawless system actually works you soon realize that it is currencyless and lawless only from the human perspective. Much as the family dog may believe that he lives in a communist utopia of share and share alike when really the dog just simply isn't allowed to use the credit card, the humans in the Culture live in a world with a strictly defined currency - they just aren't allowed to own any of it. Granted, humans don’t exactly use their resources wisely, but is Banks saying that what we really need to do is submit ourselves and our resources wholly to the whims of benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient beings?
As best as I can tell, the actual currency of the culture, by which I mean the tokens by which labor is allocated in case anyone doesn’t know what money actually is, is the esteem held by the Minds. Now, in humans, 'esteem' is an abstract concept that can't be usefully traded on. But it's quite clear from the nature of Minds, that abstract concepts are in fact concrete, definable, quantifiable and can be traded on. The Minds in fact appear to conduct economic business under an entrepreneurial free market. It's either that, or else there is a central planning committee out there that can order other minds to exert their labor to create 2000 of these half-psychotic high-tech macho warships according to a standard design. As best as I can tell, ordering minds around would be like herding cats, and there is certainly no evidence of a central planning committee. What is really going on isn't communism, it's a free market barter economy tokenized by concrete measurements of esteem and favor that can be traded and probably even speculated on. The real economy is no more something humans are allowed to participate in than they are allowed to understand the way the Culture's actual legal system works. Humans participate in the real economy only in the way that a dog that fetches his master’s slippers and doesn’t doodoo on the bed may get a bigger bone in his Christmas stocking.
I’m not sure that it is exactly capitalism except maybe as idealized version with near infinite buyers and sellers possessing near omniscience, but it’s certainly not communism either. I can’t actually tell if Banks realizes that, or if he honestly believes that that all it would take is genetically reengineering humanity, producing cybernetic demigods of near infallible reason, and putting them in possession a nearly infinite supply of energy and materials to actually make communism work. Because, if it is the latter, then I’m not sure whether that constitutes a damning condemnation of communism as an economic system, or the thinnest attempt at justifying continuing to adhere to a failed murderous ideology since Holocaust denial.
Incidentally, the legal system is described as a ‘Court of Public Opinion’ but apparently actually also quantifiable by similar measures of esteem and some sort of common law framework so that judgments and opinions can actually be measured or discarded to produce a final binding result. The closest modern legal system to it would appear to be Shia Islam’s kritarchy system. Which, I find really ironic.
Don’t get me started on Banks exploration of religion.
Anyway, I enjoyed all the deep onion-like layers of the book and the fact that they didn't seem to have a bottom, but just for a while I'd like the narrator voice in the story to be actually as mature and complex as Banks story seems to be. Here’s to hoping that something will actually happen in the Culture in the future and we’ll get a chance to see a conflict that can’t be resolved by remorselessly and effortlessly blowing things up. -
Banks is one of my all time favourites, but had put out some disappointments recently - Algebraist and Matter were just plain no good. Some of the straight fiction stuff had also been really below par, but he's put out Transitions and now this and I'm ready to say 'all is forgiven.' There are some cookie-cutter chapters, where you think that he's repeating scenes and characters and just varying the outlandish architecture/hunt-scene/cruel game/unusual dinner and pretending that it's something else. There are genuinely weak elements... BUT, the Culture is back, baby! The tech is awesome, the aliens are fun. SC is joined by three more Contact departments and throwing around vicious, amoral super Abominator class spaceships and the bad guy is a real bastard. I've been sick for a bit, and this was my company. I can't remember the last time I was as happy to be unwell.
-
First things first: does anyone else picture Demeisen as David Tennant? Gaunt, gangling, fast-talking, humorous, with a tendency to switch within moments from cheerful to scarily intense, and with a jaunty enthusiasm for sharing viewpoints that...uh...have a tendency to fall outside the usual moral constraints? Every time Demeisen talked, I heard David Tennant.
Now the actual plot. Surface Detail centers around the concept of afterlives, and hell--well, hells-- in particular. Many "civilized" cultures had some basis for hell in their faiths, and when digital afterlives became a reality, they projected these beliefs onto the new realities. Without Hell, they argue, there is no moral center, no consequence for evil actions. Other civilizations--the Culture in particular--consider the idea of entombing sentient beings into eternal torment to be barbaric. And this is something that the reader, presumably, agrees with. But the interesting aspect, to my mind, is the logical extension into the Judeo-Christian belief system: if it's not okay to lock people up in Hell for all eternity, (1) why do we believe a loving God would do it, and (2) if we have some doubt about the reality of our own Hell, is it morally acceptable to threaten to people with that fate? How can we accept that an ultimate being would perform an act we find so repulsive in the virtual? The major distinction between our world and the one Banks creates--and one that Banks doesn't even discuss--is the power of the decision. Hell becomes marginally acceptable in the believer's mind because the ultimate decision is made by an all-perfect, all-knowing, all-forgiving(ish) God. But if your Hell is a piece of software, how can any fallible panhuman have the right to send someone there?
And then there's Interesting Issue Number Two, which again goes mostly unexplored by Banks but which, despite its familiarity, kept me fully preoccupied during the reading of the book: do the ends justify the means? Battlelines have been drawn up between the pro-Hell and anti-Hell factions, virtual battles rage throughout the afterlives, and Hell is winning the war. So the anti-Hell side decides to cheat, and, when all else fails, forswear their oaths and bring battle to the Real. The question: how is that possibly okay? Does the noble task of freeing the inmates of Hell overturn the respect for the rules? If the pro-Hell faction decided to cheat, we would see them as despicable. So why do we accept it when the good guys betray morality? The sum total of recrimination the pro-Hell guys receive is about a page's worth, but the irony echoes throughout the book.
The ideas of Surface Detail are fascinating; the plot and characters, not so much. The whole plot seems to me to be a vehicle for the ideas, to the point that I don't think Banks ever looked back and realized just how futile the characters' actions actually are. Looking back, I think there is exactly one character with meaningful agency in events: Demeisen. Who is awesome, in a David-Tennantish variety of creepy-but-awesome, or possibly awesome-but-creepy. Everyone else? And the villain of the piece is so utterly one-dimensionally evil that his very presence strips the book of nuance and complexity. In the end, only the Minds have real roles in the plot, which, given some of the issues brought up, may be the intent.
I have no idea if Banks was attempting to show the flaws in the Culture or if he genuinely thought their way of doing things is the best way. A few things that come out in this book: first of all, as one of the Minds cheerfully explains to Yime, Minds' lives mean more than human or drone. So everyone in the Culture is equal; it's just that ship Minds are more equal than others. And then there's the socioeconomic side. As another Mind tells Lededje, while SC has been known to off people at will, power and influence make them hesitate. Power and influence make their deeds have consequence in a way that simple life does not. And then there's the touted Culture "Court of Public Opinion.," where decisions regarding right and wrong are decided via peer pressure and social norms. It's absolutely not a democracy: as the Minds carefully point out, different groups' opinions have different weights, with Minds, of course, holding the lion's share. Again, everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. Majority and "gentlemen's agreements" have been proxy to law for much of history, often notably in times of horrific injustice. Such concepts of honor were highly respected in the American South, for instance, and few saw hypocrisy in maintaining honor with one's peers and enslavement of one's subordinates. And that's leaving out the issues of popularity, presentation, skew, and every other aspect of communication that turns objective fact into subjective experience. Before you assume that openness equals fairness, remember some of the great internet pile-ons and lynching sessions that turned out to be completely unjustified. Whenever anyone starts touting the fairness of the court of public opinion, I get a bad taste in my mouth.
Every scifi author eventually seems compelled to write a book challenging religion and the constraints it puts upon society, and Banks' contribution is certainly thought-provoking. Even though its characters and plot may be superficial, the ideas and questions of Surface Detail have depths worth fathoming. -
Surface Detail reminded me of
Matter-- a host of gee wiz ideas, snarky Minds, various aliens and such assembled around a rather simplistic plot. The background for the story emerges gradually and involves a virtual war between Pro and Anti hell factions/species. Once civilizations reach a certain point where they can construct 'heavens' and such, where people can 'retire' to after their bodily death (via 'soul keeper' tech), many species also constructed 'hells'. Banks is in rare form here, with rather pointed musings about morality and religion, for it seems some species believe that the threat of Hell is the only thing that makes people not do evil things. Eventually, the various civilizations decided to address the question of maintaining Hells by having a virtual war between the Pro and Anti Hell factions, with the outcome being the final decider on the issue. This virtual was has been ongoing for 30 years now, but apparently, the Anti Hell faction is losing...
Surface Detail begins with a series of chapters that end in the death of the featured protagonist, only to have them 'revented' later to become the main characters in the story. The basic plot is really simple. One of the revented persons, Lededje, our main protagonist, was basically a debt slave (debts her father owed no less) to a really nasty asshole named Veppers, a big wig in a pan-human society lower on the tech scale than Culture. She is murdered brutally by Veppers in an escape attempt, but due to an unknown neural lace, she is 'revented' by the Culture and wants some payback-- e.g., serious revenge on Veppers. We are also introduced to a soldier in the Hell wars, where it seems each chapter he dies a different way. There is also an alien in a Hell, who went there to make public how horrible it is, but while her partner escaped, she was stuck there. Finally, we have a Culture agent, not in Special Circumstances, but in another branch of Contact that deals with the dead.
As I mentioned in the beginning here, Banks seems content here to toss myriad big ideas and such right and left rather than provide a complex plot. If you are looking to be dazzled by his imagination, you will not be disappointed-- we have several alien species, strange alien habitats, lots of gee wiz Culture tech, including several snarky old ship minds, and a fairly detailed expose of the the society Veppers de facto rules. All good! Yet for me, the side story arcs featuring such dragged on more than one occasion and did not really add much to the overall story. Surface Detail felt more like an amalgamation of ideas (fun, interesting ones) rather than a cohesive story. Banks does give us lots to chew on here, especially with his thinly veiled critique of our scarcity based society and religion, but really did not break any new ground here. YMMV, however! Fun, but definitely not the best in the series. 3 stars. -
When one rates an audiobook, is one rating the quality of the underlying written work, the quality of the audio version, or both? I suppose I'll just clarify that my five-star rating applies to both in this case.
Surface Detail is the latest of the Culture Novels from
Iain M. Banks. The wait for this one was worth it. I think I'm ready to say that
Use of Weapons has finally been supplanted as the best of the Culture books.
I'll write a proper review of Surface Detail, the book, after I've read the hardcopy. For now I'll make a couple of points.
First, I love how the shock and consequences of the Idiran War continue to resonate across 1,500 years of Culture history. Fascinating stuff. How long will the shock of World War II resonate across our world's history? It seems that, only 65 years after WWII's conclusion, the shock is dissipating fairly rapidly at this point.
Second, this book keeps you going until, literally, the very last word of the epilogue. Obviously, I can't say here what that last word is without hitting the spoiler box. Let's simply say that the last word is worth waiting for, that it imparts a great deal of meaning to the rest of the book, a book already quite full of meaning. Well, maybe I should clarify that the last word imparts meaning to those of us who are Culture fans and have read a certain prior Culture book. Again, I can't say which book, or you might figure out what that last word is, which in turn would spoil some of Surface Detail.
About the audiobook, specifically: Surface Detail is read by my one of my favorite narrators, Peter Kenny. He's a master of voices; at times it seems that each character is being read by a different actor/narrator, but it's all just him. Peter Kenny also read the Transition audiobook, for those interested, and
my comments about him in that review apply with equal force here. Peter Kenny's voice and tone sound very much like the book would sound in my head were I reading hardcopy. He and Iain Banks are a match made in heaven. I have since listened to Peter Kenny's readings of Consider Phlebas and Player of Games and, I think, my ears have a man crush.
I suppose, then, I can't recommend Surface Detail, in hardcopy or audio format, strongly enough to those of you who share my love of good sci-fi. Happy listening! -
Good not great. The first Culture novel that I didn't absolutely love all the way through. Very inventive concepts represented here, but the plot threads don't come together as smoothly as they usually do in a Banks novel. The first half is fantastic, but the pacing gets a little slow in the second half as the narrative focuses almost entirely on side events and leaves the main story – the one I was most interested in anyway – to dwindle until the conclusion. Great little hook at the end to top it off and connect it back. Loved that.
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If you’re not already a citizen – if only in dreams – of the Culture then Surface Detail is not your path to naturalization. This is not to say that this isn’t a worthy part of the Culture mythology – it is. I enjoyed reading it, meeting a few more of the Culture’s citizens and learning a bit more about how its nonhierarchic, anarcho-communist civilization works. But that may be why non-Culture aficionados shouldn’t start off with this book. It’s heavy with unexplained Culture jargon (e.g., Sublimed races, the Ulteriors, Special Circumstances, the Idiran War); info dumps appear but they’re about new aspects of the milieu (e.g., Quietus, Restoria, the Nauptre Reliquaria and the Gespetian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy (mercifully shorted to GFCF)) and won’t help the novice. The best introductions to the Culture are still the earlier novels like Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games (my favorite).
Surface Detail takes up the Culture’s stance toward death and what happens to your “soul” when you die. Even the less advanced space-faring civilizations of the galaxy have the technology to store the brain states of their citizens. The Culture uses such tech to back up personalities that can be downloaded into new bodies (“revented”) whether in the event of death or simply because a person is tired of the current incarnation. Other civilizations, however, more religiously minded than the Culture, have created virtual Heavens and Hells to which their members migrate upon death. At the time the book opens, a virtual war (a “confliction”) has been waged for 30 real-time years between coalitions of pro-Hell civs and anti-Hell civs to decide the Hells’ ultimate fate. The anti-Hell forces are losing and plot to bring the confliction into the Real by destroying the physical substrates where the virtual Hells are hosted. The Culture, anti-Hell by nature and sympathy, has held aloof from the “war in Heaven” because it had been felt, at the war’s beginning, that its presence would have overbalanced the forces in play and made the anti-Hell coalition’s victory a surety. This doesn’t mean that the usual Culture suspects - i.e., Special Circumstances – aren’t trying to manipulate a win for the anti-Hell forces.
The existential dilemma for the Culture (at least for its biological citizens) is to live lives of meaning and consequence. Most manage to find some hobby or role that satisfies this need. Others find satisfaction by joining Contact (the lucky ones getting invited to join Contact’s black-ops bastard offspring Special Circumstances) or similar organizations (like Quietus). For the less group oriented, there’s always the options of the Ulteriors or the Forgotten. There’s a constant tension between not interfering with other civs and juggling affairs so that its neighbors come closer to the Culture’s ideal.
Against this backdrop, Banks weaves together the stories of six characters: Vatueil, a leader of the anti-Hell forces whose real identity links this novel to Use of Weapons (which is as spoilerish as I’ll get in this review; read the book to find out who); Prin and Chay, two inmates of one of the Hells; Joiler Veppers, the principal “bad guy”: Yime Nsokyi, a Quietus agent; and Lededje Y’breq, Veppers’ former slave. There’s a host of secondary characters as well, including Jasken, Veppers’ chief of security and the Culture Minds Me, I’m Counting (avatar Himerance) and Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints (aka FOTNMC, avatar Demeisen).
As I mentioned, I enjoyed this novel but I can’t help but feel that it would have been better focusing on fewer characters – I would opt for Lededje and Yime – and exploring the issue of death a bit more deeply. A case in point is the Veppers’ thread: He’s a disappointing villain because he’s a one-dimensional, mustache twirling figure. You know he’s loathsome and Banks piles on the loathsomeness until Veppers becomes a parody.
Another weakness chronic to the series is that humans are often just gilding – the super advanced tech of the Culture makes its biological citizens irrelevant. Which Banks recognizes: There’s a short subplot about the Culture’s efforts to contain a smatter outbreak* where Auppi Unstril, the human “pilot,” acknowledges that her presence aboard the ship limits its effectiveness. She’s there because it’s exciting, something to do and will make a real difference as opposed to a virtual adventure. Or that the FOTNMC single-handedly takes on the entire GFCF fleet and wins – and the FOTNMC is just a Limited Offensive Unit. Or that Lededje is murdered, resurrected and spends a good chunk of the novel trying to return to her homeworld to murder Veppers, only to have Demeisen deliver the coup de grâce. Banks is at his best when exploring the motivations of the Culture’s biological citizens or those who are reacting to its presence in their lives, and I think the book would have been better had he stuck more with Lededje and Yime.
I think with the last few Culture novels, Banks has been more focused on having fun with his universe than seriously exploring weightier themes, even though – as the jacket blurb says – “and it will not end until the Culture has gone to war with death itself.” He only tangentially raises the issues of consciousness and the meaning of death, and that’s primarily in the Prin/Chay thread, where the implicit conclusion is that the virtual Hells are cheats. They are constructed versions of what a particular species thinks is Heaven or Hell. Their denizens, copies of individuals whose “real” souls (whatever those might be) are forever lost to the perceptions of non-Sublimed cultures (and even then…).
To sum up, while Banks is more than capable of serious fiction, if you’re looking to find an in-depth exploration of consciousness (a la Blindsight) and life and death, you won’t find it here. You’ll also be disappointed if this is your first Culture exposure since you’ll need some background to fully understand what’s happening. However, if you’re already into the Culture and/or Banks, I think you’ll enjoy his latest space opera. In terms of quality, it falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum – I liked it more than Matter or Look to Windward but not as much as his more focused, weightier efforts like Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games. -
Surface Detail is the 9th volume in Iain Banks Culture series, and while Matter remains my favorite in the series, Surface Detail was a great reading experience. It is a discussion of the role of hell in society and the legitimacy of the rule of force.
In the far-future where mind recording and "revention," essentially technical reincarnation, are ubiquitous, many societies still believe that threatening the citizenry with eternal torture is the only way to "keep order." Initially, the concept of revention nullified the traditional beliefs of an afterlife through omission. With revention, the "soul" becomes the digital mind recording, and physical death is only temporary. To remedy this "problem," pro-hell societies created digital hells, where the mind recordings of bad actors are eternally tortured. This situation eventually leads to a virtual war between pro and anti-hell factions, deciding the virtual hells' fate.
I did feel that Banks didn't go far enough in establishing the "pro hell" side of the argument. He took the high road and framed support for the rule of force as an intellectual and political discussion. While he did a great job handling such a deep and complex topic intelligently, I felt the story would have benefitted from showing us why the rule of force exists. As good as the story was, I felt like it would have been more potent if Banks had depicted victims' shattered lives and let us make up our minds for ourselves whether bad actors deserve hell. What we are essentially talking about here, though, is the value of punishment in society. No author could even begin to explore all the complexities of this discussion in one book, let alone provide non-divisive answers. Banks has never shied away from tough subjects, though, and I feel he accomplished what he set out to do for story purposes.
Surface Detail is angrier and edgier in tone than previous volumes except for Use of Weapons. This appeals to me, and I can get by without "comfort characters," but some may not agree.
Character development and dialog were both done very well, although perhaps not as well as in Look to Windward and Matter. Characters are unique, engaging, interesting, and intelligent. Surface Detail is a darker, more serious book than the previous two, but there were still some choice comedic moments.
Craftsmanship is at the same high level as previous volumes. Banks' writing is as poetic and thought-provoking as ever. I will never tire of his use of misdirection and "smoke and mirrors." The ending was a great example of his incredible talent for leading readers to a significant and satisfying revelation with only the necessary breadcrumbs. I'm sure some people may have figured this one out, but I'm happy that I didn't because it made the big reveal all that much better.
Surface Detail was a great reading experience, and I can't recommend it highly enough to fans of the series. It's an absolute must to read at least The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Excession, Look to Windward, and Matter first.
This review is also posted on my blog, Hidden Gems. -
It begins in the realm of the Real, where matter still matters.
Iain M. Banksov Culture serijal me je oduševio već od prvog romana Consider Phlebas. Uvijek mi je trebalo malo da "uđem" u svaki roman, ali što sam dalje otkrivao Culture svijet mi je bio sve zanimljiviji, a Culture civilizacija mi je postala omiljena utopija. Vjerovatno je i jedina koja bi i mogla opstati jer u njoj ljudi nisu bitan faktor pa ni ne mogu dovesti do korupcije sistema i njegovog pada.
Culture civilizacijom vladaju Minds (kako i samo ime kaže Umovi) koji su učitani u ogromne brodove ili Orbitale - rijetko gdje Culture građani žive na planetima, većina je na ogromnim brodovima i svi žive u blagostanju. Nema novca, gladi, a resursi su gotovo neograničeni. Naravno, tu onda nema ni drame pa je radnja svakog romana iz serijala van Culture civilizacije, na planetima gdje ne vlada takvo blagostanje. I naravno kroz svaki taj scenarij Iain M. Banks se obračunavao, odnosno pokazivao nam naše moralne i općenito civilizacijske nedostatke. Uz to, uvijek je uspio stvoriti i zanimljive i jake likove, nerijetko su mi najzanimljiviji likovi bili dronovi (inteligentni "strojevi", koji jedva skrivaju prijezir prema ljudima, i nerijetko ih podbadaju svojim britkim humorom i zajedljivim dosjetkama).
Surface Detail je predzadnji Culture roman i možda sam i zato, barem nesvjesno, odugovlačio, jer je Iain M. Banks umro sredinom 2013., pa ima još samo jedan roman i onda moram napustiti taj svemir.
U svakom novom Culture romanu se detaljnije otkriva neki dio tog svemira, ovdje je najveći fokus na virtualnim svjetovima, koji su univerzumi za sebe, od raznih verzija Pakla, do bojnih polja sa virtualnim ratovima kojima se odlučuju sudbine cijelih civilizacija u Stvarnom svemiru (The Real).
Ovaj roman mi je najslabiji u serijalu. Matter, prethodni roman, izvukao je odličan kraj, a rasplet ovoga, iako zadovoljavajući, ostavio me bez osjećaja oduševljenja.
Banks piše dobro, iz svakog romana se može izvući mnogo zanimljivih citata, ali mi ga je ponekad i teško pratiti jer su mu neke rečenice nezgrapne ili jednostavno preduge.
Sama radnja mi nije bila toliko zanimljiva, a i likovi me nisu zainteresirali kao u prethodnim romanima. To može biti i zbog toga što sam roman čitao gotovo punih godinu dana, sa dugačkom pauzom od nekoliko mjeseci nakon pročitanih prvih 15%. Također malo kritičnije ocjenjujem otkad pišem i ove osvrte, tako da ovome ide četvorka, i to slaba. -
Banks has outdone himself in what might be the best Culture novel, in a series which never fails to deliver. In typical Banks fashion, he masterfully weaves disparate story threads into a whole, building into a magnificent crescendo of galactic intrigue and confrontation.
The story shines with an intricate plot, featuring vast, multi-nested virtual realities, and a cast of amazingly well developed characters, which of course include some of the wonderfully advanced, witty, sentient ship AIs (Minds). We're also treated to quite a bit of insight into the history and inner workings of many aspects of the Culture itself, Banks' fascinating, ultra advanced, post scarcity civilization.
My only regret is that I'm quickly running out of Culture novels to read :( -
I'm a big Banks fan in both of his incarnations. He's one of the giants for me, of SF and plain fiction in general. As with all the Culture novels he has the outstanding Culture 'mythos' backdrop to the story and like all his books he mixes original ideas with a range of characters that evoke sympathy and dislike in the reader, sometimes in the same character. This book has a brilliant central idea (do read this to find out what it is) and several threads to the plot-line. Now this where a lot of writers mess up - too many strands and a dislocation for the reader from the narrative - Banks manages this well in most of his books but in this one I was a little disappointed with the lack of development of one or two characters. Hence the 3 stars and not 4 rating.
However, it's still very enjoyable and a welcome return for the Culture. -
*This is a spoiler-free review.*
Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks is the ninth book in his Culture series and the twelfth science fiction novel that he wrote. Each book in the series can be read as a standalone, but that being said; I would not recommend starting here.
(If you are interested in jumping into the Culture I would suggest starting with
The Player of Games or
Consider Phlebas.)
Surface Detail is also the second to last book that Banks wrote under this name before he died of cancer in 2013.
I normally wouldn't mention much about an author or their personal/health situations in a review, but I believe that the topic is so closely linked to the subject matter found within the story of Surface Detail, that it would be a disservice not to mention it.
This is - above all - a story about death, what it means to die and, therefore, the value of life. Within the Culture - this society that Banks has created - death is fixable, avoidable and repeatable. Using personality back-up and custom body re-growing technology, a person can "revent" within a few days, with all but the most recent of their memories fully intact. This is just one perk of such advanced technology.
Another option to those faced with death is a digital afterlife. A technically artificial heaven in which you can do whatever you so desire - with a potentially endless time frame for an individual to enjoy all the pleasures and entertainment conjurable. These afterlives can be as realistic as life in the Real and it is often hard to differentiate between them in quality alone.
"The vast, coruscating landscape below was probably the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his long and varied existence.
It was heartbreaking that they had come here to destroy it utterly."
BUT. Not all is perfect. Other involved societies that have taken to the galactic stage, (some of which rival the Culture in size, but never in technological know-how) have created Hells.
These digital Hells were created for the express purpose of torturing their inhabitants. Unending pain, mutilation and suffering. Many of the occupants go mad, losing all sense of themselves, knowing nothing but a huge array of the most creative pains that any being could possibly imagine.
*I should note that whilst some of these scenes are rather disturbing, it is never overly gratuitous or fetishised, but it's worth knowing it's there for those who try to steer clear of such writings.*
But yes, death is a dominant theme throughout the book and it doesn't shy away from asking, and sometimes trying to answer, the myriad of difficult questions associated with it.
The book follows 6 main character perspectives and a handful of smaller peripheral ones too.
- Our first is a young lady called Lededje Y'breq. Lededje is from a non-Culture world and her family is indebted to the wealthiest person in the system. She herself is part of the debt owed and is marked as property with a full body tattoo.
(This tattoo, and it's perceived importance, is what inspired the title Surface Detail.)
- Next is Joiler Veppers, an industrialist, playboy and the aforementioned wealthiest and most powerful man in the system - the owner of Lededje Y'breq.
- The third perspective is Vatueil, a soldier who is fighting on multiple levels of the virtual war between the pro and anti-hell societies of the galaxy.
- The next characters come as a pair. Prin and Chay are academics and lovers. They plan to expose the truth of the horrendous goings-on in the various Hell's to those ignorant of it back in the Real.
- Lastly is Yime Nsokyi, a Culture agent. She is part of a team known as Quietus, whose purview is dealing with and assisting those entities who have either retired from biological existence into a digital form, or those who have died and been resurrected/revented back into the Real.
I thought at first that this was too many perspectives. I felt as though I was bouncing around a lot and felt myself getting a bit confused at the beginning, but about 1/3 of the way through it all fell into place and I realised just how important each story was to the others, and to the story as a whole.
“Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever.”
Whilst I do not know if Banks had yet been faced with his diagnosis at the point of writing this, it is very clear to me that he put a lot of thought into the importance and significance of death (or lack of) and the role it plays within a society.
Elevating these ideas, and many more, to a scope such as we are used to him doing within the Culture series, gives him a lot of space and time to really get creative and explore the themes through a multitude of lenses.
"At such moments she felt she was the very heart and soul of the ship; the tiny animal kernel of its being, with every other part, from her own drug-jazzed body out, like force-multiplying layers of martial ability and destructive sophistication, each concentricity of level adding, extrapolating, intensifying.
She plunged into the storm of swirling motes."
If you cannot tell from my ramblings, I adore Banks' writing and his imagination. The Culture novels are some of my all time favourites and I truly believe that anyone can find something in his books to enjoy, from the cool tech and his progressive thinking, to his wit and humour and his mind-bending ideas.
Whilst this isn't my favourite of his works, it's still lightyears ahead of many of the other sci-fi adventures out there.
This is another superb addition to the best Space Opera series available today.
4 stars.
“All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now."
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Thank you for reading this (once again) somewhat overlong review. I struggle to refrain myself when it comes to finishing and reviewing a Banks book and it is a real challenge to stay spoiler free.
I hope you are all doing well and that you are enjoying your current reads!
Up next for me will be
Elantris by Brandon Sanderson! -
There seems to be an epidemic of weak editing these days. Surface Detail is sadly not immune, either on the typographical (words and punctuation missing or misplaced) or stylistic (poor word choice, lack of clarity) front. It's not a major impediment, but it's disappointing.
Iain M. Banks' Culture books tend to exceptionally well-written, but also be dry, distant, and complex. Surface Detail is no exception. Characters with long, difficult names abound, and there are several plots and sub-plots, most of which come loosely together at the end. In fact, the epilogue relies on readers' memory of another Culture book from some years back. (I didn't get it and had to look it up).
Briefly, Surface Detail is about both an indentured servant/slave who breaks free, and a disagreement about the future of virtual "Hells". As always, Banks' writing is generally excellent, engaging, and witty. (Though there are some rough patches during which the editor seems to have fallen asleep.) Almost everything is plausible, though one key character is decidedly ex-machina and both inconsistent and non-credible in his actions. I'm always amazed at Bank's ability to keep a complex, multi-element plot moving smoothly through a massive book.
At the same time, while I enjoy Banks' writing, I often have difficulty remembering much about the Culture books afterwards. That may in part be because they're complex. However, I think it has more to do with the characters. They're likeable and realistic, but they seldom seem to have very deep emotions, and I always feel at a fairly great level of remove from them. Every now and then, I'm afraid with them, but more often I relate to them somewhat clinically. In this book, that's true of the central character, to whom many bad things have happened. I accept her desire for revenge, but I never really feel it, and since it's a plot driver, that's problematic. At the other end is a couple to whom bad things continue to happen. There, I felt a little more empathy, but always at some distance.
In short, in Surface Detail, as with other Culture books (and unlike the only Iain Banks [no M.] book I've read, A Song of Stone), I finished the book and thought "That was really well written." I did not think "I'm really relieved that Character X came out of it okay." My appreciation was much more technical than emotional.
This book won't change your mind about Banks. If you've liked other Culture books, you'll like this one. If you're new to Banks, you can start here, but you might be better of with Consider Phlebas or Use of Weapons. -
I am taking a break from Iain M. Banks, I have decided. To be precise, I decided this about halfway through this book, when the meandering plot and lots of torture (not approval of torture, but lots of it) were taking their toll. I stand by that. I was initially thinking of it as a permanent break, but the end of Surface Detail somehow convinced me that while I might need a break, perhaps even of a year or two, I may come back and finish off the Culture novels at some point.
Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision
here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at
Smorgasbook -
О, какъв финал само! Без да променя нещо същностно, без да преосмисля или мами, неочаквано дава (за челите Use of Weapons) фантастична нова перспектива към всичките 700 страници досега, към скритата и очевидната философия на Културата и въобще към механиката на тоя свят. Втората най-добра книга за Културата досега.
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INTRODUCTION: Iain M. Banks' early Culture books, "Use of Weapons", "Consider Phlebas" and "The Player of Games" as well as the standalone "Against a Dark Background" are among my top sff books of all time, with "Use of Weapons" (which I hope to review by year-end) still at #1 after 18 years since my first read and many re-reads in the meantime.
Last year's Transition was my number 1 sff novel of the year and this year Surface Detail will be most likely #1 sff of the year. Actually as structure goes, Transition was a pretty complex novel that required at least one reread for full appreciation, while Surface Detail is straightforward, though of course rereading it brings a fuller appreciation.
Surface Detail is also a Culture novel, the best since the early three and the first in which the global vision of the Culture as part of a well developed galactic community that started in Excession and Look to Windward, while being explicitly articulated in Matter, pays off big time.
I have seen before this attempt to proceed from relatively local adventure novels like the first three Culture books, to having a fully developed coherent "big picture" framework as in Matter and Surface Detail and it is not easy, but when it succeeds, it does big-time.
Because beyond being a very entertaining novel, Surface Detail is much more, an articulated vision of an Universe that while purely materialistic as far as its inhabitants know, allows the major goodies associated with traditional religion: souls, afterlife, though of course logically it has some of its drawbacks like Hell(s). All of course was implied from the first Culture novel (Consider Phlebas), but here and in Matter the edifice hinted before is explicitly built.
FORMAT/CLASSIFICATION: Surface Detail stands at about 630 pages divided into twenty nine chapters, the usual IM Banks "what happened later with the characters" coda and a tongue-in-cheek epilogue that was hinted already in chapter two; I considered the possibility slightly far-fetched at the time, though there was a general "you know, it actually could be" feeling there. About what, well read the book to find out...
Surface Detail has several threads with all kinds of POV's: humans in the extended Culture sense like Ledejde - the "ingenue" decided on justice at all costs, even if it's inconvenient for the great and the good like the mighty Culture itself, Vateuil, "the ultimate warrior", Veppers, "the businessman from hell" - not quite literally, but close and Yime, "the Culture agent", non-human quadrepds "Pavuleans" Prin and Chay who take a literal journey in (the Pavulean) Hell and the "elfin" Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III and of course the Culture Ships/Minds of which the The Abominator-class picket ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints and its bad boy avatar Demeisen take over the novel alongside Veppers.
Surface Detail is readable perfectly well on its own though a familiarity with the rest of the Culture novels only adds to its enjoyment.
OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: The main idea of Surface Detail can be summarized simply: the laws of the Universe allow mind-states aka "materialistic souls" and any sufficiently advanced civilization can build a virtual afterlife since physical immortality in the Real is still undesirable due to issues like finiteness of space and resources. Some of course build Heavens, but some build Hells too...
Of course many of the most advanced (stage 7 and 8) civilizations object to the existence of Hells and the Culture is the most powerful of such, but unfortunately some events recounted in "Look to Windward" made it recuse itself from the debate for a while now. When the Pro-Hell and Anti-Hell forces decide to fight a virtual war - "The War in Heaven for the fate of the Hells" - to decide the issue for ever, the Culture (officially) stands on the sideline which gives an unexpected edge to the Pro-Hell side. And of course like all virtual contests, the result needs to be accepted by both parties since after all there is the Real where the war may otherwise spill with potentially catastrophic consequences.
While not directly involved with the war - except for Vateuil whose career as AntiHell grunt-to-marshal is recounted in his thread - all the characters above will nonetheless play an important role in its context and resolution.
I will let the three characters that dominate the novel speak for themselves:
Ledejde:
“All those years, all those times I tried to run away, the one thing nobody ever asked me was where I might be running to.” She smiled a small, thin smile at the avatar, who looked surprised now. “If they had asked,” Lededje told her, “I might even have told them: I was running away to the Culture, because I’d heard they’d escaped the tyranny of money and individual power, and that all people were equal here, men and women alike, with no riches or poverty to put one person above or beneath another.” “But now you’re here?” Sensia offered, sounding sad. “But now I’m here I find Joiler Veppers is still deferred to because he is a rich and powerful man.”
Veppers (full quote here):
There was nothing worse, Veppers thought, than a loser who’d made it. It was just part of the way things worked – part of the complexity of life, he supposed – that sometimes somebody who absolutely deserved nothing more than to be one of the down-trodden, the oppressed, the dregs of society, lucked out into a position of wealth, power and admiration. ..... Still, at least individual losers were quite obviously statistical freaks. You could allow for that, you could tolerate that, albeit with gritted teeth. What he would not have believed was that you could find an entire society – an entire civilization– of losers who’d made it. And the Culture was exactly that.
Demeisen:
“What, this?” he said, looking down at the ash-dark burn on his skin as Lededje stared at it, openly aghast. “Don’t worry; I don’t feel a thing.” He laughed. “The idiot inside here does though.” He tapped the side of his head, smiled again. “Poor fool won some sort of competition to replace a ship’s avatar for a hundred days or a year or something similar. No control over either body or ship whatsoever, obviously, but the full experience in other respects – sensations, for example. I’m told he practically came in his pants when he learned an up-to-date warship had volunteered to accept his offer of body host.” The smile became broader, more of a grin. “Obviously not the most zealous student of ship psychology, then. So,” Demeisen said, holding up his hand with the splinted finger and studying it, “I torment the poor fool.”
This is not say that the rest of the cast, especially Vateuil, Yime, Prin and Chay do not have important complementary roles but for me those three elevated the novel beyond all recent Culture novels which lacked precisely that: powerful, larger than life characters and here we have Veppers and Demeisen, while Ledejde is the most sympathetic Banksian character in a while for her quiet determination.
I talked about world building and sense of wonder in the introduction, while the coming together of the various threads is handled very well but I would like to add that there are so many great touches that I could fill two pages talking about them and those give Surface Detail a very rich texture. The novel has a lot of humor and I found myself laughing out loud at quite a few scenes, with the quotes above just a small sample.
If there is one negative is that the whole is somewhat less than the sum of the parts in the sense that each thread is very engrossing and with lots of specific goodies - the Pavulean Hell, the virtual War, the Unfallen Bulbitian and the Tsungarial Disk have each their goodies so to speak, in addition to the awesome stuff in the threads following Veppers, Ledejde and Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints/Demeisen - but the main story is quite straightforward. So in a sense you could look at Surface Detail as a core-story with beautiful ornate wrappings which one enjoys more in themselves than as part of a larger tapestry.
But that does not matter since Surface Detail (A++) is as good as speculative fiction on a large scale and about "big issues" gets from all points of view: great writing, powerful characters, coherent and detailed world building and just sheer sense of wonder and inventiveness. If you want to experience the best that sf has to offer these days and understand why written sf is still such a vital part of the "landscape of imagination", Surface Detail is the one 2010 novel for you. And the book has the added bonus that you can start exploring IM Banks' wonderful Culture universe just by reading it, even if you have not read previous Culture novels. -
With the ability to create any kind of Virtual Reality imaginable, some civilisations have created Hell. Each respective society would punish those they deemed to deserve with virtual eternal torment, but no less real to the mind experiencing it.
I found this an incredibly imaginative way of dealing with the idea of death and the afterlife without making the story supernatural. It’s almost even believable. It’s quite easy to imagine the justifications presented for creating a virtual Hell to punish people – it sounds similar to justifications for the death penalty. It’s also interesting to imagine the ways fundamentalist religious people may justify actually creating the afterlives of their religion, something that Surface Detail unfortunately doesn’t touch upon.
Of course, many other civilisations find this practice of eternal torture barbaric. The galactic community therefore decided to host a ‘confliction’ – a way of preventing conflict in the ‘Real’ world by fighting a war in virtual reality, with both sides swearing to abide by the outcome. In this case, should the anti-Hell side win, the Hells would be abolished. However, this arrangement can only work when you can be certain each side will adhere to the result. Consequently, the Culture did not take part in the confliction in order to deny the pro-Hell side the opportunity to call foul; “Of course you were always going to win with the Culture on your side!”
Unfortunately, the premise is one of the better things about an otherwise disappointing novel.
The antagonist of the story is a cartoonishly evil capitalist called Joiler Veppers, whose lack of emotional depth makes his POV chapters a real slog. The book opens with him murdering his chattel slave when she attempts to escape. The murdered slave, Lededje, is then unexpectedly reincarnated aboard a Culture ship because sci-fi stuff. She immediately decides to return to her home to kill Veppers. Lededje is an enjoyable enough character, and her journey back home with the Culture Mind Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints has to be my favourite human/ship-Mind pairing of the series so far.
Vatueil is a soldier who has fought the War over the Hells for several lifetimes, working his way through the ranks until he is now in a position to decide policy. When the anti-Hell side seems set to lose he chooses break the agreement of the confliction and cheat, first attempting to hack into the Hells and, when that doesn’t work, to bring the war into the Real.
Yime Nsokyi is a Culture agent who spends most of the book attempting to reach Lededje to stop her from killing Veppers, as killing the most powerful man in the region without carrying out the proper calculations isn���t the way of Culture interventionism.
Chay and Prin are academics belonging to an elephantine-esque herd species, and they abhor their society’s use of Hell. However, they haven’t been able to mobilise the public to fight against the virtual Hell, as their leaders deny its very existence, saying it’s simply a rumour, though a useful one for keeping general population in line. As a result, Chay and Prin decide to enter Hell, in order return with evidence of its existence and work to mass public opposition towards it.
Surface Detail uses these different strands of the story to gradually reveal a plot regarding the War over the Hells but I’m sure it needs so many. Yime Nsokyi was an mildy interesting character but she had very little to do. Veppers was disappointingly unambiguous, especially given Iain Banks refusal to include any true ‘villains’ in his previous Culture novels, instead always opting to flesh out his characters to the point where you can’t even bring yourself to call the most heinous crimes the work of an ‘evil’ person. This isn’t the case here. There’s absolutely nothing redeeming about Veppers. Lededje is…just okay.
Finally, there’s a reveal at the end of the novel which actually cast the story in a more negative light for me personally, as the reveal makes you realise that the Vatueil character had MUCH more potential.
The only story I consistently enjoyed was Chay and Prin’s. Hell has driven Chay to madness and she’s convinced there was never any life before Hell, and that the ‘Real’ was just a myth in order to keep them hoping, and thus making their torment worse. It’s therefore down to Prin to break them both out of Hell, as per the original plan to get back to the Real and expose its existence to the public. But something goes wrong and only Prin gets through, leaving Chay in the Hell alone to face even worse punishment for their escape attempt.
If you’ve read much Banks, especially books like The Wasp Factory and Use of Weapons, then you know he takes a sadistic pleasure in the obscene. He must have been in his element thinking up horrific punishments dished out in Hell. One particularly horrific element of the torture was his description of the demon’s semen burning like acid, and that it leads to the conception of some kind of parasitic monster which will agonisingly bite and claw and rips its way out of the victims they rape. This can happen to both men and women, no womb required – Hell doesn’t discriminate.
But I digress. I liked quite a few elements of Surface Detail, some of the side characters are fantastic and I adore the overall concept of what would if some societies used them to bring create virtual manifestations of afterlives. But many of the main characters are one-note and the gradually revealed conspiracy isn’t all that interesting. Overall I didn’t enjoy the book very much.
So, after reading six-out-of-ten Culture novels, the score sits at 3-3; I loved The Player of Games, Use of Weapons and Look to Windward but didn’t enjoy Consider Phlebas, Excession or Surface Detail. However, the best thing about the Culture series is you can really dislike a book (or even many books) but still find that my love for the series as a whole is more than the sum of its parts. -
It's His Party and You're Invited...
As in "Matter," the last Culture installment, Banks waxes at length in "Surface Detail." Happily, SD is more interesting than its predecessor, and features more tidbits about the Culture - that industrious, indefatigable, galaxy-spanning civilization that has always been the most interesting character in a series that is essentially a collection of character pieces. The plot and writing and characters are competent at best, and tedious at their worst. Really, the main reason I read these is because Banks has created a hell of a sandbox to play in, and when he's at his most exuberant, his creations achieve a scale that steals all of the oxygen out of the room. I still get chills when he delves into the nitty-gritty of a General Systems Vehicle.
As I say above: Banks has thrown a party, and you're invited. It's his party, though, so expect some indulgence on his part. -
Iain M. Banks has earned more than a little slack from us over the years with his prodigious and amazing output.
Surface Detail calls some of that back in. The book takes its time getting started. Its multiple opening chapters seem like little more than vignettes. But Banks' ability, the trust that he has earned over those decades, should keep you reading, as he begins weaving these disparate tales together.
Surface Detail turns out to be something like a pleasant, prolonged stroll through unfamiliar areas of a favorite park. It is a Culture novel, and that is really all you need to know—all of the familiar trappings are here: whimsically-named starships with wise-cracking drones and avatars on a human scale; vast and ancient engineering marvels; depraved individuals at the top of their barbaric capitalist civilizations, coming up against the urbane, effete Culture which will, in the end, best them with one manipulator metaphorically tied behind its collective back.
But there is much that is new here as well. The heretofore unmentioned Hells, for one main thing—virtual afterlives to which the less-than-virtuous are consigned, in those civilizations that, unlike the Culture, still believe in such notions. (There are Heavens, too, but they are of course much less interesting and figure very little in the novel.) There is a war in, and among, the Afterlives, both Heavens and Hells, a virtual war that has been going on for thirty years. That's three decades in the Real, that is—time runs differently in the Afterlives, and death is but a temporary setback.
Now, though, things are coming to a head, and the confliction between the anti-Hell and pro-Hell forces is threatening to spill over into the Real, in defiance of all treaties, all honorable agreements among the combatants.
Will the Culture sit idly by while the carnage mounts? Will the worthy be redeemed, and the wicked (and there are most certainly wicked) be punished? The surface details vary, but the outcome never really seems to be in doubt.
Despite or maybe because of its length,
Surface Detail's impact seems blunted. Unfocused. Obscure. I liked it well enough, myself—I always like visiting the milieu of the Culture and its surrounding, less-genteel Galactic neighbors, and on a sentence-to-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph level, Banks' writing remains as sharp and entertaining as ever. But I'm thinking I'd like to see something a little less Cultured, next time. -
I don't know... I think Banks may have finally reached the limit of engaging stories he can tell in the Culture universe, without perhaps going for more small scale intrigues rather than galaxy shaking events. This is by no means a full review, but I'll jot down a few thoughts and impressions.
Banks displays his usual skill with words, but in the end the whole thing was a bit... boring I guess. I really didn't care that much about any of the characters, the things they were doing didn't really seem to matter and nothing about the narrative really grabbed me and pulled me in.
Speaking of the narrative, I found it a bit too fractured and it had too many side plots that really didn't amount to much. The whole side story about the two aliens who set out to investigate and expose the virtual Hells could have been completely eliminated without affecting the rest of the book in any significant way except to shorten it.
The Hells themselves are the source of the conflict in the book, various sides, conspiracies and factions seeking to either eliminate them completely or maintain them. Frankly, the various twists, turns, betrayals, secret deals, and clashes between the various factions as they war over the fate of the Hells was a bit hard to follow. And in the end, the convoluted narrative didn't do much except to seemingly do nothing more than inflate the word count.
The plot of the book was essentially split between the war for the Hells and the adventures of a young woman murdered and then "revented" or cloned into a new body who then seeks revenge on her killer. That story element was by far the most interesting part of the book, unfortunately with so much else going on, it didn't really get a chance to be front and center as it should have.
Where the book shines, as all Culture novels do, is when we are witnessing the interactions of Culture citizens and the hyper-intelligent Minds, essentially godlike A.I.s, of the Culture ships with various other characters. Many of the Minds are delightfully eccentric and their antics are a real joy to read. Much of the dialogue between more mundane characters falls flat, unfortunately.
All in all, a decent book, but by Iain M Banks standards probably the weakest of the Culture novels to date. If you're a Banks or Culture fan, by all means, read the book. If you're not a hard sci-fi fan or couldn't care less about the Culture universe then you can give this one a miss. -
Another excellent installment in what's probably my favorite ongoing SF series. Banks plays with themes of life, death, illusion and virtual reality, in a number of permutations and twists that's dizzying right from the beginning. There's more sheer old-fashioned sense of wonder in this book than you can shake a stick at. Some of the story lines are painfully intimate, others relate to the galaxy-wide politics of the "In-Play" civilizations, one of which is the post-scarcity Mind-run Culture we've all come to know and love. Also, the epilogue provides a delicious little twist that connects Surface Detail to a previous book in the series. I'll write a longer, full-length review later, but for now I'd say this is a very strong addition to a superb series. 4.5 stars.
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Surface Detail is a 5-star interesting story with a 3-star ending. It suffers from a degree of the lack of follow-through inflicting other Culture novels. However, most of the major themes did come together in the end, so it wasn't bad. Heck, the first half was so captivating and invigorating, full of interesting situations and characters to love and hate, I even went on record as hopeful for a top 5 SF novel. But, alas, no.
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Fantastic concept of hell and the war of heaven vs hell. But, several pointless major characters that have nothing to do with the convoluted plot developments at all left me scratching my heads at the end. I guess just like Banks’s other books : cool concept, weak characters, relatively disappointing result 🤔.
3 Star.
