How Buoyant Is The TARDIS?

During last night's airing of 'Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS' I discovered that the Doctor's spaceship—famously bigger on the inside than the out—is actually infinitely big on the inside. I tweeted:

A TARDIS infinitely big on the inside, would be infinitely buoyant. How does it ever sit on the ground? Should float up like a balloon.

Several people corrected me, amongst them Alastair Reynolds, whose scientific education and knowledge are both vastly greater than my own. Al tweeted:

No.

In my foolishness, I had assumed buoyancy to be a simple index of relative density. Al educated me:

Bouyancy depends on the volume of displaced medium - ie, outside dimensions of Tardis. Interior dimensions irrelevant. Bouyant force depends only on volume of displaced fluid. Whether object sinks, floats or rises depends on weight of object (mass x force of gravity) versus bouyant force.

I forgive him his spelling of 'buoyant', since factually he was right and I was wrong. Here's Wikipedia:

For objects, floating and sunken, and in gases as well as liquids (i.e. a fluid), Archimedes' principle may be stated thus in terms of forces: "Any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object." -- with the clarifications that for a sunken object the volume of displaced fluid is the volume of the object, and for a floating object on a liquid, the weight of the displaced liquid is the weight of the object. More tersely: Buoyancy = weight of displaced fluid.

The problem with 'intuitive' understandings of science, for example my unschooled understanding of buoyancy, is that they're as likely to be wrong as right.

So. A metre sphere of lead will sink in water, because the weight of water it displaces by its volume is much less than the weight of the sphere itself. A metre sphere of wood will float in the water because the volume of water it displaces it greater than the weight of the wood. A TARDIS dropped in water, or in air, would displace an (external) TARDIS-volume of water, or air, as Al says: let's say it's 2m x 1m x 1m (I'm sure the 'actual' dimensions are online somewhere, but I can't be bothered to look). It will therefore only float if the TARDIS itself weighs less than 2mᶟ of whatever medium it displaces (2mᶟ of water weighs 2000 kg; 2mᶟ of air at ground level weighs 2.45 kg).

But, wait: how much does the TARDIS weigh? There is a relationship between density and weight, after all: denser objects have more stuff in them and so weigh more. So I return to my initial intuition. We calculate density by dividing an object's mass by its volume. And here we don't even need to know what the TARDIS's mass is, beyond noting that it is a finite number. If the blue box's internal volume is infinite, however much mass it possesses its density will be infinitesimal. So if the TARDIS (density effectively 0 kg/mᶟ) materialises in water (density 1000kg/mᶟ) it will surely float. It will only displace 2mᶟ of water, but it will still float. The same applies in air. On a cold day the gas inside a helium balloon has a density of 0.1785 kg/mᶟ. Think how quickly it ascends through air. The TARDIS, being 'made up' of a material nearly a fifth of a kg/mᶟ less dense, would float up that much faster.

Or, wait—have I just re-stated my original erroneous perception in different terms?

Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward (2000)

Or, 'The One About the War-Guilt'. So, here's a thing. The novel's dedication—to 'The Gulf War Veterans'—speaks to a pre-9/11 historical moment of relative innocency, when there was no need to specify which Gulf War was being referred to. And actually, re-reading Look To Windward I was struck by how largely my sense of it was awkwardly pranged across the 9/11 hinge. Put it this way—had Banks published this novel in 2002 instead of 2000 it would have been universally received as a metaphorical intervention into the fall of the Twin Towers. The Culture (that is, 'The West', otherwise known as us) had, with the best intentions, been meddling in the local politics of Chelgrian Space (that is, The Middle East). Despite the self-proclaimed virtue of their intentions, events in the region went tits-up; a civil war killed billions. The Chelgrians are descended from a predator species, and characterised by such Orientalised characteristics as a rigid Caste system (like in The East!), a proneness to violent action (like Orientals!) and an unshakeable belief that they have a direct-line to Heaven for those who die, although only those who die the right way (no cowardly suicides permitted past the pearly gates; but those who die gloriously in battle are a shoe-in). The Culture admit their culpability in the disaster, mumbling something about how 99% of their interventions go well, but that they had underestimated the innate belligerence of the predator-evolved Chelgrians. Yeah, right. The Chelgrians are not mollified.  And we can't blame them: they have had a direct communication from Heaven telling them that their war-dead will only be admitted once an equivalent number of Culture citizens have been slain in vengeance. This leads to the novel's main plot strand: a Chelgrian called Major Quilan is dispatched to a large Culture Orbital called Masaq' with the mission to, effectively, fly a big plane into it (actually to import wormholes connected to huge weapons caches, in order to destroy the Hub's governing Mind and this kill a significant portion of the Culture folk this Mind tends). Such tension as the novel generates—and Look To Windward is an inventive, readable and only slightly diffuse 350-pages—depends from this narrative hook: will Quilan succeed? His memory has been occluded in case the Culture try to read his mind (that is: he has literally been brain-washed! Mohamed Atta's staring eyes!); and the novel threads out nuggets as he recalls them that fill us, the reader, in on his motivation (he lost the love of his life in the war), his training, his society and so on. But, wait: Banks published this novel in 2000. The [SPOILERS!] denouement, in which the Hub is spared, combined with revelations about the involvement of the Culture Minds known as 'The Interesting Times Gang', doesn't put the 2000 reader out, although it would have felt sentimentally evasive in a 2002 novel. Another way of putting this would be to say: Look To Windward is a novel overtaken by history. But that's the fate of all novels.

Still, Banks's studiedly general 'to The Gulf War Veterans' must mean that this is the only science fiction novel deliberately dedicated to, amongst others, Norman Schwarzkopf, Andy McNab, and Saddam Hussein. So that's something.

This, as you have probably guessed, is my roundabout way of saying that I found something heavyhanded in the implied parallels the novel suggests. On the one hand, the wars the Culture fought against rigid religious fundamentalist caste-based societies like the Idirans (also a component of this novel) and the Chelgrians.  On the other, in our world, the West, the East, and the twain meeting with much bloodshed. The novel's first chapter, 'The Light of Ancient Mistakes', involves the rather nice conceit that the Masaq' Oribtal is positioned exactly 800 light years away from the site of the mass-death of Idirans. Chelgrian mass-death [commentators below remind me, the light of ancient mistakes is actually shining from the Idiran war, not the more recent Chelgrian one]; so the light from the nova that snuffed out their billions is only just arriving as the novel gets underway. Cut to our world: go back 800 years from 2000 and we're at—oh! The Crusades! Heavy-handed? Or should that be, heavy-tentacled, or heavy-drone-fielded, or ... oh never mind.

Conceivably my annoyance was compounded of the fact that I didn't notice any Orientalism at all when I first read it, back in those pre-9/11 days. I was blanker-minded then; and though racism repelled me, then as now, I was much less conscious of the ways that ignorance can, in itself, not only be racist but dangerously racist. Ignorance shapes our world-views and attitudes in ways of which we are not even aware, which makes it, and those views, harder to amend.  My reaction to Look to Windward also records a sense that, in lots of other ways, this is a deeply enjoyable, absorbing read. A secondary plotline, set aboard a huge 'airspace' artificial environment with sentient dirigibles, people falling and flying, all lit by moon-sized floating spotlights ('eyeballs the size of small moons whose annihilatory furnaces switched on and off according to a pattern dictated by their slow dance around this vast world', 158) was very nifty. I would concede that the nift involved was more of a 'oh! cool worldbuilding!' sort than anything to do with character, plotting or writing; but that's OK.

My reaction to Quilan himself was more mixed. The early stages of his grief are well-drawn, I think; the blanknesss and lack of affect followed by a raw pain, threaded with anger, and longer periods of depression and misery. It’s a human pain, despite the fact that Quilan is supposed to be descended not from a hominid but a five-legged tiger or whatever—I genuinely found the specifics of the Chelgrians physique hard to keep straight in my head: occasional descriptions of extra arms and fur simply didn’t do enough to counterbalance the extremely-very-much human-flavour of their speech patterns, emotional habits, frames of reference and so on. So, yes: it’s a human pain, but a believable and even a moving one. Or at least in the early stages it is: because it sticks there. Quilan’s grief never goes past its suicidal stage because Banks needs a suicide-bomber (tooled-up by Space Bombs and Bigger Bangs) for his plot. Perhaps that’s not fair—perhaps Quilan’s grief never goes past its suicidal stage because, for some people, that’s how bereavement is. But I couldn’t shake the sense that an emotional portrait that actually touched me in the first half of the novel stopped doing so in the second. 'There can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered’ one of his superiors tells him at one point, and there's something in that.

There is a great deal of jaw-jaw in this novel about the rights and wrongs of Culture interference, and I've been trying to get it straight in my head whether this is a feature or a bug. It's clearly one of the main things Banks is using his novel for: the Chelgrian caste-system is very nasty indeed for those at the lower ends of it, and (as with the Hells in Surface Detail) the novel pays only the merest lip-service to the arguments of the higher caste wallahs that it also provides benefits in terms of social stability and tradition and life-structure. We, the readers, never doubt for a moment that life in the Culture is better, something reinforced at the end when [SPOLER! AGAIN!] the die-hard traditionalist Chelgrian general Sholan Hadesh Huyler, who has spent the novel egging Quilan on in his Mohamed Atta-ish mission, reveals that he's been working for the Culture all along. 'They showed me all there was to be shown about my society and theirs and, in the end, I preferred theirs' [356] he says, deflatingly. That this epilogue comes immediately after a scene in which the Culture send a Magic Djinn (well, an 'E-Dust Assassin') to kill the Chelgrians responsible for the attack on the Hub may be intended as irony. Hard to say. Remember: this is a pre-9/11 novel. Remember above all that the Culture doesn't believe in torture. It is too civilized for such barbarities.

Estodien Visquile opened his mouth to scream for mercy. She became insects—they represented something of a phobia for the Estodien—and poured into his throat, choking him and forcing open the route to his lungs and to his stomach. The insects packed each tiny air-sac in his lungs tight; others bulked out the Estodien's stomach to the point of bursting and beyond, then invaded his body cavity, while others rammed down into the rest of his digestive system, forcing an explosion of faecal matter from his anus. [LTW, 352-3]

Take that, Osama! Sorry, no, wait: it's 2000. And anyway: we're civilised. We don't approve of torture.  In The Hydrogen Sonata, Cossont asks one of the Minds ‘You’re not allowed to torture people, are you?’ and the ship replies ‘I believe the consensus is it remains one of the few temptations we don’t indulge in.’[HS 182].  So—

She pulled the canopy open. The white-furred male lashed out with an antique knife; it penetrated her chest and she let it hang there while she took him by the throat and lifted him bodily out of the machine. He kicked and spat and gurgled. The knife in her chest was swallowed inside her as she walked to the edge of the terrace. He hung easily in her grip, as though he weighed nothing; his kicks seemed to have no appreciable effect on her whatsoever. At the terrace edge she held him over the balustrade. The drop to the sea was about two hundred metres. The knife he had tried to harm her with appeared smoothly out of the palm of her hand, like magic. She used it to skin him. She was ferociously quick; it took a minute or so. His screams wheezed out through his partially crushed windpipe ...she threw the knife away and used her own claws to rip him open from midlimb to groin, and then reached inside pulling and twisting at the same time as she let go of his neck. He tumbled away, finally screaming in a high hoarse voice. She was still holding his stomach in her hand. His intestines unravelled, whipping out of his body in a long,quivering line as he fell. Skinned and disembowelled he was light enough—and his entrails sufficiently elastic as well as firmly anchored—for him to bounce up and down on the end of his own guts for a while, jerking and quivering and shrieking, before she let him fall into the salty waves. [LTW, 354]

Itchy, meet Scratchy.



GENERAL THOUGHTS ON THE CULTURE 4

Another repeated theme of Look to Windward is Subliming. The Chelgrian's access to Heaven comes about via a group of Sublimed Chelgrians who, unusually, are still kind-of hanging about in our untranscendental space. I take it that in this novel Banks uses the Sublime as a way of highlighting the imperfection of The Culture. 'To flourish, make contact, develop, expand, reach a steady state and then eventually Sublime,' we're told, 'was more or less the equivalent of the stellar Main Sequence for civilisations, though there was an equally honourable and venerable tradition for just quietly keeping on going, minding your own business' [LTW, 145]. The galaxy regards the refusal of the Culture to Sublime as a puzzle ('behaving like an idealistic adolescent'). One of the things we learn in this novel is that perfect AIs always Sublime [LTW, 110]. What is a perfect AI?:

AIs tended to reflect the civilisational demeanour of their source species ... a detectable flavour of the intellectual character and basic morality of that precursor species.... What various Involved, including the Culture had also tried to do, often out of sheer curiosity once AI had become a settled and even routine technology, was to devise a consciousness with no flavour; one with no metalogical baggage whatsoever.

Hence, perfect AI. And what was discovered was that without said baggage, or flavour, the AI immediately bailed on reality and upgraded to the Enfold.

Alrighty-tighty: the Culture Minds are, we are repeatedly told, bogglingly advanced and intellectual and omnicompetent; but they are not perfect. Look to Windward is, centrally, about that imperfection -- about the grit in the Culture-Mind shell that holds them back from Subliming. My worry is that it doesn't add up. The mistake, intervening in Chelgrian affairs, did not happen because the Minds were too attached to reality. It happened because the Culture Minds didn't foresee that taking a low-caste individual and making him emperor of everybody in a warlike predator society that has been stuck in its caste-hierarchy for unimaginable lengths of time might have negative consequences. Towards the end of the novel one character, pondering the desire of one Culture mind to die, ponders: "I find it hard to understand how something as fabulously complicated and comprehensively able intellectually as a Mind might also want to destroy itself.' But the Chelgrian fuck-up is not the consequence of fabulously complicated and comprehensively intellectually-able strategist examining the situation and acting. It is the consequence of a George-W-Bush-level of short-sighted stupidity. We have to take it on trust that Banks' Minds are as godlike as he keeps saying they are. In this novel they certainly don't seem to be.

This, then, seems to me the place where the novel doesn't add-up. The 'imperfection' of the Culture Minds is supposed to be about the flavour of the civilisation and mental attitudes of the people (broadly: higher-tech us) who created them. So, the Minds are superrapid computational marvels and omnicompetent thinkers, but with a penchant for Richard Clayderman or a preference for green over other colours, or whatever.  But this is not the sort of imperfection Look to Windward depends upon.  The plot hinges upon a strategic intervention into an alien species of genuine, bald-faced idiocy: not aesthetic-bias idiocy, but basic computational prediction and assessment idiocy.

Iain M. Banks, Matter (2008)

Or: the one about the Shellworld.

PROLOGUE

A light breeze blew. It lifted a feathery veil of dust from the plains of Barkshĭjr, and shifted a lock of hair across Adam's forehead -- or would have done, had not the passing of immemorial time erased such strands from his shining pate. Adam was the only one of his kind within several thousand light years.  Grains of dust. Galactic scales. Hop from the one to the other. I'm sure you appreciate the sudden shift in scale from the very small to the mindblowing big. Without the former you don't appreciate the latter you see.

Away, across the sodden Barkshĭjr plains, the mighty army of Bankspectations was approaching nearer and nearer.

'It'll take you hours and hours,' said the machine-lisible. 'Hours and hours and hours. 593 pages! Including a stonking great set of appendices—and an epilogue after them.'

'I know,' said Adam.

The machine-lisible looked like a scruffy compact suitcase; brown and yellow on the outside, and foxed throughout with row upon row of regimented glyphlines. It moved a little on the table, as Adam prodded it with his finger. 'Have we deployed the gratuitous sweary-words yet?'

'Fuck,' said the machine. 'No.'

'Fuck wank shittery,' said Adam, dutifully.

'Fucking pissing arse-before-cock,' agreed the machine. 'They'll soon be here.'

The onward march of the Bankspectations continued—serried ranks of proud, equine lookings-forward of wit and charm, of steel and ingenuity, entertainment and being carried away on the back of a Ripping Good Yarn. 'It has to be done,' sighed Adam.

'You'll feel worse afterwards if it isn't,' agreed the machine-isible. It tipped, as if nodding to him, and flipped open one of its rectangular covers, hard as beetle-rind. From its interior two buzzing narradrones zimmed out. The one on the left was called Surasmen, a Big Dumb Object constructed by long vanished aliens, hugely spherical and divided inwardly into 16 layers, worlds nesting within worlds, upon the skin of one of which live a varied bustling cast of Heroic Fantasy Novel characters (Mostly Horses, Armour and Swords Heroic Fantasy characters, except for the odd Steamcar. Also Flying Nazgul, not called Nazgul. Also the Horses are called Mersicors). The one on the right is a Standard Model Culture Should-They-Shouldn't-They Intervention Novel. The two narradrones strung between them a superstrong filament, constructed of Coldhardlightofdayium. In a trice, less than a trice indeed, roughly a twice-and-three-quarters, they flew over the Barkshĭjr shallow hills, zeroed-in on the mass of Bankspectations and—snickersnack!—decapitated them all.

They returned to the machine-lisible, slipped inside, and its cover snapped back (having left from the front hinge-cover they returned, naturally, via the rear one). Adam sighed again.

'Lots still there!' the machine-lisible urged him. 'Lots of stuff to admire! You gotta to admit, it held your attention as you read! Plotting, neat ideas, Big Dumb Object. What's not to like?'

'I know,' said Adam. 'And yet ...' He looked around. 'And yet ....'

APPENDIX: PLOT

There's a precis of the plot here, but its quite involved (it has to be! the novel itself is 600 pages of All Rococo All The Time plotting!) and I don't have space for that.  So, in summary: Prince Ferbin, assumed dead, secretly witnesses King Hausk assassinated by Mertis tyl Loesp, an act which puts underage Oramen lin Blisk-Jausk'r yun Pourl yun Dich (that is, Oramen-man Prince (3/2), Pourlinebrac, 8/Su) on the throne. The Oct, mentoring the Sarl, move into the ninth level of Sursamen, with the approval of the Nariscene and the more senior Morthanveld, searching the Nameless City buried beneath hundred-millions-year-old sediment under the Hyeng-zhar waterfalls. Elsewhere, Djan Seriy Anaplian, having left Sursamen to join Special Circumstances, returns. Ferbin otz Aelsh-Hausk'r flees. A human-like avatoid, Klatsli Quike recruits Anaplian; whereas Quike, a virtual of the Liveware Problem, is soon replaced by another avatoid, Pone Hippinse. Anaplian smuggles Turminder Xuss as a dildo. Anaplian is reunited with Ferbin and Choubris Holse. All descend to the ninth level, where Oramen, having survived Loesp's attempted assassination, is assassinated by a Machine of the Iln. And to think the humans had thought they were uncovering one of the Involucra! Fools! For the Iln hope to kill the Xinthian WorldGod with antimatter. Anaplian and Ferbin descend towards the WorldGod. The Liveware Problem, damaged by Nariscene weapons, is later destroyed, because the Iln commands a Morthanveld guard ship. Where is Xuss? None know where Xuss may be. Whither Xuss? Whence? Hippinse's ship destroys all but two of the Morthanveld drones. Anaplian and Ferbin, suicide-attack the Iln. Only Hose and Quike survive. And so the Shellworld is saved!

APPENDIX: NAMES

Banks does many things very well as a writer of SF. But naming is not one of those things. In Matter this manifests itself via (a) various names from the Dr Seuss Sector of the Galaxy (Terminder Xuss, the Xinth and the Xolpe); (b) names that provoke the little man in my head to start singing—the main human villain, Mertis tyl Loesp has a name just begging to be yelled by three raucous New York Jewish boys (Mer! Tis! Tyl! Brooklyn!); and there's a vanishingly minor character called Omoulldeo, a painter. Try, in company, saying his name a few times, in a deep voice. By the sixth or seventh iteration your companion will have no choice but to join in, with a falsetto 'in the jungle, the mighty jungle...' And (c), it goes without saying that one of the main characters has a name that sound like a meerkat struggling to recite the Gettysberg Address whilst being throttled to death: Ferbin otz Aelsh-Hausk'r. We expect nothing less.

APPENDIX: UNSNARK

The plot summary, above, though accurate, really doesn't capture the flavour of this novel. The experience of reading it is not one of denseness and confusion. On the contrary, compared with the later novels (earlier on this blog) Matter is a genuinely absorbing and pleasurable read. The overarching plotline is a Save The World story, but it's artfully orchestrated so that the story generates real tension; major characters drop like flies; nothing feels guaranteed. The rococo plotting, mentioned above, is twisty enough to hold a reader's interest, and the spaciousness of the whole doesn't feel baggy or diffuse in the way that, say, Hydrogen Sonata does. There are some longueurs, but overall this struck me as a very well paced adventure yarn. The worst that could be said of the core stories is that they're a little hokey (the prince watches his father the kind murdered by his uncle! He flees! The asperger's infant-king doesn't realise that his uncle the Regent is wicked!) -- but they work. And one thing this novel does really very well indeed is the focus-pull from small-scale to large, to vast, to vaster. The Big Dumb Object in this novel is full of wonder and marvel. And Banks handles his main narrative motor, the revelation of buried secret, unveiling of hidden identity etc., very nimbly.

APPENDIX: GENERAL THOUGHTS ABOUT THE CULTURE, 3

Nonetheless, there was an 'And yet ...' when I turned the final page. Not a snarky 'And yet ...' but a small-scale sense of anticlimactic 'And yet ...'. Thinking about this, I wonder if it has to do with the way the novel flirts, slightly prick-teasishly, with Banks's perennial Big Themes. Three of these in particular leapt out at me; and as I work backwards through his backlist it's dawning on me how often he comes back to them. The first isn't so much a theme as a trope, a fascination with vasty colossal massively-massive structures. Specifically he is drawn to huge bridges and huge houses. His early The Bridge (1986) uses its endless pont to brilliant metaphorical and world-building effect; and his most recent non-M novel Stonemouth (2012) opens with a Massive Great Bridge—this one at ‘an estuary town north of Aberdeen’:

I look up at the north tower of the suspension bridge, a double H shape rising another hundred metres into the murk, its grey flank stitched with little steady red lights. At the top there’s a single aircraft beacon producing sharp bursts of the blue-white light of a camera flash. The mist smears each pulse across a whole great tract of sky. [Stonemouth, 3]

His fascination with Big Bridges is a career-spanning one, evidently. Big Houses (Castles, Palaces, Orbitals etc) is perhaps more of a common feature in SF; but Banks takes it more cannily. The gigantic castle in Feersum Endjinn (1994) for instance, in which warring tribes of humans defend the vast territory of their respective rooms, pitches its conceit cleverly between grandeur and a kind of cartoonish Tom-and-Jerry-in-the-Big-House hokum. The thing is, the Shellworld manages to combine both these Vast Structures in one Absolutely Humungous Spheroid. Characters explore the planet-sized rooms; and bridge from level to level, from the present to the secrets hidden in the deep past. It's all very satisfying.

The two other themes are more properly thematic. They are, first, gaming; and, two, heirarchies. The latter is the better handled of the two in this novel, I think. The Heroic Fantasy worldset enables Banks to dilate upon the injustices and unfairnesses as well as the dehumanising dangers of caste; something the architecture of his Shellworld literalises. The novel puts in play both a fairly likeable royal prince and his likeable servant; but this being a Banks novel we're not surprised that, of the two, it is the servant who survives at the end. As for gaming; I wonder if later Banks (earlier on this blog) has rather grown-out of this. In The Player of Games gaming tropes all of life. In Matter Holse has a philosophical revelation whilst playing games on board the Hence the Fortress 'to pass the time':

Life was very like a game or simulation where every possible course and outcome has already been played out, noted down and drawn up, as though on an enormous map, with the beginning of the game—before a piece has been moved or a move has been made—in the centre, and every single possible end-state arranged along the outer fringe of this implausibly stupendous chart. By this comparison, all that one does in mapping out the course of one particular game is trace a path from that central Beginning of things out through more and more branches, chances and possibilities, to one near the infinitude of Ends at the periphery. ... As Game, So Life. And indeed, As Game, So Entire History of the Whole Universe, Bar Nothing And Nobody. [Matter, 386-7]

I didn't buy this, either as a philosophical insight in its own right, or as something earned or organic to this novel. I'm not convinced 21st-century Banks really thinks Life is Exactly Like A Game. Because, you know: it isn't.

APPENDIX: EPILOGUE

'So you see,' said Adam, leaning against the kitchen door-frame, as his wife scrubbed the potatoes for supper, 'since it passed the time, during the actual reading, I was carried along. But on finishing it, the passing-the-time elements fell away and I was left feeling that the larger questions of Heirarchy (we might as well call a soil-turning-implement a soil-turning-implement: the larger questions of Class) and Gaming, aren't very insightfully handled, not to mention the ontological implications of Scale ...'

'Mmm?' said his wife.

'... which of course is simply a way in which a creative artist attempts to come to terms with the smallness and vulnerability of individual men and women, and the vastness and indifference of the cosmos as a whole, by exaggerating features from ordinary life to create hyperbolic symbols of existential mismatch between individual and unniverse. But somehow Matter doesn't properly inhabit those things.'

His wife turned her face towards him. 'What was that?' she asked. 'I wasn't really listening.'

Brian Stableford, Dark Ararat (2003)

You won’t be surprised that the title caught my eye, for it repeats that most excellent dyad ‘AR’ not once but thrice. Thrice! I read it out of sequence, since it is (the author-note says) the fifth of a series of six; I may, accordingly, have missed nuance or depth. The ideas are cool, but the prose is Content Delivery System style, bogged down again by lecturettes on DNA-analogues and speculative biology (there are a lot of these) or else by a broadcast sowing of pico-cliché. People cast one another wry looks; people engage in wishful thinking; things are user-friendly or falter slightly or turn the tables—and it’s all like this. Lots of books are written this way, of course, and it doesn’t make for actively bad prose, but it so comprehensively salts the ice of the novel’s idiom that the prose can never achieve the glorious glissando of Nabokov or Updike. Accordingly it never feels very vivid or engaging. So it goes.

I liked the purpleness of the thoroughly-thought-through alien world; I liked the kit the human explorers have to wear, including a special coating of their innards (lungs and digestion ‘from mouth to anus’) to be able to walk around in it. The whodunit element was a little underbaked, and the Core Cool Idea, to do with an alternative genetic model to DNA/RNA, was put over in a slightly unmasticated fashion. But it was cool for all that. But, but, but! There was a but, and I’ve been trying to lay my finger upon what it was. I suspect it has to do with the competence of the piece: the competence of the extrapolation and worldbuilding, the adequacy of the plotting and characterisation. There's something deadening in that. I don't mean that I hoped the novel would go beyond competence. What's beyond competence? Super-competence, which would be even more deadening. Something needs to be let-go-of. There's needs to be some thing or things creatively fucking-up the adequacy, of it doesn't come alive. But maybe that's merely a personal crotchet of mine.

Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail (2010)

Or: The One About the Hells. Well, I reviewed this once before (in, as they say in the House of Commons, Another Place); so re-reading it, perhaps a little too rapidly, was in part a process of seeing whether my earlier reaction still held water.  On balance I'd say the book is a little better than my initial reaction prompted. I'll draw out two points from my earlier review, and then go to GENERAL THOUGHTS ON THE CULTURE 2; but before I do I'll pause to say that, sensitised to the rubbishness of Banks's SFnal naming by reading The Hydrogen Sonata, I was more struck this time through Surface Detail by said rubbishry. One main character, initially a chattel slave, is called Y'breq. It occurred to me that, should she join a Revolutionary Socialist Party (as all should who seek to struggle against slavery in its manifold forms) she would be Red Y'breq. After I had that thought I found it harder to take her seriously as a character.

Anyhoo: here's what we're dealing with.

The novel's main premise is that with the invention both of completely immersive virtual realities and the uploading thereunto of the consciousnesses of the recently dead, some societies have taken to uploading their dead into virtual heavens and—more to the point—hells. These latter are the occasion of humanitarian outrage in some quarters; and indeed a war is being fought (virtually) between the pro- and anti-Hell camps. The anti-Hell camp is losing, and feels so strong a moral repugnance concerning these hells that it is ready to bring the war into the Real, aiming to destroy the ‘substrates’—the hard drives, in effect, upon which the virtualities are being run. The Culture is notionally neutral in this war, but it’s obvious where its sympathies lie ... The Boschian hell that Banks describes has its cruel ingenuities, both practical (waterwheels powered by the blood of the flayed) and moral (an anti-Hell soul is incarnated as a demon and allowed to kill—which is to say, delete, remove from their suffering—one soul per day, out of hell’s billions; although each time she does she takes on a fraction of her victim’s pain).

Re-reading this, I found myself more impressed than I was first-time round, both by the coolness of this conceit, and by the horrible ingenuity Banks brings to the creation of his hells. It is limited to somatic horrors, which hobbles it somewhat (what I mean is: there's nothing existential about the sufferings in these hells--the medieval theologians used to insist that the greatest punishment endured by condemned Christian souls was the knowledge of the withdrawal of the love of God; and there's nothing like that here). But it draws the reader in; we can't help feeling the Culture's outrage.

In my 2011 review I said two main things. One had to do with the texture of the novel.

Surface Detail struck me as a novel that is lengthily intricate without being in any sense complex. It is necessarily 'about' the largest questions—life and death, punishment and atonement, cruelty and kindness—but churns through a great deal of business without ever saying anything particularly worthwhile about any of that.

This, I think, still holds; and speaks to something about later Banks more generally. There are levels of intricacy I missed on a first reading (it seems that Vatueil, a soldier fighting in the Hell/Antihell wars, is actually the character Zakalwe from Use of Weapons; although I'm not sure I see what this adds to the larger picture); but there is no greater depth to the picture. Banks can't put himself in the position of somebody who would approve of souls going to Hell, and that skews the moral dynamic of the novel. Veppers, the villain, is a 21st-century superwealthy investment-quadtrilliobillionaire without any human depth or resonance at all: he might as well have worn a black cape, twiddled his tache and cackled maniacally for all I believed in him.

My second point, in that original review, had to do with the book's rapiness; and on this a re-read makes me think I over-reacted.

If I had to pick one word to describe Surface Detail it would be: rapey. To be a little more exact, it isn’t wholly rapey, but it’s a bit rapey, and that’s not a good thing. A main narrative strand concerns the can-do action-heroine Lededje, enslaved and repeatedly raped by a smooth-talking villainous Steve Jobs called Veppers. At the beginning of the novel Lededje, trying to escape Veppers, is captured by his staff. As he taunts her, she breaks free and bites the end of his nose off, enraging him so much that he stabs her to death. But she is resurrected by a bit of Culture-tech handwaving, and returns to wreak her revenge. Veppers' rape and murder of Lededje is the way Banks focalises his more systematic, corporate, super-wealthy Evil. Rape, you see, is wrong; and Banks underlines this point by building his Hell around it. This is what happens to a key character, Chay by name:

They took turns raping her while they discussed what to do to make her really suffer. In Hell, the seed of demons burned like acid and generally brought with it parasites, worms, gangrene and tumours, as well as the possibility of the conception of something that would eat its way out when the time came to be born. That conception could equally well take place in a male; a womb was not required and the demons were not fussy. [280]

Because, evidently, vanilla rape is not nasty enough for our purposes. There’s a narrative offhandedness to this which doesn’t sit well (“I’ll make sure they tell her it’s all your fault when they’re fucking her to death, a hundred at a time...” [446])

On a first read I found the use of rape as an easy correlative for 'Horribleness' ('the world's a horrible place...') underexamined and facile. And I still think that, to a certain extent. But on a re-read I found more nuance to it that I previously had. Demeisen (avatar of the Culture Ship Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints) more obviously dubious, and his sadism less endorsed. And the way the novel trips over the John Stuart Mill-ish foundation of Culture ethics (freedom means the freedom to do whatever you like except interfere with another's freedom) struck me as deliberate rather than unintentional. That is to say: the perfect Utopia, lacking conflict and therefore dramatic tension, is a storyless place; so Banks is typically drawn to non-Culture locales, where there are still Villains, and horribleness, and the story of striving against villains and horribleness can be formulated. Hence his focus is so often his own CIA:

Banks is less interested in definitions of rape predicated upon consent. Indeed, the whole drift of this, as of other Culture novels, is that the John Stuart Mill liberalism as socially consensual of the Culture’s official ethos just doesn’t cut it in the nasty, nasty place the galaxy truly is. Hence we need the Culture black-ops, the heroised Special Circumstances, who, having identified bad guys to their own satisfation, treat their ‘consent’ with gung-ho contempt. No, rape in this novel isn't about consent; it's about something sexually nasty happening to somebody you like. When something sexually nasty happens to somebody you don’t care about it's funny. And when you’ve established that somebody is a bad guy, then he's fair game for any number of horridnesses, as the nasty Veppers finds out at the end of the book, physically paralysed by a Culture ship, kneeling before his victim and tortured to death (‘he had never known such pain, never guessed that anything could hurt so much’).

On a first read I thought this jejune. Now I'm ready to give Banks more of the doubt-benefit. This, I think, is what Surface Detail is about: finding test cases that push the Federationesque Prime Directive supposedly governing Culture foreign policy to the limit.

The good thing about having previously published my review is that it enables me to quote from the, often, really insightful things people said in comments. Chris D makes an important point:

My main problem with the book was one of believability; specifically, the rubbish characterisation of the aliens. Banks can do really good aliens sometimes – like the Affront, or the Idirans or the Dwellers – but often does a really half-arsed job. The Pavuleans (sp?) in Surface Details reminded me of the Chelgrians from Look to Windward, in that they speak, act, and think like humans, and have cultures that socially, spiritually, and culturally resemble humans (and specifically, 21st century Western European humans), but look like double-trunked elephants or five-legged fucking dogs or something, and that never really sat easily with me. I mean, the Pavuleans appear to have TV shows, and railways, and a media that seems uncannily like ours, and they have a suspiciously Judaeo-Christian-seeming hell. The way they interact with each other made me picture them as being human, which gets thrown out of kilter every so often by jarring references to trunks or hind legs. I just couldn’t picture them as aliens; Banks should have made them pan-human (like a lot of the species in the Culture books), rather than weird elephant things.

This is quite right, I think; and leads to a larger point, which I start to discuss below. I also can't pass up the chance to quote from the estimable, 'Where's Her Hugo?' Abigail Nussbaum, who notes

the way Banks uses crimes like rape as buzzwords to justify his characters' own immoral behavior in response. If Surface Detail were in any meaningful way about rape, you'd expect a victim of it like Lededje to react very strongly - much more strongly than she does in the book - to Demeisen's performance. That she doesn't - and that her driving trauma is rooted more in having been murdered than raped - is a strong indication that rape is being used as little more than an intensifier of the bad guys' badness.

True, I think. It's as if Banks is, on some level, thinking: 'yes, I'm a feminist, I'm on the side of women, I write strong women; and so the rules of dramatic conception require that I structure my novels around the most horrible thing that can happen to a woman ... and the most horrible thing that can happen to a woman is clearly: being raped by a man.' But this (to state the obvious) is still to position 'women' primarily in relation to male sexual desire in the first instance. It fails a kind of grisly, more violent version of the Bechdel test. (I should add: 'DC' disagrees with my assessment here -- 'While a pretty fair statement of a genuine and re-occuring problem in genre fiction, and possibly also a legitimate criticism of Banks in some instances, this is evidently false when applied straightforwardly to SD. The most horrible thing that can happen to a woman in SD is that she’s murdered (as Abigail says above: ‘her driving trauma is rooted more in having been murdered than raped’ Which seems reasonable enough to me). Lededje is, as it happens, murdered by a man who has raped her repeatedly, but he has also violated her in pretty much every other conceivable way, right down to engraving his name in her DNA, and the thing that drives her, that drives the plot and that drives any thematic concerns the book has is loss of life, not sexual violation (and yes, I agree that the narrative necessity of making death impermanent complicates the thematic intent, but that’s a different issue). Moreover, I think it is pretty clear throughout that Banks intends rape as one more example of the abuse of power - which is to say that one of the ways that baddy Banks’ characters abuse other Banks’ characters over whom they have - often culturally sanctioned - power is by raping them. This is as true of the warship raping the volunteer avatar as it is of Veppers raping Lededje or the demons raping lost souls.' Fair points.)


GENERAL THOUGHTS ON THE CULTURE 2

Veppers, the villain here, is super-super-wealthy. This makes him evil, because it is the Super Super Wealthy (the bankers and corporate financiers) who are responsible for all out current woes, it seems. And I'm not about to use this blog to stand up for the super-rich. Mr Burns and his friends can look out for himself. But! But ...

The Culture is a post-Scarcity society. This fact is an essential part of its utopia-ocity. But one observation we can make about the novels is that they trope ‘post-scarcity’ in terms of ‘affluence’. This is a—thing. Affluence means having a lot more money than the median. Post-Scarcity means living beyond money altogether. Now, I can posit two explanations for the way Banks consistently figures the latter in terms of the former. One is that this is part-and-parcel of the overall textual strategy of the Culture novels: these (as per Chris D's comment, above) are books that write about almost unimaginably different alien species and technologies by tacitly translating them into the sorts of terms ‘we’ can understand. It could be argued that all SF does this, to one degree or another: Banks’s aliens sound like late-20th-century Caledonian lefty intellectuals, hipsters and geeks not because aliens would ‘actually’ talk like that (what would ‘actually’ even mean, in this context?), but because this is the literary convention into which we buy. If the lion could speak we would not be able to understand him; and this goes double for the insectoid Zxach’pblm. Accordingly, only a party-pooper would niggle and kvetch—Banks is doing the necessary in making his stories readable. Let’s call this Hypothesis A.

Niggle and Kvetch. A pair of Jewish crime fighters, battling wrongdoing in the city, already!

Not to get distracted.

Hypothesis B would go something like this: Banks has enjoyed prolonged commercial success with his writing—many bestsellers, movies and TV made from his books and so on. He was a regular guy; then he became a wealthy one (and, I should add: good luck to him). He can write affluence from first hand. What is it that the inhabitants of the Culture do in their post-Scarcity utopia? Well: they do a lot of travelling, seeing the sights. They go to a lot of elegant parties—like the one at the beginning of Look to Windward. They do arty and cultural stuff: learning to play monstrously complex musical instruments and so on. They play with high-tech toys and gadgets. They go sailing (in space). They eat and drink fine fare. Here, from The Hydrogen Sonata, Culture special ops are tracking an individual called ‘Yutten Turse’.

“Get some screen of him.” … The first item was a still image of a man in late middle-age, wearing a big silly grin, a loud shirt and a grass hat … On the sub-screen, some moving footage followed: the man seemed to get slightly lost in the transit lounge, apparently unsure which way to go, until he left, led by a modest amount of luggage on a helpful float-trolley. [HS, 217]

The luggage trolley can float; and the screen Security are observing is 3D, but otherwise this could be a description of any well-travelled 21st-century wealthy individual—say, a successful author, whose many invitations to cons and festivals necessitate him spending many hours in departure and arrival lounges. The danger, here, is that the novels tacitly position ‘utopia’ as ‘having lots of money in a scarcity-based economy’, rather than actually thinking through what transvaluing all the values of scarcity might entail.

On the other hand ‘having more money than I presently do’ is more easily imagined by the average reader (hey, I’m an average reader; and I’d like to have a bit more money, please) than asking him/her to transvaluate all her/his values. It brings us back to Hypothesis A.

One problem I have with Hypothesis A is that it isn’t very consistently applied. In an earlier review I suggested, with a tentativeness indicative of my extraordinary critical delicacy, that Banks’s names are a bit crap. Some people (well; one person) suggested this was unfair: upset-scrabble-board names are part of the fun of SF. Maybe so. But there’s something partial in the logic: ‘you can’t expect these characters to be called Gavin and Harriet! They’re aliens for heavens sake!’ Having your characters perform their narrative functions exactly like Gavin and Harriet but calling them Laksjd-Bubblzap and N’Hhgbtmyuji only takes us so far into the territory of estrangement. It’s like the gag about our current fascination with Grimdark Fantasy—‘I’ve created a world where green unicorns fly through the sky and Potato Waffles can speak! Also women are raped and oppressed—I’M SORRY, THAT’S JUST THE WAY THINGS WERE, BACK THEN.’ The selectivity says more about authors and readers individual states of mind than it does about the ostensible imagined world.

Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)

Or, to adopt the Friends naming-convention, ‘The One About The Subliming’. Subliming happens when a galactic spacefaring society transcends material reality and enters a supercalifragilistic hyper-reality. It’s a venerable SF trope, of course, but—in what may have been a deliberate aesthetic decision on Banks’ part (if so, a poor one)—The Hydrogen Sonata renders this process not via the uncanny potency of (say) the end of Clarke’s Childhood’s End, but instead with all the thrill and dramatic intensity of filing for planning permission to add a conservatory to your Ruislip three-bed. So there we are.

In this novel the ‘Gzilt’ is the civilization on the cusp of Subliming. Now, you might think that a Galactic Civilisation on the verge of becoming collective-supercreatures might be superevolved, but, in the words of Amy Winehouse, No, No, No. Despite being a civilisation tens of thousands of years old, and one of the original founders of The Culture, the Gzilt are as petty, bickering and banal a society as it’s possible to imagine. You might think superevolved imminent-transcendental types would have outgrown War, but apparently not. In point of fact the Gzilt society is one large army in which everybody is a soldier, service is lifelong and everybody has a military rank and a primary loyalty to their regiment. Most individual Gzilt are reserve rather than actual soldiers, pursuing their various careers and living their lives in more-or-less civilian mode. Which is to say: Banks’s candidate for a Galactic Civilisation grown so sophisticated as to pass beyond mortal ken into an ineffable Sublime is one modelled on the TA. Now, I've known people in the TA; indeed, I've had good friends who served in that organisation. Perfectly decent people. But that’s not to say that the TA strikes me as the ultimate evolution of society and culture permitted by this, our material cosmos.

Given this set-up, poised on the brink of Subliming, there’s really only one story Banks can tell, and he tells it: a will-they, won’t-they narrative concerning the Gzilt and their Sublime. Their decision to Sublime was arrived at via that most quasi-Religious and Transcendent modes of knowing, a democratic plebescite, and isn’t, it seems, a binding one. But there are conventions to be observed at times like this; scavenger species start hovering waiting to scoop up useful kit when the Gzilt are raptured away. Also, any species that’s been holding back Important Secrets generally use this time to impart them to the just-about-to-Sublimey ones. Because Galactic Spacefaring Species are big into the ‘holding onto guilty secrets about bitchy things they once did to/said about their supposed friends’ thang.

A few observations before I go any further. I’ll spend a few paragraphs discussing this novel, and offering my ha’pennorth on its quality (long-story-short: it’s not a very good novel). There may be spoilers. Then I’ll begin a new section, under the sub-heading GENERAL NOTES ON THE CULTURE in which I air some still-baking-in-the-oven-of-my-head observations about Banks’s Culture more generally. If you want to avoid the spoilers, then jump to that bit. Assuming you want to keep reading at all.

Where was I? Ah yes. The names. I kept misreading ‘Gzilt’ as ‘Glitz’ -- which in turn reverted back to the doll-like characterisation put in play here. 'Gzilt' is a rubbish name. Banks does many things very well as a writer of SF, but naming is not one of those things. Another ancient Galactic civilisation, the Zidhren (but naming is not one of those things) reveal the secret they have been holding back—they faked the Gzilt’s Holy Book, its Bible, a volume unusual in that it accurately predicted subsequent scientific developments. I liked this notion: for, after all, the Old Testament would be a lot easier to swallow as Holy Writ if it mentioned lasers and computers as well as goats and tents. But Banks rather dissipates the coolness by revealing early that the Holy Book is faked. Anyhow, the Zidhren send a ship to ’fess up; and one faction of the Gzilt destroys the ship rather than let the revelation poison the forthcoming Sublime. The Culture poke their noses in. Will the truth emerge, more generally? If it does will it stop the Sublime? Will-it-wont-it? You can probably work out the answer for yourself. The ‘place’ into which a Subliming society goes is called the Enfold. Every time I read that word in this novel I thought “Danger Mouse!” Shows my age, that.

What else do we have? Two other civilisations, the eel-shaped Liseiden and another species—the Ronte—who, despite being an insectoid hive-like intelligence, have a name that sounds like a horse coughing (But Naming Is Not One Of Those Things)—arrive in fleets of beweaponed starships to fight over what the Gzilt are going to leave behind. Which will get the contract? Most of the middle of the novel is taken up with a deal of running around trying to determine whether the Gzilt Holy Book really is a fake, which information is encoded, for rather arbitrary reasons, in the eyes (subsequently removed) of a fantastically old man called QiRia (Banks does many things very well, but Naming Is Not One Of Those Things).

This quest involves the closest thing this diffuse novel has to a protagonist, a Lieutenant Commander from the Gzilt 14th Regiment called Vyr Cossont, named I presume after the popular French breakfast pastry. She is tasked with locating this individual and getting the bottom. Coincidentally, or otherwise, QiRia is old enough to have known T C Vilabier, composer of the titular Hydrogen Sonata—a musical piece of enormous complexity and no aesthetic merit, played on a giant eleven-string sort-of cello, that Cossont has dedicated her life to mastering. She has gone so far as to add two extra arms to her two-arms-two-legs humanoid frame the better to achieve this aim. The enormous sort-of-cello felt to me underused, to be honest. Its relevance is not always apparent. A new school of Cellopunk SF could have been inaugurated. There’s also a character called Ximenyr, whose full name, I was disappointed to discover, was not Xim Ximenyr Xim Ximenyr Xim-Xim Xeroo. But Naming Is Not—look, I don’t want to labour the point.

The Hydrogen Sonata is a weirdly flat, momentumless piece of writing. It hangs heavy upon the reading consciousness. The pages do not fly. Not much happens, but it took me a long time to read the whole. Banks throws a couple of cool ideas into the mix at the beginning, but instead of being developed these are left to marinade in the weakly juice of Banks’ dialogue-heavy prose. There are more than 500 pages here, divided into a first 250 which do nothing but meander around the premise set-up, and a second 250 that run with rather deadening predictability down the rails established by said premise. This is not a story that needs 500 pages. It’s not a story that needs 100 pages, really, but alright: part of what Banks’s readers love about Banks is his texture, his beguiling blah, the slightly diffuse wit of his Culture Minds’ interactions, the ships names, the whole Swearing Is Big And Clever (fuck yeah) teenage vibe of it, and all that needs space.

That last sentence may look more condescending than I mean it to, actually: the Golden Age of SF is still 14, and one reason for Iain M.’s enduring success is the real, unfakeable charm with which he libretto-izes his Space Opera. His imagination is ingenious, which I like a great deal (I prize ingenuity highly): sometimes inventively ingenious, sometimes cruelly ingenious. One problem with The Hydrogen Sonata is that this ingenuity feels rather deracinated. For example: Glitz, sorry, Gzilt regimental headquarters are in a hurtling hollowed-out asteroid that is propelled round and round a planet-girdling trench cut into the surface of a world called Eshri. The trenches were excavated by a long-ago Sublimed species called the Werpesh (But Naming Is Not One Of Those Things), and the novel would have us believe that propelling your HQ round and round this trench makes Good Military Sense. It does, but only if we redefine 'Good Military Sense' to mean ‘making the location of your command centre super-obvious to all-comers and then hobbling the defensive advantages of the fact that it can move quickly by trapping it into an entirely predictable trajectory moving within tight confines.’ That’s not the point, of course. The point is that the phrase ‘sub-surface equatorial orbit’ pricked Banks’s fancy, so he constructed a Heath-Robinson narrative context in which to be able to stick it in a sentence (‘Fzan-Juym [But Naming Is Not One Of Those Things], headquarters of the Socialist-Republican People’s Liberation Regiment #14, had been in sub-surface equatorial orbit of Eshri ever since, zipping along like a superfast bullet in a slide-sided groove open to the pitch-black sky, orbiting the planet in less than an hour and covering two million kilometres—nearly half a trillion altogether by now—while never coming closer than fifteen hundred metres to either the flat canyon floor or its sheer, polished walls’ [99-100].

Take another look at that sentence, the one I just quoted. It sprawls. It hasn’t been polished (there are too many adjectives; the repetition of ‘orbit’/’orbiting’ is ungainly; the knot of measurements at the end, clumsy). The whole novel is like that. Cossont and a Culture warship called the Mistake Not … meander about after the Truth with respect to the Book of Truth, which turns out to be exactly what you think. On p.505 a Culture Ship called the GSV Empiricist announces ‘Fellows, colleagues, friends—we have our answer. It is much as we expected.’ I almost liked the barefaced cheek of this, or would have done if I hadn’t just ploughed through 500 pages to get to it. So, spoiler alert, 99.9% of the Gzilt join Danger Mouse in the Enfold—only two civilisations, we are told, have managed higher percentages of upload, the ‘Xown’ and the ‘Zyse’, societies from, apparently, the Dr Seuss sector of the galaxy. Truly, Banks does many things very well as a writer of SF. But naming is not one of those things.



GENERAL NOTES ON THE CULTURE 1

OK, if naming is not one of those things, it is worth asking what the many things that he does do well as a writer of SF, are. I’m well aware that calling this novel ‘Not Very Good’ might seem insensitive, considering the genuinely horrible news about Banks’s current state of health. Maybe the tactful thing would be a brief notice of the ‘another masterpiece from the teemingly inventive brain of the great Banks!’ kind. But such mealymouthism would be dishonest—worse, patronizing. One reason I’ve decided to read the Culture novels in reverse order, apart that is from the mildly Mind-ish perversity of doing it that way, is that my memory of reading them first time around was that they have declined in quality. This way, hopefully, the books will seem to get better and better as I go through them. It may be that Banks’s own productivity has worked against him. His fans are legion, yet no Culture novel has won any of SF’s many awards, and the critical reaction increasingly skews nitpicky and dismissive. The problem may be that we’ve been talking Banks for granted, for too long. One thing his alarming and grievous news may do is shake us out of that complacency. There’s a reason Banks has the huge following he has. It has to do with what somebody on Twitter described as his combination of charm and steel.

Well, the charm is still here, in Sonata, and some of the steel too—although the charm is stretched thin over these 500 pages, like too little butter over too much toast, and the steel feels uninvolving, since we don’t really care who gets murdered, or who survives. But the Culture as a whole is still a beguiling notion, only partly dimmed by its ten-fold repetition. That tenfold reiteration of the initial conditions hasn't brought us very far. This is because Utopia does not admit of very much Plot Development.

The best essay I know on The Culture is this one, by Alan Jacobs. The whole essay is worth reading, and I don’t want simply to nick Alan’s ideas to pass them off as my own. He quotes from an interview:

Science Fiction Weekly: Excession is particularly popular [among your novels] because of its copious detail concerning the Ships and Minds of the Culture, its great AIs: their outrageous names, their dangerous senses of humor. Is this what gods would actually be like?
Banks: If we’re lucky.

—and adds—

It is through the work of the Minds — in their overwhelming resourcefulness and, perhaps, wisdom — that the Culture possesses its most interesting feature: it is what Banks has called a “post-scarcity” society, in which everyone has everything he or she wants. A Culture citizen can live in any environment, under any climate, in any kind of dwelling, and can wear any kind of clothes and own any imaginable objects. Sexual prowess and pleasure are ensured by genetic modification and precisely infused drugs: glands secrete at the citizens’ commands to produce whatever mood or energy is needed. The Culture has no laws, and nothing that we would call a government. All power remains in the hands of the omnipotent and omnibenevolent Minds. As Banks himself has written, “Briefly, nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited.”

Scholars of Utopian writing identify two main strategies authors employ: top-down or bottom up. The latter predicts a utopia based upon human beings who are somehow tweaked, or educated, or changed out of their present-day belligerences, selfishnesses and stupidities, in order that their combined actions create a society that just ‘is’ equal and free and exploitation-free. The former takes gnarly, utopic-resistant human nature as a given, but corrals it with more effective (often military) social authority and discipline so that individual humans can’t exploit others and fuck-up the Utopia. Banks’s utopian Culture combines the two. On the one hand, its human constituents have no qualms about altering themselves genetically to make themselves better people—in an interview with Wired magazine, 1996, Banks said ‘I’m not convinced that humanity is capable of becoming the Culture because I think people in the Culture are just too nice — altering their genetic inheritance to make themselves relatively sane and rational and not the genocidal, murdering bastards that we seem to be half the time.’. But this is only half the picture: on the other side of the equation are the Minds, wholly benign and kindly (though with flecks of dangerous unpredictability) dictators who shape, guide, control and otherwise maintain the utopiannesss of the Culture. Its utopiaicty. Its utope-stuff.

That Banks is prepared to write Utopia in unembarrassed, unironic mode, is remarkable, I think. Few other writers would be so bold, which is to say, would be prepared to be so old-fashioned—Fredric Jameson, for instance, thinks ‘writing utopia’ strictly impossible in this day and age. The best we can do, according to him, is ‘anti-anti-utopianism’. Not so Banks. And this is true in a broader sense. When Consider Phlebas came out in wait-let-me-check-gosh-was-it-really-1987?-well-don’t-I-feel-old, it was greeted as something fresh. And tonally it was fresh: lively and witty and unencumbered by the backlist. But in other respects it was deeply old-fashioned: all the props and tropes and many of the clichés of Golden Age space opera wheeled out yet again. Everyone else was going cyberpunky, which made Banks’s spacious, sunny charm-and-steel combo stand out even more. Writing such nakedly old-fashioned fare turned out, counter-intuitively, to be a rather brilliant strategic move.

Banks’s contribution to modern SF has been enormous, but it hasn’t been—despite his huge talents for ingenious invention—on the level of the content of his novels. What Consider Phlebas got right was the tone. So many SF writers were taking their gritty cyberpunkadiddle very very seriously indeed. Lots of SF writers continue to do that. Lots of fans do too—they are comfortable with rigid definitions, hard boundaries, direct expression (rather than the beauty of inflections, the beauty of innuendoes, and all that). Lots of writers and fans feel, perhaps, that levity, wit, irony and cynicism are liable to burst the magic make-believe bubble of Genre … that we all need to concentrate very hard, furrowing our brows, so as not to destroy the illusion that SF Matters and that SF Is About Important Stuff. Banks at his best knows better than this. Indeed, I’d give at least half-an-ear to the theory that the significant figures of 90s and 00s SF all shared an understanding that SFF plus levity (wit, irony, playfulness) was something much more important and significant than SFF without those qualities—Joss Whedon; Pratchett; Banks; Who. Putting Banks alongside Whedon and Pratchett, on the one hand, tends to remind us that he isn’t as nimble or hilarious a writer as those two; but on the other hand he wasn’t trying for outright comedy. There was something more bedded-into the fabric of his novel; not characters swapping one-liners but characters sharing a mordant, cynical but always amused and smart Weltanschauung. The downside is not so much that Hydrogen Sonata is less witty than earlier Culture novels (although I think it is), but that the reader comes away with the feeling that the Banks-mode has curdled. Gareth Rees is characteristically insightful when he notes, in his review of the novel, that ‘The Hydrogen Sonata is a bitter exercise in cynicism and disappointment. All expectations are dashed. The villains’ motivations are extraordinarily petty. No-one is punished for any of their crimes. The Culture ships directing Cossont’s quest decide (after far too many interminable committee meetings) not to tell anyone about what they have discovered.’ Maybe that’s how Banks feels the world is, nowadays, in the centre-right, no-escape-from-Thatchereagan’s-legacy post-9-11 world we live in. But that’s not to say that such a state of mind makes for a good Culture novel. The Culture ought to be beyond that.

So, yes; as per that Science Fiction Weekly interview, the deal with the Minds is that this is what it would be like if secular gods walked among us. Like Greek gods they cohabit with mortals; like Greek gods (though to a rather less sadistic degree) they are immensely powerful and capricious. Unlike Greek gods they don’t want to have sex with us shaped like various animals, but apart from that. Indeed, I wondered if this was one of the games The Hydrogen Sonata was trying to play—deliberately denaturing the religious hyperbole about ‘The Rapture’, parodically writing a story about a gun-saturated, infantile society obsessed with the Holy Book (America) that is predicated upon the provable notion that said Holy Book is a forgery. That might explain the rather wearingly over-emphatic Bang Bang shoot-out final stretch, and the general unfittedness of the Glitz, Gzilt, sorry, to Sublime at all. In which case, having them Sublime would be—what? A sort of narrative double-bluff? As if Banks were to write an ‘M’-less novel set in the US Bible Belt, mercilessly satirising the evangelical Christians who inhabit those territories, only to have them all actually Rapture at the end anyway?

I wonder if The Hydrogen Sonata felt unengaging to me because it’s a novel in dialogue not with life or the universe but with the other Culture novels. The discussions between the Ships are mostly interminable exercises in Exposition. ‘Hurry me onwards if I start to tell you too much of what you already know,’ says the MSV Pressure Drop. It manages a cloggy paragraph before its interlocutor (the LOU Caconym) interjects: ‘consider yourself hurried.’ ‘A pity,’ the Pressure Drop muses. ‘My third example was particularly witty and amusing. But no matter.’ [67] Maybe referencing the idea that Minds can be witty and amusing, rather than actually showing them being, you know, witty and amusing, is an index to how far the series has come. If so, it’s a shame. ‘Most amusing,’ says the Pressure Drop, later. ‘My fields expand at the mirth of it all’ the Caconym complacently agrees. This is that deadly phenomenon—the late-entry franchise text in which the assumption is made: look, you know all these characters already. There’s no need for us to actually flesh-them out. Just parading them in front of you should be enough, yeah?

The worst of it is—there’s something in that. Maybe we’re all so pleased just to see Tony Stark put on his metal britches and coat in "Iron Man 3: Iron, Mannishly, With A Vengeance" that that’s all he needs to do, and the wit can be gestured-towards rather than actually invoked. And the odd thing with The Hydrogen Sonata is that though I moved slowly, I moved surely through the whole.  There is scale here; there are striking set pieces, gigantic examples of galactic megarchitecture, cool notions. There is, still, something beguiling.  And by the end of this long novel I even found myself warming to Banks terrible, terrible names. The spaceships called Gellemtyan-Asool-Anafawaya and CH2OH.(CHOH)4.CHO and Upset-Another-Scrabble-Board-Would-You-Please,-Here-Comes-One-More-Alien-Ship. Maybe it doesn’t matter that Banks doesn’t do naming very well; because he does many other things very well indeed.

Next up—2010’s Surface Detail.

So what's the deal, here?

It's another blog about SF, evidently; but it's no Punkadiddle. I'd say 'I'm sorry to disappoint those who were hoping it might be', but I'm not so vain as to believe there's any lasting general public disappointment involved (I'm quite vain, but not that vain). With the 'diddle, I blogged fairly regularly on SF books and film and the like, for no reason other than that I love SF books and film, and wanted to articulate that love. It was laborious, and did me no good (indeed, many people assured me in comments, it did me active professional harm) but I enjoyed it, up to a point. Nonetheless it just wasn't sustainable, and I can't promise to start doing it again here. I'm afraid I don't have the leisure.

This leads me to ask: how do 'we' use blogs, for values of 'we' including writers, critics, academics and so on? Some of 'us' use blogs to build a fanbase, but my blogs (and I used to run a great many) never managed to Scalzify any particularly sizeable quantity of readers and fans. John Scalzi does many things very well, blogwise; but he has one thing in particular—likeability—that I lack. As to why I lack this quantity, well, that's an interesting question. I'm a pleasant enough fellow, in real life. Not to pick on the man (except that he's a perfect example of what I'm talking about): Scalzi writes a likeable, clever blog in which self-promotion is balanced with alter-promotion, and which wins many readers.  Then he writes likeable, clever books. Readers of his blog know what they are going to get, and accordingly they spend their time go-getting in large numbers. I'm not especially interested in 'likeable' where my novels are concerned, because the aesthetic concerns that fascinate me aren't about that. Likeable is fine, and there are plenty of writers (read: an overwhelming majority of writers) who provide it, if that's what you want.  I have, on some occasions, even essayed it myself. I have no beef with either MOR or AOR. I listen to both kinds of music. It's just not the whole bag.  Likeable skews to bland, and the more I read the more tired I become with bland. There are many, many other things books and stories can do, and those are the things I'm interested in. As I put it in another place, a while back, '...however much I have sacrificed my dignity and sales to the idol of being Johnny Rotten at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, jeering at the crowd "you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" We all have our crazy Fitzcarraldo-type dreams, after all.' Though I lack the sales and, therefore the money, and therefore the leisure, to blog at will, what with a mortgage to be covered and kids' shoes to buy (so! many! shoes!), there is nonetheless a part of me that feels happier not pandering, so I guess I'm stuck with that.

So what is the deal, here? Well, blogs have other uses.  My secondary hat is a fine nineteenth-century literature professor topper, and wearing it I am putting the final edits in place to an academic monograph on Walter Savage Landor, and readying an edition of Coleridge's brilliant Biographia Literaria for Edinburgh University Press. A blog is a useful place to park ideas, passages, references and so on; and accordingly a 19th-century lit blog has morphosed (I daresay I should use tumblr instead. What can I say? I'm mired in the past).  Sibilant Fricative serves a parallel, skiffy-related purpose.

I'll be specific, thrice. One: in the immediate future, I am writing an overview piece on Iain Banks' Culture novels for Arc (paying gig, you see), and accordingly I'm re-reading, and in two cases, reading for the first time, all thirteen -- in reverse order, since that seemed to me the way to do it. I'll probably post thoughts on these, here, as I go, by way of helping me get my cyberducks in a row for the actual piece.  The previous post on this very blog, a NYRB-length essay post about Margaret Atwood's science fiction, was similarly utilitarian. I had to teach Oryx and Crake for my day-job at the University of London, and wrote that post to sort-out what I thought about it. That sort of thing.

Two: in the mid-term future, there's something else. The estimable Ian Whates, and more specifically his excellent NewCon Press, are going to publish a collection of my sf-related non-fiction. This is confected of various items, including a fair few of the less disposable Punkadiddle pieces, some of which (it turns out! who knew!) are quite lengthy; and the collection will be available soon.  It will be called Sibilant Fricative, see, and when it comes out I'll use this blog for minimum-efficiency promotion, see.  After that, there's one last thing I want to strip-mine from the old Punkadiddle site (a short book about the ten-best-selling books of all time; I've been, in odd moments, writing up the blog-posts into more finished forms; plus I'm still reading the immensely lengthy Dream of the Red Chamber). When that's done I'll finally be able to wheel on the fiddle-playing cat and jump Punkadiddle over the moon and into oblivion forever.

Three: there are times when I read a book and want to understand why I reacted to it the way I reacted to it. My problem is that I've now reached the stage where I really can't work out what I think unless I write it out; the process of writing is now so intimately connected to my broader processes of cognition and judgment that I can't really do without it. I've got those writerly blue-on-blue eyes now, and without my regular doses of ectriture 'Melange' I'd be in a parlous state.  I don't say this to contradict my first paragraph, for the blue-on-blue eyes don't obviate the need to earn a living; but it does mean that there may be occasional posts here when I'm trying to work something out with respect to a particular novel.

That's the deal, here.

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Update Dec 2014. The seven or so regular readers of this blog will have noticed, assuming they've ever gone to the bother of constellating the above post with the ongoing SibFic activity, that whilst I stayed true to its principles pretty much through 2013, things got busier here in 2014 (in part because I used the blog as a means of getting my thoughts in order with respect to a course on Children's Literature I was teaching) and then much much busier towads the end of this year. This latter was because I'm one of a team judging a literary award, and have gone back to writing (usually brief) blog notices of 2014's releases to get my thoughts in order. This will likely continue into the early portion of 2015, but likely not beyond that. [AR]