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.