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Iain M. Banks: The Hydrogen Sonata

Conscious Bob

Well-Known Member
Iain M Banks Culture novel number 9 or 10 concerns itself with the cousins of the Culture, an advanced civilisation called the Gzilt. The Gzilt having reached the done everything stage of galactic development have decided to leave the 'real' galaxy forever like millions of civilisations before them by a mysterious process called subliming.

Events however do not go smoothly and while the countdown continues the Culture gets involved trying to sort out a messy situation involving a Gzilt Reserve Lieutenant Commander and a 9000 year old Culture Citizen that may potentially know something heretically important about the Gzilt religion.

The Sublimed have been covered in previous Culture novels so I was hoping a little more light would be shed on this element of backstory, in the end though I was slightly frustrated...

There is plenty for the reader here, the Culture and the Gzilt are equivalent civilisations which means the Culture can't rely on technological supremacy to carry the day and the Sublimed are given a much more central role which has a flavour of the Arthur C. Clarke novel - Childhood's End, about it.

I got the impression that although the universe which the Culture inhabits is an atheist universe, the Sublimed fill the supernatural void pretty much to bursting.

Enjoyable.
 
As did I. It is on my Kindle waiting, and now I have ten more books on my to read list.

:sigh
 
Seconded. I can nae STAND reading a series haphazardly. It's like skipping to the last page, fundamentally wrong.

Of course, we could just look it up, but what would be the fun in that?
 
Goddamit, you lazy bookwhores...

There isn't an order as such but my preferred reading list is order of published, there are spoilers in the later books concerning the earlier books too.

1 Consider Phlebas
2 The Player of Games
3 Use of Weapons
4 The State of The Art (novella plus short stories)
5 Excession
6 Inversions
7 Look To Windward
8 Matter
9 Surface Detail
10 The Hydrogen Sonata
 
:D

Thank you mate. I thank you, sparkilicious thanks you, Amazon thanks you. You are a scholar and a gentleman.
 
About halfway through Consider Phlebas.

It's good stuff, and I am enjoying it thoroughly, but there is an aura of the bizarre surrounded some of the details. I like bizarre.
 
I am almost done with Surface Detail. After eight months I am finally back to the point at which I started when I bought Hydrogen Sonata.

Banks has quite a vivid imagination and a sometimes Michner-like flair for detail. Intelligent, pithy and well worth the read.
 
Gah. I just now realized that there will be no more Culture novels.

I find that this saddens me greatly, and I will let that stand as review enough for the series.
 
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