There are descriptions of empty worlds, imagined castles, poignant scenes of love, and banter, lots of banter, between humans, androids, avatars and ships. The fact that he is served by someone with a bowl of soup for a face also caught my attention. Alongside this we have set pieces or scenes that are gobsmacking – the party that lasts for years on an airship hosted by a man with fifty plus penises, each seeking attention on almost every limb. Their dialogue is often hilarious, their names just as much so, and their manifestations are both eccentric and strangely loveable. In The Hydrogen Sonata they play a major part and I would argue that they are its success. One of the great pleasures of Banks’ Culture novels is his presentation of the ships and their Minds, often fantastically made real through avatars that walk and talk and react alongside more conventional humanoids. But, as she becomes caught up in the attacks on Gzilt, the last state of emotion that springs to mind is ‘Sublime’. It’s not known whether it’s possible to play it at all with only one pair of hands but Cossant works at her goal to perfect her performance before she crosses into the Sublime. Vilabier’s 26th String-Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented’. Meanwhile, our heroine Cossant practices ‘The Hydrogen Sonata’ or ‘T.C. Faith itself is under attack, the path to the Sublime. The reason confounds everyone but it appears that it may concern their Book of Truth. The argument between the two ships results in the destruction of one, shortly followed by an attack on the high command of Gzlit. Like countless advanced civilisations before them, they are ready to abandon reality and take that final step into a dimension from which few have returned and little is known – except that it has eighteen different types of weather. The Gzilt are progressing through the final days of their countdown towards becoming Sublime. Two ships, or Minds, conduct a polite argument above the planetary fragment of Ablate, a territory belonging to the Gzilt civilisation. I had hopes, then, for The Hydrogen Sonata. I am still a novice in Culture-terms but I aspire to be experienced enough to know when Banks achieves greatness, as he did with Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons. Peerless writing competes with exquisite humour as well as an imagination that quite frankly risks expanding one’s brain to such an extent there is a chance of it exploding within one’s head. Banks will always produce tingles of anticipatory pleasure. The prospect of a new Culture novel by Iain M.
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