Surface Detail

"I read all of the Culture novels back-to-back, and this was the one that I had the most vivid and guttural reaction to. I found it really intense. It’s an extraordinary novel: absolutely terrifying, and really upsetting in many ways, in a similar way to one of the other books on my list – The Sparrow . It is set in the Culture, which is a vast Galaxy-spanning civilization, and is essentially benign – as in, its non-invasive to other species. Everyone lives for a very long time, there’s a lot of human-AI interaction, and it’s very stable. Not quite utopian, but close to a utopian future. But the story that Surface Detail tells is about a war taking place in virtual reality, the outcome of which will decide whether societies within the Culture are allowed to create their own hell. There are civilizations which have been creating their own hells within virtual reality, and consigning the consciousnesses of people who are deemed to deserve it – criminals, essentially – to these hells after their death, to spend eternity in torment. But obviously, as we know from our own world, people are condemned unfairly. So there’s now a debate across the galaxy as to whether the entire concept of these artificial hells should be allowed to continue. One of the characters in the story is attempting to break this virtual reality war, this proxy war, out of the virtual space and into reality – where it will have real consequences. It’s a story about how meaningful religion still is in a technological universe, and abut cultural difference, and it’s also definitely about capital punishment – and there’s never really any doubt as to which side Banks is on. And it’s also just a ludicrously readable story, because it’s constantly opening up kind of new vistas of ideas and worlds. Parts of it are set in various hells which are genuinely disturbing and unpleasant, and it’s about characters trapped in there who don’t believe that they ought to be. It’s the kind of novel where the bottom keeps dropping out of it, and you fall into something more shocking and wild and mind-expanding than you already thought you were in – as with many of his books, actually. There’s another one called Matter , which is very similar. I just don’t understand how it’s possible for him to have created such a body of work, particularly in such a short time – and alongside another entirely separate body of work! It’s completely bonkers! Even though not all of them are books I adore, they all have so many ideas, and it’s wild. I guess what Banks was doing, to some extent, is taking the kind of idea that Le Guin would write a short story about, and extrapolating and extrapolating and extrapolating, so they just get bigger and bigger and bigger, and ideas pile up on ideas. It’s a creative process of accretion – like the literal building of worlds, when planets form, they spin faster and faster and draw more and more matter into themselves. I find the process of forming a novel to be like that anyway: you have an initial idea, and it starts to spin in your head, and then other things kind of clump to it. It’s really an intense experience. It’s just so very visceral. And it’s a horror novel in the most literal sense, because it’s about people being consigned for eternity to absolutely horrific torment. There is nothing more upsetting than that! But there’s a rip-roaring war story going on in parallel. It’s really quite something, and I definitely need to read it again."