Surface Detail

Iain M Banks* writes so engagingly that reading his novels is always a pleasure.  Surface Detail returns to the Culture, one of a small number of Level 8 (referring to a top degree of technical accomplishment) civilisations in the galaxy. The galaxy is not short of less developed civilisations and has its own meta-civilisation with strict social rules about technology transfer and comportment.  The Culture is perhaps defined by it's willingness to go all out at 'being' - engineering Minds (vast machine intelligences that are worth billions of human lives) that long since took over the running the show, extending the powers of matter to its limits in this universe - while usually remaining very laid back about 'doing' anything in particular, and having as little as possible in the way of 'tending'.  But somehow, the Minds and the humans and the drones all seem to get along pretty well, and if you can't get along, well you have as many options as you can think of, money being no object, literally.

Relations with other civilisations are more complicated, are regulated through a Culture organisation called Contact, and are usually where the story-worthy material uccurs.  Within Contact, the usual heroes of these novels, the ships, drones and humans of Special Circumstances.  In Surface Detail, the trouble arises around the widespread galactic practice of preserving the minds of people after death in simulations.  Once discovered, the possibility of condemning the images of sentient minds captured in their 'soulkeeper' to eternal punishment seems attractive to many societies.  Many civilisations maintain large and expanding Hells of a very medieval sort, in Matrix-style worlds in processing substrate. For some reason, there is debate about this obscenity, and the debate has reached such a pitch that the Hells themselves have been declared appropriate space for the war to a finish on the issue.  The war has gone on for thirty years.

The losing side, the one that has been aiming to shut down Hell, has become desperate and attempts action in the Real, with the help of Veppers, a corrupt corporate Tyrant from a Level 3 or 4, a couple of Level 8 civilisations and a Level 6 civilisation that is modeling itself on the Culture, trying to do what it thinks the Culture wants - in fact, offering the sincerest form of flattery.  While the Culture is against the Hells, it is careful about imposing values on other civilisations, and more than careful because there are a bunch of other Level 8s and they all have to agree on how to proceed.  The heroine, Lededje Y'breq, begins as an intagliated prize of Veppers - tattooed inside and out, her very DNA altered to imprint her flesh as the property of Veppers thanks to his betrayal of his oldest friend, her father.  Her native Sichult is a place that believes in punishment.

The themes Banks is playing with here are crime, revenge and punishment. Alongside these is 'surface detail' - and its significance is still a question for me.  Given the interest in simulation and reality throughout, surface detail makes sense as an issue is of interest to conscious beings looking to understand their world - it is repeated in the tattoo, the quality of simulation. The cover design is a fractal, the Mandelbrot set - defined in a simple algorithm, yet the most complicated possible 2D shape. Is the idea here that the Hells are an organising principle, a fractal algorithm for the societies that need them?  That abusive power is the final texture in those societies - that no relationship occurs without tincture of power?

Two confrontations stand out - Veppers confronts the Culture ambassador and the worlds collide: his world of abusive power, and her world of contentment and peace. This moment is small enough, but pivotal, providing insight into all the major players.

The second is Lededje confronting an old lover who tells her gently that Love is not Enough. I think the way this rankles expresses the secret essence of the Culture, hidden behind all the surface detail: that the Culture is founded on the idea that Love is Enough.  The Minds of the Culture enjoy themselves in their immense fashion, but they also make great sacrifices to remain engaged with humans, sometimes ultimate sacrifices. This is belied by the relish with which Banks has all his Culture people & Minds squabble with each other, and his interest in the fringe, the Contact section, in which the people are a bit edgier than the Culture mainstream. But I think the secret constitution of the Culture must be Love.

The problem he raises but cheats in resolving is that some people do deserve punishment and the Real can't be relied on to administer justice - indeed the opposite is probably true for most of us (those who read and write blogs). Sometime its not even just people, its the entire civilisation.  The point of the Hells is to torture, and the point I expected him to be making is that Torture is Wrong - it isn't made significantly worse when applied to the weak or the moral, or carried out by the immoral, because in its face all are weak but relatively righteous, ad beyond its practice no one can remain righteous.  He went to some pains to set up a range of problems and to narrate the awful reality of Hell, but in the end the Culture wins thanks to the strength of an Abominator class vessel with psychopathy on tap.  The Hells become an object of disgust to most of the civilisations that used to operate them once they have the chance to try their civilisation without that threat, but the Abominator doesn't mind administering punishment. Apparently Culture principles of merciful treatment of fellow sentients are not Enough in the Real.

For Banks trainspotters (he invites it) look out for the return of a long lost SC agent. This may be a habit - certainly there was another one in Matter.  There are also major subplots that apparently come to nothing, just carrying a variety of interesting exposition - the treacheries of the SC agent in question, the involvement of the Bulbitians with the sublimed, and the Nauptre Reliquaria as a potential nemesis of the Culture.  I would like to think that these extraneous bits will one day add up to something, perhaps the revelation of the cause of the eventual demise of the Culture revealed in Look to Windward.  While this might be satisfying, I fear it may be too much to ask - these overconstrained plots, with too many players, have happened up before (in Excession, for example).  For all the annoyance of structural redundancy, Banks' writing is so smooth and pleasurable, and his idyllic world of the Culture so pleasant, that I will certainly be lining up again.

*probably the second best M Banks, after Rosy, but well ahead of the others.