The title itself refers to an almost comically unplayable piece of music which needed an entirely new instrument to be invented to play it properly - an instrument which ideally requires the musician to have four arms, sit within it and prop it up with their own legs. For all the bleakness in these books, for all the genuinely horrific things that happen and all the people who die in unpleasant and gruesome ways, there's an inescapable sense that things will, ultimately, work out for the best. Compared with how quickly and, occasionally, impulsively previous committees, such as Excession's "Interesting Times Gang" reacted to crises like this one, the reader feels that maybe the Culture is, finally, past its prime.įortunately, Banks' writing is anything but and The Hydrogen Sonata is every bit as entertaining, playful and surprisingly optimistic as we have come to expect from his science fiction. One of the recurring jokes is that the committee of ship Minds who get together to monitor the situation don't actually accomplish anything - they always decide to see how things pan out before making a decision, right up until the endgame. While it's suggested throughout the novel that the Gzilt are rushing to Sublime and are going too early, it's hard to escape the feeling that it's time the Culture itself went down that road. It was written and published a while before Banks found out about his cancer, but this balancing of the beginnings and ends of societies makes it a great way for the Culture series to end - if not quite as strange a case of life imitating art as his last novel, The Quarry, was about a man dying from cancer. Predictably, things happen which could imperil the Subliming or convince people not to go through with it, and so begins a galaxy-spanning adventure to try and find out what actually happened 10,000 years ago when the Culture was first put together.
The Culture isn't keen on the idea, and many of the Minds within it view Subliming as essentially disappearing up one's own fundament, but the Gzilt, a species who almost ended up being a member of the Culture, are beginning their final preparations for it at the start of the novel. Here, Banks explains it using string theory, describing the Sublime as existing in dimensions seven to eleven, tucked and folded away from the Real but demonstrably there nonetheless. One of the recurring ideas in the Culture series is that, when a civilisation reaches its peak or otherwise feels it's accomplished everything it can, it enters the Sublime, a realm beyond reality which no one really understands but everyone knows to be essentially Paradise.
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