“Death, real death is a blessing in Hell,” she told him.

“That is precisely the point!” the creature thundered. “You may kill one person per day”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (JUN 6, 2011)

Iain Banks’ novel, Surface Detail, is his latest in the continuing series about the super civilization of the future, the Culture. It is about the lives of a number of distinct individuals whose stories come together to enrich the basic concepts. This is a story centered on a virtual battle between those who want to stop the construction of Hells because of their belief that it is uncivilized to engender perpetual torment and those who want to continue the practice based on the idea that Hell is required to keep people from doing bad things. The Hells are virtual worlds and the war is required to be virtual. The side favoring Hell is winning. The group on the losing side is now taking the battle outside of the virtual into the real, breaking the Culture’s eons-old premise that war must be fought in the virtual world.

This is space opera on a grand scale like Asimov’s Foundation series but with aliens who are really different form homo sapiens. There are hyper- cybernetic AI ships more intelligent than biological creatures and often more interesting as personalities. Individuals can have their very selves recorded so completely that they can be resurrected virtually or into biological or mechanical bodies in the real world over and over. One of the more visually arresting inventions here is the concept of the intagliated, people who were modified on the genetic level before birth to have elaborate tattoos. These tattoos are a punishment visited on the children of those who owe another more than can be paid. One of the most spectacularly decorated of these intagliated is a prime character in the tale, as is her master, the person who forced her father into financial ruin and now owns her as a living symbol of his power and wealth.

This tattooed woman is murdered by her owner and is subsequently resurrected, becoming a friend of one of the AI ships, an individual in the special forces of the Culture personified as a powerful and incorrigible bad boy. He takes great pleasure in running around the universe spreading violence and mayhem as a kind of super CIA agent. She enlists his help in pursuing revenge. Another fascinating character is a soldier fighting on the side of those who want to end the Hells. He is resurrected over and over as he repeatedly suffers virtual death in this virtual war. His experiences lead him to the belief that the enemy is winning. In the real world he then advocates that his side must betray the tradition and ethics of war in the Culture and move into the real world.

If someone in Hell dies (the conditions are such that they all die over and over in excruciating pain and degradation) they are resurrected back into that Hell. There is a woman in one of the Hells who has lost all hope; hope that her suffering can ever cease; hope that there is anything other than Hell. Ironically she entered that Hell as an investigative journalist hoping to end the practice by revealing the extent of sadism and brutality present there. After one of her deaths she is resurrected by a chief demon as an angel of death who can kill one sufferer a day in the sense of releasing them from further life virtual or otherwise. Her purpose is to bring the hope that pain and suffering can have an end. This will actually increase the suffering of the many who will have their hopes dashed over and over forever.

It is often hard to figure out why all the separate narrative trails are necessary or how they are connected. In the end the various story lines converge and resolve with sometimes surprising nuance. The Culture is a rich construct and it would have helped my enjoyment to be familiar with previous books from this series in order to get into the book more easily. That said, the concepts are quite rewarding. This is an author with a huge capacity for invention, which is given full rein by the vast scope of his world. Banks constructs a good plot and writes with great skill. The various characters come across with distinct voices, even from one incarnation to the next.

I will read more of the series and look forward to whatever Mr. Banks pulls off next.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 64 readers
PUBLISHER:	Orbit; Reprint edition (May 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Iain M. Banks
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Wikipedia on The Culture Primer for  The Culture
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Embassytown by China Mieville

Bibliography:

Science Fiction:

• Against a Dark Background (1993)
• Feersum Endjinn (1994)
• The Algebraist (2004)
• Transition (2009)

The Culture Books:

• Consider Phlebas (1987)
• The Player of Games (1988)
• Use of Weapons (1990)
• The State of the Art (1991)
• Excession (1996)
• Inversions (1998)
• Look to Windward (DATE)
• Matter (2008)
• Surface Details (October 2010)

Mainstream books (written as Iain Banks):

• The Wasp Factory (1984)
• Walking on Glass (1985)
• The Bridge (1986)
• Espedair Street (1987)
• Canal Dreams (1989)
• The Crow Road (1992)
• Complicity (1993)
• Whit (1995)
• A Song of Stone (1997)
• The Business (1999)
• Dead Air (2002)
• The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007)

“There were two main ways the Ariekei who could lie a little could lie. …The liars I had thus far seen were slow-liars.

There was reputed to be another technique. It was more base and vivid, and by far harder. This was for the speaker to collapse, in their mind, even individual word-meanings, and simply to brute-utter all necessary sounds. To force out a statement. This was quick-lying: the spitting out of a tumble of phonemes before the untruth of their totality stole the speaker’s ability to think them.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAY 17, 2011)

The core of Embassytown by China Mieville is an exploration of the nature of language in the context of the future on a far-distant solar system where humans interact with an alien species that speak a profoundly different language. This is a new book by the brilliantly inventive author of The City and the City, Perdido Street Station, Kraken and others. I have read four of his books now and one common thread is that they have a philosophical emphasis, and plunge us without much explanation into a radically different world than our own. Due to the strangeness of these worlds, the first part of each book is like visiting some foreign place without knowing much at all about the place, the people, and the customs. Initially clueless, we are rewarded with an unfolding appreciation of the environment. Complex philosophical and conceptual issues are the point of this body of work. Embassytown is no exception to this rule.

Embassytown takes place some distant time in the future when humans have spread to the stars. The science is pretty vague, but also isn’t really the point. This is space opera with a twist. Our latter-day heroine triumphs after incredible difficulties by heroism and the timely application of creative technology. Given Mieville’s wildly inventive mind, this is technology with a twist. We are forcefully reminded that language is a powerful tool and that its use is socially transmitted. Language is one of those significant enabling technologies along with the wheel, fire and the internet.

Embassytown showcases Mieville’s uncanny ability to create outré characters, situations and conceptual mash-ups. The most significant concept in the novel is the language spoken by the Ariekei, the natives of the planet on which the story takes place. Embassytown is the name of the human enclave on this planet. This language, unlike any others spoken by technologically advanced species, is one in which the only things that can be said at all are truths, sort of an embodiment of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philsophicus. Something untrue is simply not comprehended as language at all.

The Ariekei have two mouths, each with their own vocabulary and voice. Their speech is the two mouths working in synchrony. If two different people try to speak Ariekei it is incomprehensible; synthesized speech is heard as mere noise. What is required for comprehensible speech is that two intelligent voices must be simultaneous and so in tune with each other as to be of one mind. People have developed a breeding program to develop cloned pairs who can be trained to be comprehensible. When the planet of which Embassytown is a colony sends a new kind of ambassador composed of two very different individuals who can nevertheless be understood by the Ariekei, the result is a tragic addiction to this impossible speech, a la the media addiction in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

Avice, our heroine, is an immerser, a navigator in something like the underbelly of the universe. She is known to the Ariekei as a simile, “the girl who ate what was given to her.” This is short for, “There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given to her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time.” Her word-self is spoken to describe irony, surprise and a kind of resentful fatalism. She became this simile when she was a child. Some Ariekei asked and paid handsomely that she be put into an old room, suffer some discomfort, and eat what she was given so that they had a particular fact, an actual event, the description of which could be used as a comprehensible figure of speech. We never learn exactly why they made this request, or how they came to be able to articulate their need, but the character of this simile and the fact that other humans living in Embassytown have been similarly employed to become figures of speech of one sort or another is crucial to the resolution of the plot. In other words a simile with conscious intent, our heroine, becomes the agent of resolution to this tale.

This space opera plays out in Chomsky land; in Whorf-Sapir land; in Wittgenstein space. We expect space warps and super ray guns when we pick up science fiction; instead we get language as technology mixed in with the philosophy of truth, lies and figures of speech. Mieville takes his technology seriously by focusing on that most important tool, language, and by asking the question: Can language even be language without lies? And, of course it is all enormously entertaining and mind-bending. Bravo!

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 56 readers
PUBLISHER:	Del Rey (May 17, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on China Miéville
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The City & The City Perdido Street Station

Bibliography:

New Crobuzon Series:

• Perdido Street Station (2000)
• The Scar (2002)
• Iron Council (2004)

Other Novels:

• King Rat (1998)
• Looking for Jake: Stories (August 2005)
• The City and the City (May 2009)
• Kraken (June 2010)
• Embassytown (May 2011)

Teen Readers:

• Un Lun Dun (February 2007)

Nonfiction:

• Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (2004)