Iain M. Banks reacts to the symposium on his book, The Hydrogen Sonata.
The Hydrogen Sonata Forum: Iain M. Banks Replies
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The Hydrogen Sonata
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Dan Nexon on The Hydrogen Sonata: To Sim, Perchance to Dream
The Culture novels have long been concerned with the interplay of simulation, simulacrum, religion, and materialism.
PTJ on The Hydrogen Sonata: Actors on the Sci-Fi Stage
So the Culture appears to both want to pursue this knowledge for the sheer joy of knowing, and for the contribution that knowledge can make to deciding on a course of action. Both constitute recognizable grounds for action, both in the Culture and in our world, but as the novel unfolds, both are called into question.
Iver B. Neumann on The Hydrogen Sonata: Religion and the Sublime
General Warning: this is emphatically not a spoiler-free Forum! Hence all of the text all of the contributions will be safely below the fold, and only the identifying information for the author of the contribution will be here for even causal browsers to see. If we are to begin with author intentionality, The Hydrogen Sonata is about ‘the subliming business’. In the Western tradition (which is rather less Western than we sometimes imagine it), the concept of the sublime may be traced back to a work that surfaced in Byzantium during the tenth century, but that probably hails from the first...