This post exists to collect all the links from our Forum on Iain M. Banks' The Hydrogen Sonata into one coherent place: Chris Brown: A Triumphant Return to Form | Gerard van der Ree: Learning from Utopia | Iver B. Neumann: Religion and the Sublime | Patrick Thaddeus Jackson: Actors on the Sci-Fi Stage | Dan Nexon: To Sim, Perchance to Dream | and Iain M. Banks' reply Let me also admit just how geeked I am to have been able to put this...
Iain M. Banks reacts to the symposium on his book, The Hydrogen Sonata.
The Culture novels have long been concerned with the interplay of simulation, simulacrum, religion, and materialism.
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.
A discussion of Iain M. Banks’ last Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata, including the author’s reaction to the symposium.
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...
Three particular themes stand out when reading The Hydrogen Sonata as a utopian narrative. The first is that whatever happens, politics seem to be an inevitable feature of human life. Second, that however advanced technology may become, nothing beats human communication. Third, that purpose is essential.
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. Chris Brown is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. Ten books published over twenty-five years, many brilliant and not one of them a real turkey – such is the achievement of Iain M. Banks’s Culture series. This longevity is, in a way, surprising because the Culture is a genuine utopia, a galaxy-wide...
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