Surface Detail
All the time I was reading Surface Detail, I was realizing that I'd only have one more new Iain M. Banks novel to read after this. That is just sad.
On the other hand, I've read very few of his literary novels, written as Iain Banks, sans M, so all is not lost.
This science fiction novel is set in the Culture, a universe that Banks had created for most of his far-future space operas. One of the problems with far future fiction is that it seems unlikely that people will be recognizably like us at that point. Banks solved that in the Culture by having human-form creatures (who are NOT Earth humans, by the way) only because it's the current fashion in body shape. There are many other aliens that come in very different forms. The really important characters in the Culture's civilization aren't people anyway, they're the AIs that mostly inhabit large spaceships or other orbital platforms: the Minds. And the Minds can produce physical avatars that tend to look like people, for convenience of communication. So they're ships, but the human characters often see them as people.
There are also small drones, and in many of his books the drones are the best characters.
The ships have a sarcastic habit of naming themselves irreverently. In this volume we have the Abominator Class special operations warship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints; another that goes by the name Me, I'm Counting, and the normally well-behaved General Service Vehicle Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly.
That last ship's name is also the ideal of the Culture, in so many words. There is a certain cynicism in Banks's view of civilization, and a very healthy respect for forces outside any civilization's control. The Culture books promote the code of behavior that one should try to behave decently, whenever possible -- while realizing that it is a natural tendency of the Universe for things to go wrong, and for intelligent creatures to generate both unfortunate catastrophes and deliberate, evil disasters.
In this case we learn that quite a number of civilizations have created virtual afterlives for the dead (since they can decant minds into computers, and even into new bodies), and some of these are Hells. Indeed, a number of civilizations have linked the Hell databases, so that their virtual dead can suffer tortures their own kind never even dreamed of. Other civilizations think this is unconscionable, and have tried to get the Hells shut down. Indeed, to settle the issue, there is a virtual War in Hell going on; and the war is threatening to spill out into the Real.
That's one of several central conflicts, but it's the one that ties the others together.
There's an interesting addendum to this volume, when readers who have followed the series discover that they know one of the main characters from another book.
There's also a certain touch of Responsibility Porn to the book, in which characters get to behave questionably, for the greater good; but Banks is part satirist, and I have always felt that he meant to have that problematical issue of reader conscience nagging away at us, even as we enjoy the tale.
CBsIP: Claims for Poetry, Donald Hall, ed.
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.
A Light in the Attic, Shel Silverstein
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections on Natural History, Stephen Jay Gould
Writing Down the Bones (expanded edition), Natalie Goldberg
Plutarch's Lives, Plutarch
Blood Honey, Chana Bloch
Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, Vol. II, P. H. Sheridan