The Hydrogen Sonata – Iain M. Banks

Rating: 4 stars

Here’s a brief of my review: a cool high concept sci-fi that sometimes did too much tell and not enough show.

Now, for my longer review:

I didn’t realize this was the first book in a series until the end, so if any of my problems get resolved in later books, I apologize. I feel like the rating should be 3.5 stars, but Goodreads doesn’t have half stars.

The book seems to have three goals, tell a story, be snarky/sarcastic and explore sci-fi concepts. The first two are executed to fantastic grade in the first chapter quite amusingly when a high-powered warship of the Gzilt captures then destroys a small delegation of an alien race containing a secret message. They start out acting very diplomatically but then start protesting bureaucratically increasingly loudly until they are vaporized.

The story then shifts to Vyr Cossont, her uncomfortable and inharmonious eleven-string instrument she has to sit in to play and Pyan, her familiar. She doesn’t care that much about the Sublime, the transcendent state of existence her entire civilization is about to enter and somehow gets caught up with this secret message and millennia old beings and equally unorthodox things. 

To start from the first of my complaints, I feel like Pyan is emblematic of the book. It often takes the form of a cape but can take many forms. However, we only encounter one familiar, and any elaboration or consideration of Pyan feels less than important, more introduced because of the concept and not because of how relevant it is.

One of the largest themes of the book is consciousness. The opposing force to the Gzilt, the Culture, are run pretty much by hive minds that run their ships, and the Gzilt run their ships with what seem to be computer simulations of human beings. Life, too, is explained as consciousness in any form. Like humans, ships can copy and transpose themselves into physical beings that can be re-united with the original, but the idea is that the longer that the original and copy are separated (whether human or not), the more they become two different beings. This is expanded more when the author goes on a diatribe on how an accurate simulation is creating an artificial copy of the world and therefore unethical because it can be disabled or turned off at a whim. It is an interesting concept and one I find interesting, but it suffers from my next point.

The author seems to extrapolate certain technologies uninterestingly. I’m talking about small things like communication and high tech gadgets being incapable of things that modern devices could easily do. One example is reporting in the Gzilt civilization going through television interviews and cameras. Like, okay? It seems terribly banal, and that may be the point, but it’s not very interesting and feels annoying. An expansion of this is several times throughout the book, the author will go out of his way to spend somewhere between one and ten thousand words describing something that isn’t particularly relevant to the story, like massive buildings that are somewhat useless but made for art or the above-mentioned simulation thing. If I can explain them halfheartedly in a paragraph, using that many words in an authoritative and tell-not-show way is excessive.

I’ve always looked forward to reading, but I occasionally found myself bored enough with the book to dread reading it. The snarkiness of the book I briefly mentioned gets left behind except maybe it transitions into an apathy about existence. There are some interesting things in the book, and I recommended it for certain elements. However, I found it inferior to the classics like Asimov, Dick or Bradbury.