They are contacted by the remnant of a civilisation who previously Sublimed, who had taken the Gzilt somewhat under their wing in the years before they left. A civ called the Gzilt is about to do this. In the far future, civilisations can do something called Subliming – abandoning the real universe and escaping up to a higher dimension beyond spacetime. It’s probably the best book in the sequence since EXCESSION.
Iain Banks died almost seven years ago, now - god, I remember buying his first book, THE WASP FACTORY, off a spinner rack in Rayleigh High Street in 1984 and just being knocked flat by its mad audacity – and there aren’t going to be any more Culture books. In The Hydrogen Sonata, this issue becomes crucial.I’d been saving the final book in Iain Banks’ CULTURE sequence, THE HYDROGEN SONATA, for a while. Some species choose other paths – and collectively transcend into the greater possibilities for wisdom conveyed by the immaterial dimensions of the "Sublime".
Long ago they let most of the actual running of things be done by incredibly intelligent, if whimsical, artificial intelligences, who regard the fleshly beings they protect as quite amusing pets. The many species, most of them humanoid, who make up the Culture are intelligent hedonists. The vast majority of Iain M Banks's science fiction novels are set not so much in the future but elsewhere, in parts of the galaxy that regard humanity as a slightly embarrassing poor relation. Nothing is wholly serious in such worlds and nothing is so trivial that it can be dismissed from memory. A random mention, a gratuitous piece of irresponsible world-building, can become in a later book Chekhov's gun, which you hang on the wall in order to fire two acts later. The world, the universe, where they are set is a given, and you can explore any patch of it you feel like. For readers and writers, one of the pleasures of series novels that are not also serials is that you can skip around them with no particular concern about sequence or chronology.
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