I have devoured this week Iain M. Banks’s new Culture novel The Hydrogen Sonata (see http://www.iain-banks.net/). As I wrote last year in the post on Surface Detail, I hesitate to recommend his novels either as a mainstream or as an sf novelist for I know this is an acquired taste. I read complaints in Amazon.co.uk that he’s past his prime and that The Hydrogen Sonata offers nothing much, in terms of new ideas or space opera. Well, I have been a very happy reader during the hours I have spent reading it, marvelling at what kind of mind can hold together such a vast literary universe, and thanking him for the sense of humour, which I always appreciate. In this one, there’s a male character which overdoes it by having dozens of penises implanted all over his body –he needs four hearts to pump up all the required blood!! So much for the post-human body…

Banks has always maintained that as a Scottish sf writer his allegiance is to the genre not to the nation and, so, that his universe should not be read in political terms in connection with Scotland’s history and culture. His claim has always been that he created the Culture as a utopian response to so much American dystopian SF. I have always followed his lead in this, until now. I’m sure that my reading of The Hydrogen Sonata is contaminated not only by the forthcoming Scottish referendum on independence in 2014 but also by the independentist madness that has gripped the otherwise sensible nation where I live, Catalonia, because of the deep economic recession.

Consider Banks’s plot: his universe has reached a point in which entire civilisations may choose to Sublime into a higher state of being. One of these, the humanoid Gzilt, have decided to follow this path as a consequence of their veneration for their main religious icon: the Book of Truth, handed down to them by a long-Sublimed civilization. The Book has so far accurately predicted their whole progression as a species and seemingly suggests Subliming as the final target. Subliming can only be undertaken on the basis of a majority vote and those few who choose to be left behind must face the consequences of the ensuing planetary loneliness (and loss of significance as members of a extinct culture). A few weeks before Instigation (the beginning of the final process) the doubt arises of whether the Book of Truth might be just a pack of lies. Are the Gzilt committing a tragic mistake of epic proportions? The Culture, as usual in Banks’s novels, is faced with the tough decision of letting things be, or plunge their friends the Gzilt into chaos at the very last minute.

All this rang a bell as I read, which does not necessarily mean that Banks intended The Hydrogen Sonata to be an allegory. I do not know whether he’d be annoyed or amused by my paranoiac reading of his sf novel, I’d like to believe he’d be amused indeed. I realise that I am projecting my own fears, as no matter how in favour I may be of Catalan independence, I am worried sick that matters have gone too far, too rashly and, what bothers me most, with little Catalan sense of ‘seny’. Those who Sublime in Banks’s novel do not usually return while the very few who do are too overwhelmed to be minimally coherent. This contributes to the impression that the grass is indeed greener on the other side, but none really knows for sure. The alternative choice, though, the almost complete loneliness that the female protagonist Vyr considers is equally scary.

So much for reading sf to escape from the worries of daily life here on Earth…