The novel “Surface Detail” by Iain M. Banks was published for the first time in 2010. It’s part of the Culture series.
Lededje Y’breq is a slave owned by Joiler Veppers. When she tries once again to escape but gets caught another time, she bites his nose and he kills her in a fit of rage. Her mind, however, is transmitted to the closest Culture starship, where it’s transferred into a new body. Her only thought is to go back to her planet to take revenge but Veppers is the most powerful man of their civilization and that means among other things that he’s always surrounded by bodyguards.
A virtual war has been ongoing for many years in an extremely sophisticated simulation between two factions that represent many galactic civilizations. The dispute is between those who want to keep the virtual hells that exist in various civilizations and those who see them as an aberration and calls for them to be shut down. When some of the fighters decide to change the rules of the war, Joiler Veppers becomes a person of considerable strategic importance to its outcome.
The underlying themes of “Surface Detail” are death and the afterlife but they’re treated as far from supernatural. In fact, in high technological levels civilizations that live in the galaxy the afterlife consists of simulations in which the minds of sentient organic beings can be transferred.
Among the many civilizations of various levels existing in the Culture fictional universe, a part have also created virtual hells. Others, however, believe that this is a barbaric application of the technologies that enable the transfer of a sentient mind in a very advanced form of cyberspace.
Two factions, one pro-Hell and one anti-Hell, end up deciding the future of these versions of the virtual afterlife in a war. Given the purpose, it’s logical that the war is fought in a virtual environment where soldiers can have a full experience but where death is only a momentary state. The Culture is strongly anti-Hell but for political reasons refrains from participating in the war, at least officially.
This war, however, is only one of the themes of “Surface Detail”, which is divided into several subplots, partly set in various places of the physical universe and partly in various virtual universes. It’s no coincidence that a novel of this type starts with a murder, that of Lededje Y’breq. Initially, her story may seem marginal, the sad story of a crime that unfortunately remains unpunished, but soon the reader starts understanding its importance.
Joiler Veppers, Lededje’s owner and murderer, is the most powerful man of his civilization and his activities have a strategic importance in the war that is fully revealed only in the course of the novel. Their stories are interwoven with those of other characters and other subplots with a result that’s truly complex even by Iain M. Banks’s standards.
“Surface Detail” really has many characters, physical and virtual belonging to various different species of biological origin but also artificial intelligences. In the Culture novels there are always sentient spaceships and in this case there are also warships, an important element when the virtual war starts expanding to the physical galaxy. Inevitably, not all the characters, even the important ones, are adequately developed.
It’s not easy to follow a novel like “Surface Detail” and it doesn’t help that very often Banks switches to another character specifying its name only after a page or so. The reader is on a kind of roller coaster running between the real universe, the virtual battleground world and virtual hells.
Despite the many characters and multiple settings, Iain M. Banks often dwells in detailed descriptions of specific situations. This can be Lededje who discovers how a sort of smart space suit works but in other cases there are crude and sometimes gruesome details of what can happen in a virtual hell or the meaning of death in a virtual war.
These features make “Surface Detail” a novel whose contents range from space opera to philosophical-religious reflections. As it’s often happened in Iain M. Banks’s last novels, this breadth of contents is both a strength and a weakness in the novel because it makes it very rich but also in various ways dispersive.
The Culture novels obviously have in common their fictional universe but generally are completely independent. “Surface Detail” can also be read independently but its epilogue contains a final twist tied to a previous novel in the series. It will be meaningless to those who don’t understand its reference while it might leave open-mouthed the readers who have read the Culture novel linked to this one.
In my opinion, in “Surface Detail” the merits are overall much greater than the flaws and the final result, although heavy to read, is very good. For those unfamiliar with the Culture universe it might be a novel too difficult to start the series but for people who already read at least some of the other novels I recommend this one.
