The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks
The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks
4 Rating(s)
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The Hydrogen Sonata

Author: Iain M. Banks

Series: Culture

Narrator: Peter Kenny

Unabridged: 17 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Orbit

Published: 10/09/2012


Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling Culture novel. . .

The Scavenger species are circling. It is, truly, provably, the End Days for the Gzilt civilization.

An ancient people, organized on military principles and yet almost perversely peaceful, the Gzilt helped set up the Culture ten thousand years earlier and were very nearly one of its founding societies, deciding not to join only at the last moment. Now they've made the collective decision to follow the well-trodden path of millions of other civilizations; they are going to Sublime, elevating themselves to a new and almost infinitely more rich and complex existence.

Amid preparations though, the Regimental High Command is destroyed. Lieutenant Commander (reserve) Vyr Cossont appears to have been involved, and she is now wanted -- dead, not alive. Aided only by an ancient, reconditioned android and a suspicious Culture avatar, Cossont must complete her last mission given to her by the High Command. She must find the oldest person in the Culture, a man over nine thousand years old, who might have some idea what really happened all that time ago.

It seems that the final days of the Gzilt civilization are likely to prove its most perilous.

About Iain M. Banks

Iain Banks (1954-2013) came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. Consider Phlebas, his first science fiction novel, was published under the name Iain M. Banks in 1987 and began his celebrated ten-book Culture series. He is acclaimed as one of the most powerful, innovative and exciting writers of his generation.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Mario the lone bookwolf on June 04, 2022

The last work of this great master, dealing with life, death, the afterlife, and the sense and usefulness of art and its use as an expression of cultural identity. Reread 2022 with extended review Organizing the sublimation How might not only individuals but whole states or intergalactic empires deal w......more

Goodreads review by Manny on January 07, 2019

There's this eternal debate about the extent to which you should be looking at the author's life when you try to understand their work, and The Hydrogen Sonata is a fine example. It's the tenth and last volume in Iain M. Banks's Culture series, it's about the death of a major Galactic civilisation,......more

Goodreads review by Bradley on February 09, 2017

End Days. Oh yes, the end is coming for the whole Gzilt civilization. They're tired of making music and screwing. They're tired of being so damn *good* at everything. So, let's follow the holy text and hop aboard the higher-dimensional expressway and SUBLIMEo ourselves! They're not the first culture t......more

Goodreads review by Matt on November 10, 2015

Banks seems content to spin out increasingly fractal world building episodes while adopting an ever more and more affected and feathery writing style filled with qualifiers and digressions and dangling clauses, becoming in each new work ever more tangled in conscious - or perhaps unconscious – imit......more

Goodreads review by Alan on June 09, 2013

This has been a hard review to write. Not because of the book itself, about which I have only nice things to say, but because, as he recently announced, Iain M. Banks is dying of inoperable cancer, the sort of general systems failure which makes a mockery of notions like "intelligent" design. He's i......more