By Michael Parsons, Wired UK
Iain M. Banks’ latest novel, Surface Detail, is a grand addition to his long-running science fiction series known as the Culture novels, named after the sprawling civilization which dominates his space opera’s universes.
Banks has used the Culture novels to make space opera his own, and the results are a delight — intelligent, cleverly structured novels bursting with a Dickensian excess of detail, characters and ideas, all held together with extremely tight plotting.
In Surface Detail, thousands of races throughout the universe are consigning the souls of their people to eternity within digital hells. These virtual hells have become connected and are now host to a virtual war between supporters and opponents of the hells, including the Culture, who understandably regard torturing the damned as a rather uncivilized practice.
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http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/10/iain-banks/snip
Wired.co.uk: The device becomes a great way to talk about religion — and in particular the Catholic religion’s vision of hell. You’re explicating the theology, and saying this is what it would really be like, these are the hells you’re wishing upon your sinners. And you explore it in excruciating detail.
Banks: Absolutely, I think hell is a sick idea! You have to make sense of it, though, as with everything else. It starts off as a neat idea, but then even hell would be bureaucratized. You have to think it through in detail, as part of your responsibility as a writer. If it’s a short story you can get away with just touching the idea, but you have to go into it in great depth in a novel of this scale, particularly when these hells are supposed to be an ongoing thing. It’s certainly not just aimed at the Catholic Church, of course — but at superstition in general.
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