Surface Detail

Written by Iain M. Banks

Narrated by Peter Kenny

It begins in the realm of the Real, where matter still matters. It begins with a murder. And it will not end until the Culture has gone to war with death itself.

Lededje Y'breq is one of the Intagliated, her marked body bearing witness to a family shame, her life belonging to a man whose lust for power is without limit. Prepared to risk everything for her freedom, her release, when it comes, is at a price, and to put things right she will need the help of the Culture.

Benevolent, enlightened and almost infinitely resourceful though it may be, the Culture can only do so much for any individual. With the assistance of one of its most powerful - and arguably deranged - warships, Lededje finds herself heading into a combat zone not even sure which side the Culture is really on. A war - brutal, far-reaching - is already raging within the digital realms that store the souls of the dead, and it's about to erupt into reality.

It started in the realm of the Real and that is where it will end. It will touch countless lives and affect entire civilizations, but at the centre of it all is a young woman whose need for revenge masks another motive altogether.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Little, Brown (Hachette UK) Audio
• Release date: Oct 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9781405508650

Iain M. Banks

Iain M. Banks (1954–2013), one of the United Kingdom’s most popular science fiction authors, wrote such highly regarded novels as Consider Phlebas, Excession, and Inversions. Under the name “Iain Banks,” he also published mainstream fiction, including such novels as The Wasp Factory and A Song of Stone.

Reviews for Surface Detail

[kavinay-677830 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Banks' genius is imagining a future removed from labour, sickness, even death, and then royally screwing it all up with people finding ways to pervert utopia and exploit post-scarcity. Just amazing and stunning sci-fi from cradle to grave.

[mkfs-354306 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Banks tackles the Big One here: death, the afterlife, the ethics of human attempts to make their theory of an afterlife become more (or less) real. Rather watered-down, of course, this being a sci-fi thought experiment more than an exploration of ethics or group psychology.

The standard storytelling components are a bit more disappointing. The characters have no character; defined mainly by the situation they are placed in, one could easily be exchanged for another with no loss of consistency. The villain of the piece is downright cartoonish - by the end of the novel, it's surprising he hasn't tied any damsels to railroad tracks. The narrative climax and subsequent wrapping-up are careful to tie up all loose ends, but not in a way that is satisfying or convincing.

So: decent sci-fi, better than probably half of the other Culture novels, but by no means the best of them.

[capewood · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Culture is a galaxy-wide civilization of mostly recognizable humans. There are a few books in the series and while I think they can be read in any order, I've found that the universe that Banks has created has become more detailed and complicated over the series. This is the latest and we learn a lot more about the Culture and the other vast alien civilizations it interacts with. At 654 pages, this is a pretty big novel, as are all of the Culture novels. One problem I have with Banks is that his books get off to really slow starts. I nearly gave up on this one at around 100 pages because I couldn't see where the story was going. But it was worth finishing.

[santhony_35 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

So, after reading four titles in the Culture series, I was teetering on the verge of abandonment. I started with A Player of Games (skipping Consider Phlebas on the recommendation of many) and was VERY happy with the result and looking forward to tearing through the remaining books in the series. The following two books, Use of Weapons and Excession were disappointments, primarily due to their level of complexity and my struggle in keeping on top of the various story lines. The fourth title, Inversions was in no way science fiction and only extremely tangentially Culture. One more strike, and I was out.Fortunately, Look to Windward was excellent. Better than A Player of Games and orders of magnitude better than the other three. Surface Detail, the next in the series is better still, some of the best science fiction I’ve read. The story consists of several threads that alternate in their advancement. At times, it might take a little while to get back in the flow of an individual thread, but not if you consistently read the book. You can’t put it down for a few days and pick it back up expecting to remember all of the back stories.At its heart, the story involves the practice of some civilizations to maintain a simulated Hell, where afterlife punishment is relentlessly and painfully meted out. Some of this is not for the squeamish and many will be turned off by it. A virtual war is being waged between opponents and proponents of the practice.The various threads gradually coalesce to a very satisfying conclusion. A Player of Games was a very simple science fiction novel to read and follow. A couple of the successors, not so much. This book walks the fine line between being intellectually challenging and difficult to follow, much as some of Neal Stephenson’s work, which I thoroughly enjoy. All of the Culture novels I’ve read so far stand completely on their own. There is no reason to feel compelled to read one for fear of losing track of a story arc. They appear to be capable of being read in any order. I would recommend reading a Player of Games first, as it sets out the Culture universe more fully than the others I’ve read subsequently. I cannot recommend Use of Weapons, Excession or Inversions, but would advise to follow up a Player of Games with Look to Windward and Surface Detail.

[jercox · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of his better culture stories, possibly the best - Player of Games was my first in this series, and remains a very strong choice as a starting point for an introduction to the Culture, but this one is very strong for those who are already immersed in the world.

As usual, lots of characters and plotlines twist through to a compelling and not quite predictable finish. Particularly enjoyed the ship "Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints" and his role in keeping things up in the air. Lots of fun.

The hells are ... hellish. Didn't love reading those sections, but a gruesome characterization of some of the horrors that could come with simulating mind states.

[jakecasella · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm slowly but surely working my way through all the Culture books, using a time-honored "when I stumble across them in a shop" technique.

This was a bit more work to get through, for me, than many of Banks' other works. Sentence-by-sentence, still lots of fun—the more attentively I read Banks, the more wordplay and cleverness jumps out at me—and the big ideas are good. However, the multiplicity of plots and view-points is a little overwhelming; what initially seems like three storylines proliferates and multiplies, with each point-of-view getting only fairly short textual chunks at a time. The result is a kind of attenuated feeling; there's so much not immediately obvious in each storyline (standard for Banks) that I just got a kind of collage of events, with things not really lining up until the last fifth of the book or so, when Veppers' real motivations become clear.

To real it back for a second to synopsis, Surface Detail is a Culture story: broad galactic space opera. The Culture itself is a multi-species civilization run primarily by Minds, highly advanced and typically ship-born AI. As it's basically a post-scarcity, hedonistic, space socialist utopia, tension in the Culture comes from its interactions with other civilizations—lower-tech groups that it sometimes attempts benevolent interference with, equivalent-tech groups that are potential threats, and "Elder" or "Sublimed" species that typically don't participate in galactic life, but may have powers far in excess of the Culture if they decide to do so.

Surface Detail has two main plotlines. One focuses on the Sichultians, a non-Culture humanoid race. Veppers, a massively wealthy playboy, murders his slave Lededje when she tries to escape. Unknown to either of them, Lededje was implanted with a "neural lace" during an earlier encounter with an eccentric Culture entity, which device backs up her mind and transmits it to a Culture ship, where she is "revented" into a physical body and sets about trying to get back to Sichult for revenge.

In the second, much more tangled plotline, we learn about "the War in Heaven". Many/most advanced civilizations run virtual afterlives where uploaded consciousnesses can continue after physical death; some non-Culture civs have created virtual Hells for a variety of reasons. After many groups (including the Culture) have been campaigning against these, both sides agree to hold the conflict in a purely virtual form and hold to the conclusion, so that it doesn't spill out into the Real. We meet many players in this plotline, including academics from the Pavul race who infiltrate their Hell and attempt to expose it, a high-ranking military commando from the War in Heaven, and eventually a number of players who are seeking to affect the outcome of the War by means of Real-world action (physically destroying the computers that run the Hells, for instance).

Sichult winds up being intimately connected to the War in Heaven for a few reasons, which brings Lededje and Veppers' plots into line with the larger space opera.

Two hardest parts of this book for me: first, because of how short many of the sections are, there were whole swaths of the plot I found hard to keep straight or care about. Lededje & Veppers worked, but the rest is a bit of a blur. Secondly—and many might consider this a feature rather than a bug of Banks' writing—it's just discomfiting. The first three chapters consist of gruesome murder & rape, tragicomic but still brutally violent military death, and a horrifyingly visceral introduction to the Pavulean Hell. As in much of Banks, the backdrop is that the Culture is Genuinely Good, a more fleshed-out and open-minded version of Star Trek Federation Good, but the actual text of the novel revolves almost pruriently around barbaric sadism.

The Minds-as-characters are where Banks really shines—their intelligence and abilities allow Banks to write them as both believable utopia-shepherds and occasionally-slightly-psychopathic smartasses—and we don't get a ton of them directly here. Lededje feels like the putative protagonist, but while her backstory is developed, I don't feel like Banks infuses her with much character. By contrast, Veppers, who is a moral monster, is actually given the screen-time and agency to develop.

Also, I have to bring up a possibly-purely-personal complaint I always have with Banks, which is that my brain just refuses to remember his character names. With the exception of the Minds, which have funny phrase-names (two main players here are the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly and the Me, I'm Counting) the entirety of Banks' characters have names that feel like they were created by some kind of random syllable generator. No more or less true than many SF/F works, but the sheer volume of his characters makes it particularly hard to keep up with.

The twist towards the end here is sort of slowly, messily revealed. It's terribly clever, and the kind of realpolitik that Banks revels in—when might a deeply good civilization have to temporarily put aside morals for those self-same morals' sake? It is a well-done wtf-moment to realize that everyone you've been following for the whole novel, villains and good guys alike, are basically on the same side. The ship that winds up helping Lededje, and almost single-handedly resolving the Real, physical battle at the novel's conclusion, is an "Abominator-class", masquerading as a "Torturer-class", and calls itself the Falling Outside Normal Moral Restraints. Banks' entire project in a single character name.

Overall: enjoyable, would definitely not suggest as an entry point to the Culture series.

[breic-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Moments of fun, with an exciting conclusion. (You already know how it ends, of course, but what's not to like about a Culture BOOM BANG POW?) I never really bought into the characters, or cared about the Hell versus anti-Hell plot line. One could also probably skip the first 200+ pages without missing much; isn't it more fun to figure out the setting yourself rather than get it in a lecture?

[livingtech_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Some interesting ideas here, especially regarding far-future implications for VR, but overall feel it would have been a better novel at half the length with some of the many subplots removed entirely.

[brumby18 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not a big fan, got bogged down in the minute, skipped a bit

[eldang-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book kind of blew my mind (and brought back my rabid Iain Banks fandom, after the slight disappointment that was Excession). It took me a long time to read, partly because it's 600 pages long and partly because the hardback copy I have is too heavy to want to take on vacation, but also because it's thematically so huge that I kind of needed 4 months to digest it.

There are, of course, several interleaved plots, but the overarching one (introduced early enough for this not to be a spoiler) is a conflict about whether Hells should exist. This being the universe of the Culture, this is not a metaphysical question, but a purely ethical one, because civilisations can choose to have a hell or not, and that choice has become a major division between and within civilisations.

As I read the book, and plenty happened in my own life and the world in that time, what made me really love it was the number of parallels I saw between its techno-fantasy world and the real world around me. The sadism embodied in the Hells, the repugnant status-quo-at-all-costs reasoning used by those who would justify them, the sometimes hopeless-looking idealism of those who would get rid of them, and the weaknesses and limitations of all the would-be good actors all felt like biting commentary on events this year that Banks couldn't have exactly foreseen. And then there's the moral ambiguities of just what steps may or may not be justifiable in service of a noble goal (not exactly a new theme for the Culture novels, or the best exploration of it I've seen, but certainly an engaging one), and the multiple levels of different actors manipulating each other. Of all the Culture novels, even as it has one of the more outlandish plots, I think it's the one that has most to say about the world we actually live in.

NB: If you haven't read any of the Culture books before, don't start with this one because it definitely seems to assume you know something of its world.

[imyril · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Was that a happy ending? Of sorts, obviously, because it's still Banks - but I ended up with a tear in my eye for the first time in a while. Surface Detail wasn't at all what I remembered or expected and was all the better for it.Surface Detail is huge in emotional scope, taking on the concept of death (in a galaxy where being backed up and reincarnated, or effectively digitally immortal are both norms in advanced societies); the afterlife (...and whether we need the threat of Hell to keep us on the straight and narrow); and the delicate balance between justice, revenge, privilege and political expediency.All of which sounds like very heavy going, but leavened here by quality snark, a superbly entertaining Mind that just can't wait to blow something up, and enough sly humour to keep it from smothering you.Full review

[dantarlin · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A bewildering story in which Banks crams a thousand strange ideas into one book. I'm reading the Culture series in order generally, and it seems that as the years went by Banks got more and more complex in his plotting and just threw more and more stuff into every story. The previous book, Matter, bothered me this way, but maybe I'm growing more accustomed to this style, as enjoyed this story better. Anyway, the characters here:-Lededje is the central character, an "intagliate" woman born/engineered with tattoos down to the cellular level, but who is also essentially a slave, owned by a man to whom her parents were indebted. She is murdered by her owner at the start, but surprisingly is reanimated on a Culture ship because of a neural lace built into her brain that she didn't even know about. She sets out for revenge against her owner.-Veppers is Lededje's owner, the main villain in the book. He is the wealthiest man in his society, and essentially a cartoon villain, caring about nobody but himself. He is also buried in a complex conspiracy with some aliens involved in a virtual war over the fate of virtual "hells" in many societies.-Vateuil is a soldier and commander in the virtual war over the Hells.-Prim and Chay are four-legged aliens who sneak into the Hell run by elements of their society, with the goal of escaping and publicizing the barbarity of that place.-Yime Nisokyi is a Culture agent in the section of Contact that deals with the Dead in their virtual environments. As the war over the Hells intensifies and involves the aforementioned Veppers, she is sent to ensure that Lededje doesn't cause a galactic incident by murdering him.-Bettlescroy is a non-culture diplomat/military commander involved with Veppers in a conspiracy involving the Tsungarial Disk, an enormouse warship-building factory abandoned by an ancient civilization which becomes part of a plan to bring the virtual war over the Hells into the "Real".-Unfallen Bulbitian- is a ship left over from the Bulbitian civilization which houses a number of missions attempting to communicate with it. Like many of Banks' ancillary ideas, this one was wholly unnecessary to the plot, and it's hard to understand why it was included.And in this case, the AI ships have big roles to play. The warship "Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints" is actually a great character- a ship built for destruction, usually bored waiting for something to happen, that decides to help Lededje in her quest for revenge, mainly to amuse itself. When a skirmish in space occurs, the ship is so excited to be unleashed it's actually kind of fun.The ship "Me, I'm Counting" is the eccentric ship that gives Lededje her neural lace, allowing her to be reborn after her murder.As with Matter, I wish Banks dialed down the ideas a little to make the story more comprehensible. Still, this was a good time.

[orkydd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After I finished reading 'Surface Detail', Iain Banks penultimate Culture novel. It occurred to me this is the 4th last time I will have the pleasure of a new Iain Banks, following the writer's untimely death in May. 'Surface Detail' is a sprawling epic Space Opera, complete with wisecracking drones and rogue GSVs.
An indentured slave is murdered by her brutal owner. A copy of her mind escapes to the Culture. She is re-lifed and seeks revenge or redemption. A virtual war is being fought to decide whether to allow or to disallow cultures in the galaxy from running Hells, simulated afterlives in which the mind-states of the dead are tortured. The Culture, as always, vows to be neutral. But it just can't help meddling....

[nx74defiant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book.There is a war between the civilizations that maintain virtual hells and the civilizations that want the hells to end. I agree with the argument that eternal torment is wrong.I loved avatar Demeisen of the ship the Culture war ship `'Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints'. His enjoyment of the thought of going to battle was so fun. He is a very funny character.

[altheaann · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Oh, I love Iain Banks.
He consistently manages to create books which are compelling, complex and challenging while remaining action-filled, exciting and even humorous.
This is the latest of his Culture novels (the ninth, if I'm correct). As with most of the books, it works as a stand-alone, with only a few tie-ins to other books for the pleasure of the devoted reader.
This novel entwines the story of Lededje Y'Breq, a woman seeking revenge against her former master and abuser, with the story of an interstellar conflict over the right to maintain virtual "hells" in which the preserved consciousnesses of the deceased are tormented.
As the topics imply, there's in-depth exploration of questions of ethics, all wrapped in a kick-ass story with plenty of space battles, virtual conflicts and grisly, violent action.

[elenchus_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Politics and morality are front and center; comparatively less of the plot is devoted to Minds or Contact than to nefarious plots against innocents (one in Hell, the other in slavery); a villain so over the top as to be twirling a waxed mustache. Surface Detail is a potboiler, space opera in the mold of Flash Gordon, and probably should be enjoyed as such. Were this the first Culture novel I'd read, likely I wouldn't have come back. Since it wasn't, I kept an ear to the ground for Banks's sidelong commentary, and glimpses into Special Circumstances and the implications of technology supporting personal backups or virtual reality.//VR serving as a culture's Hell; Banks's imagination fell short here, Hell a Boschian salad of bodily torture on infinite loop. Hell is predicated on embodied existence, little exploration of emotional or mental hells other than what follows from witnessing / experiencing / anticipating physical pain. (Excepting: the urge to kill implanted in Prin, an existential betrayal of her ideals and Self, but still close to physical sensation.) The most interesting idea is Banks speculating widespread use of VR by pan-human civilisations in order to manifest each culture's concept of Hell, and that conflict would result about this use of technology.Three Contact specialist divisions more recent than Special Circumstances:•Quietudinal Service (Quietus) serve as liaison to the dead, that is, Persons in VR Hell•Restoria (Pest Control) "charged with taking care of hegemonising swarm outbreaks when -- by accident or design -- a set of self-replicating entities ran out of control somewhere and started trying to turn the totality of the galaxy's matter into nothing but copies of themselves" [177]•Numina liaison with Sublimed species / individuals

[piersanti-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Okay, just okay, nothing special here.

[ma_washigeri · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Fairly good. Had to skip over the long boring descriptions of people being tortured and spaceship battles - but otherwise quite entertaining.

[ub1707 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I found this one a tricky read but in the end was fully satisfied. Imagining a society that has taken it upon itself to make Hell "real" was fairly horrifying and at times challenging to read. But, the book isn't entirely taken up with these descriptions an instead a large part of the novel is a revenge story.

[j3745 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The writing is clear and easy to follow and there are some intriguing parts of the book, but overall I was disappointed. By the end of the book, I found myself caring very little about what happened to any of the many characters--human or machine--and I felt almost disinterested as to how events turned out in the galactic level conflicts that are part of the book. I've read one other of Iain M. Banks science fiction novels, Excession, which I enjoyed. I've also read two of his novels--The Bridge and Song of Stone. Although it was a hard read, in much the same way that that Saramago's Blindness is a difficult read, Song of Stone was beautifully written and compelling.

[bmorrisallen-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There seems to be an epidemic of weak editing these days. Surface Detail is sadly not immune, either on the typographical (words and punctuation missing or misplaced) or stylistic (poor word choice, lack of clarity) front. It's not a major impediment, but it's disappointing.

Iain M. Banks' Culture books tend to exceptionally well-written, but also be dry, distant, and complex. Surface Detail is no exception. Characters with long, difficult names abound, and there are several plots and sub-plots, most of which come loosely together at the end. In fact, the epilogue relies on readers' memory of another Culture book from some years back. (I didn't get it and had to look it up).

Briefly, Surface Detail is about both an indentured servant/slave who breaks free, and a disagreement about the future of virtual "Hells". As always, Banks' writing is generally excellent, engaging, and witty. (Though there are some rough patches during which the editor seems to have fallen asleep.) Almost everything is plausible, though one key character is decidedly ex-machina and both inconsistent and non-credible in his actions. I'm always amazed at Bank's ability to keep a complex, multi-element plot moving smoothly through a massive book.

At the same time, while I enjoy Banks' writing, I often have difficulty remembering much about the Culture books afterwards. That may in part be because they're complex. However, I think it has more to do with the characters. They're likeable and realistic, but they seldom seem to have very deep emotions, and I always feel at a fairly great level of remove from them. Every now and then, I'm afraid with them, but more often I relate to them somewhat clinically. In this book, that's true of the central character, to whom many bad things have happened. I accept her desire for revenge, but I never really feel it, and since it's a plot driver, that's problematic. At the other end is a couple to whom bad things continue to happen. There, I felt a little more empathy, but always at some distance.

In short, in Surface Detail, as with other Culture books (and unlike the only Iain Banks [no M.] book I've read, A Song of Stone), I finished the book and thought "That was really well written." I did not think "I'm really relieved that Character X came out of it okay." My appreciation was much more technical than emotional.

This book won't change your mind about Banks. If you've liked other Culture books, you'll like this one. If you're new to Banks, you can start here, but you might be better of with Consider Phlebas or Use of Weapons.

[schant-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A bit long but pretty good.

[chaosmogony · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

That good Iain Banks

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This one is interesting, a return to those whimsically named intelligent ships, high-tech wonders and galaxy-spanning space opera. Unlike the last couple of Banks novels I've read, this one even has a happy ending, evil punished and protagonists living more or less happily ever after.

[travelster · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Science fiction at its best. Interesting characters and great fictional science.

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

First book of the Culture series that I have read. Interesting enough and a good read - describes the idea of a massive intelligence with some degree of detail and interest. I will have to look for the others.

[xnfec · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Banks very much back to his best in this Culture novel. The "Psychopath" class ship is particluarly funny and true to its type.

[psiloiordinary_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The quality continues. Superb science fiction by a master of the craft.Someone once said that the job of science fiction writers was not to predict the future, but to prevent it from happening. Banks breaks this rule, his "Culture" seems pretty amazing to me.

[tarsolyger · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have found this book really disappointing. I was a huge fan of Use of Weapons and I had liked to read The Player of Games, and it was intriguing to read The Wasp Factory.This novel lacks the quality that made those former books valuable. In my opinion, Banks' strength lies in forming his characters, showing their feelings, inner motivations, fears, etc. The storyline was only to serve as the environment where these characters move.I had read Look to Windward too, and that was the first disappointment. The characters were strong, but the focus was on the - quite predictable - storyline which only served to enforce the proverb "Do not fuck with the Culture".Unfortunately Surface Detail moves towards that direction. The story is simpler, the characters are shallow. The ending is a disaster: the last 4 pages summarizes the events that happened after the 600+ pages of the books, and the 3-page-epilogue is like the author have realised that there were only moderate twists in the story, so he gives us a revelation about a character that is supposed to be striking but unfortunately I couldn't care less, as that character was nothing special.Otherwise, I can only recommend this novel to those who just want to read something light for a longer period that is not boring, the pace of action is good enough.Oh, and don't fuck with the Culture.

[mbg0312 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I like me some UK socialist sci-fi writers.