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.

The latest novel weaves together the stories of a persecuted slave girl, Lededjem, fighting back against her evil master, Veppers; a pair of twin-trunked, elephant-like aliens trying to expose the horrors of the virtual hells; and a warrior within one of those hells fighting an endless series of virtual battles. Banks doesn’t pull any punches in his descriptions of the virtual hells, which are as gruesome and disturbing as a Heironymous Bosch painting.

Wired.co.uk sat down with Banks to talk about the book in a predictably wide-ranging talk that touched on science fiction, religion, politics and the current financial crisis.

Wired.co.uk: When does this story happen in relation to the chronology of the previous Culture novels?

Iain M. Banks: This one takes place about 800 years later on in the chronology of the culture, that’s why you’ve now got the whole potential of the turf wars, because Contact has hived off itself into different bits and there are various bureaucratic evolutions going on within the Contact section itself.

Wired.co.uk: One thing newcomers to the Culture novels will have to grapple with is the incredibly elaborate names of the characters.

Banks: A lot of what the Culture is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens. There seemed to be all this convention that in the future everyone would have numbers for names. We’d live in a giant hive, and dress identically in dungarees. I thought: no. It also struck me that in the Culture, citizens have the lifestyle and access to luxury that in our history only aristocrats have had access to. I thought in a sense they are all aristocrats, with the very long names, often with the place where you’re born.

Wired.co.uk: They’re a bit like Hobbits — proud of their heritage.

Banks: Yes. Except taller and more elegant somehow…. It’s the same with the names of the ships: These are conscious entities, and they treat their ships as their bodies, they’re not that important, it’s the Minds inside the ships. I couldn’t imagine they’d be called things like Intrepid or Victorious or even Enterprise. They’d be called things like Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints or I Thought He Was With You.

Wired.co.uk: What gave you the impulse to write about the war of the hells?

Banks: The idea of the hells came from thinking over the approach from one of the other novels, Look to Windward, in which there’s a mention of a civilization that has a kind of Valhalla-ish virtual world for their fallen dead. At the time, that was treated as something very special. Then I began to think, if that was possible then it’s the kind of thing that civilizations would do as a matter of course, and be an actual part of your civilization’s development.

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.

Wired.co.uk: I know you’ve spoken before about the idea of colonizing the galaxy for the left. So much of the architecture of the space opera is very right-wing. Is part of the project to have this lovely, Guardian-reading hedonistic diaspora?

Banks: Well frankly yes! I suppose that’s me at my most didactic worst. I’m trying to be subtle about it as best I can. The good guys by my standards are winning, liberals with small L, of the left. Money is not the be all and end all — but it’s a post-scarcity society, so in a sense it can afford its good works and its charity.

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Authors: Michael Parsons, Wired UK

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