THE HYDROGEN SONATA was published in 2012
It is a Culture novel
The Scavenger species are circling. It is, truly, the End Days for the Gzilt civilisation.
An ancient people, the Gzilt helped set up the Culture ten thousand years ago 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 civilisations: 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 is now wanted – dead, not alive. Aided only by a reconditioned android and a suspicious Culture avatar, Cossont must complete her last mission and find the oldest person in the Culture, a man over 9000 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.
Iain said, “It’s the usual mix of starships with ridiculous names and humans with names which aren’t much more sensible either and a few sarcastic drones floating around and just lots of the standard Culture stuff. But this time it’s sort of about Subliming which is this thing that I’ve mentioned in the past about what can happen to entire civilisations when they’ve, well, not when they’ve got to the end of their allotted span but when they’ve got bored with life. Then they can go in to the Sublime which is what’s happening to this civilisation called the Gzilt in the book. Contact has split up in to largely different specialisations one of which is Quietus which is to do with the dead and the virtual realities. And there’s another one which deals with the Sublime or which tries to anyway, and the joke is – at least it’s a joke that I found somewhat funny – where there’s a ship thinking, “I wish we had a specialist agency that dealt with this kind of stuff instead of us having to.”
“Subliming had been mentioned in various culture novels and I’d never really thought much about it – it just gave me an out for civilisations without them having to collapse in the classical, Ozymandian sense. Then people at signings and in interviews began to ask about it, so I started to think about it properly and decided/realised that it was an important part of the whole context of the Culture and the rest of the civilised galactic scene, and could provide an interesting setting in which to tell a story. (This is as close as I ever get, or want to get, to audience participation.) I still needed an idea for a plot, and so the initial idea might have sat on the shelves for years waiting for one, but then, fortuitously, a plot suggested itself and the book was ready to go almost immediately. I can remember where and when the idea came to me: I was lying on a sort of bubble-bed at the side of a large swimming pool, in the sunlight at a spa complex in southern Spain, in October 2011, thinking about an edition of QI I’d seen a week or two earlier, in which Stephen Fry had mentioned something called The Great Disappointment. [It was] when a whole bunch of people in America, I think in the 1880s or sometime, genuinely did believe that the world was going to end because their preacher man had told them, and of course it didn’t. There was so many of them involved, it was called the Great Disappointment, and a lot of them really did give everything away that they had owned, and there’s no way back from that. There was a great disappointment that everyone hadn’t died, or that they had lived, or whatever. I liked the idea of not just a prophecy that came true, but an entire holy book that was proved to be absolutely correct, for entirely material reasons as it were, nothing supernatural going on. Bang; the plot of The Hydrogen Sonata just unfolded in my head.”