Readers of Banks will understand the Sublimed to be those civilisations that have ascended beyond the material reality into some higher state of existence. Vyr Cossont the main female character of the story has a life ambition, a single bucket list item, to be able to play the piece through all movements correctly and without interruption before she Sublimes with the rest of her civilisation. The instrument in fact has more than eleven strings and was created some time after the piece of music was written. The Hydrogen Sonata is a ridiculously difficult piece of music written for an instrument nicknamed the 11-string that requires four hands and a strong back to play. It is therefore with mixed feelings that I write this post about his last ‘skiffy’ book The Hydrogen Sonata and the last book of his I will have the pleasure to read. Dick, there are some stories that may be published posthumously, but I somehow doubt it given the complexity of Banks’s plotting. This measurement represents a nice coincidence as it is precisely the inside width of one shelf on my Ikea bookshelf and a sad fact as it seems unlikely that there will be any more literary inches from this author given his untimely death. Banks paperback books placed on a bookshelf and measured edge to edge measures thirty inches.
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