Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 309 - 2014-05 by vol 25 no 09

Author:vol 25 no 09
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Burrowing Wombat Press
Published: 2014-05-25T16:00:00+00:00

Joe Sanders

The Emperor of I Scream: Torture, Revenge, Justice, and Hope in Iain M. Banks’s Surface Detail

More than material comforts, political systems offer their members protection—from outsiders and from themselves. In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, for example, when members of the People’s Front of Judea are nerving themselves to strike a blow against the tyranny of the Roman Empire, their leader, Reg, rhetorically asks what the Romans have ever given them only to have one member reply “the aqueduct,” another suggest “sanitation,” and so on through “roads,” “irrigation,” “medicine,” “education,” “wine”—leading up to one final exchange: “And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.” “Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let’s face it. They’re the only ones who could in a place like this.” Whether it’s the Roman Empire, the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan, or the Thousand Year Reich, such organizations promise their members safety through violence: Law and Order. People are perversely attracted to seeing themselves as both potential victims and victimizers; they actually believe they need to be defended against themselves. When the members of the People’s Front mention how difficult it is to provide safety “in a place like this,” they really mean “dealing with people like us.” Just so, in Iain M. Banks’s 2010 novel, Surface Detail, an elderly legislator defends the establishment of virtual Hells where the souls of sinners can be punished forever, by bellowing that “We need the Hells! We’re fallen, evil creatures!” (445).

Surface Detail is one of Banks’s novels set in the interstellar Culture, which is the very opposite of an “empire.” Instead, the Culture is a vast, anarchic cluster of biologic and mechanical individuals drawn together by shared curiosity about exploration and evolution. The Culture has no central, decision-making authority; rather, its consciousness accumulates in conversations between countless mortals and the AI Minds of gigantic Ships with their arrays of avatars and drones that can take almost any physical form. The Culture tries hard not to interfere with how other civilizations express their values, though in this novel it clearly is on the side of those trying to expose and destroy the virtual Hells. This position requires a difficult balancing act, for while the Culture prefers not to limit individuals’ choices, it also realizes the dangerous attraction of “safety” achieved by repressive codes that give the right to inflict pain on transgressors. The attraction is especially great when one doesn’t have to confront the painful results. One purpose of literature, however, is to encourage empathetic recognition. Surface Detail’s description of the suffering going on in the Hells is so brilliantly, viciously appalling that it should encourage people to reject a social system based on bribery and torture. The question then becomes what alternative the Culture could offer that might both restrain and satisfy humans. In his novels, especially in Surface Detail, Banks sets out to show a believable substitute for “justice” that actually is merely revenge expressed through pain.

The novel’s opening

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