"Surface Detail": reassessing Iain M Banks

Iain Banks: (1954-2013)

"Dying. She’d be revented [re-incorporated], she guessed, in theory. She’d been backed up; everything up to about six hours ago copied, replicable. But that meant nothing. So another body, vat-grown, would wake with her memories – up to that point six hours ago, not including this bit, obviously – so what? That wouldn’t be her. She was here, dying. The self-realisation, the consciousness, that didn’t transfer; no soul to transmigrate. Just behaviour, as patterned. 

"All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy. Nothing was ever identical to anything else because it didn’t share the same spatial coordinates; nothing could be identical to anything else because you couldn’t share the property of uniqueness. Blah blah; she was drifting now, remembering old lessons, ancient school stuff."

From “Surface Detail”, Iain M. Banks, p. 518.

As good a description as you'll get as to why twins do not feel that they are each other (apparently) and why we should be unimpressed by the likely prospect of re-incarnation by our descendants as software avatars, humanoid automata or protoplasm.

'It's not the same'.

I have been re-reading 'Surface Detail'. I see from searching previous blog posts here on Iain Banks that I have been rather sniffy, condescending and patronising about him and his work: rather the teenager. Although most of what I wrote had a point, I take back the attitude.

Having written fiction myself now, I know how hard it is: I am not fit to clean his boots, etc.

I imagine that within a decade we will be able to read a not-entirely-awful next Culture novel. Pastiche but not too bad. The AI-reventing of Iain M. Banks will not, of course, actually be the esteemed author...

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Requiem aeternam dona ei.