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Hello and welcome! My name is Emma (I write fantasy under the name E. M. Epps). This blog features my Two-Paragraph Book Reviews. One paragraph from me. One from the book. Here's why I keep it short.

You are here: Home > Review: “The Hydrogen Sonata” by Iain M. Banks
TheHydrogenSonata

Review: “The Hydrogen Sonata” by Iain M. Banks

Image Emma 2 February 2017

Thumbs up for The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks. Science fiction.

My roommate described Banks’s Culture series perfectly: “Science fiction about spaceships who say ‘fuck’ a lot.” I hope, reader, that you’re okay with 900 pages in which said spaceships investigate a soon-to-be-completely-irrelevant point of record just because they’re curious? God, that sounds awful, doesn’t it? It’s not. In fact, I would read another 10,000 pages of Banks’s spaceships sending profane and snarky texts to each other. Luckily, there are a lot more books in the series.

Vilabier was thought to have been joking when he had claimed that the work was itself merely the first note in a vast and incrementally more complicated cycle that would grow to encompass the entirety of the periodic table. Regardless; after this simple beginning the work became furiously complicated and—initially at least, until playing techniques and prosthetic technology had sufficiently improved—almost unplayable. Initially, in this case, meant for several centuries. Many held that whether it was unplayable or not didn’t particularly matter; what did was that it was completely unlistenable. But that was, arguably, to take a somewhat doctrinaire attitude to what the word “listenable” meant.


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Cold Sandwiches and All: A Romantic Comedy

Mrs. Fromish's Guests

The Interpreter's Tale: A Word with Too Many Meanings

The Portrait of Geraldine Germaine

You Made My Heart a Hunter

To Hell and Back Again

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Obligatory Disclaimer Thing

E. M. Epps is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. (That's what they tell me I have to say. This is not a lucrative venture, but if you do decide you want to read one of the books I link to, and your neighborhood bookstore hasn't got it, then it would be simply lovely if you were to go to Amazon via one of my links. That may get me 10c or so and then if a bunch of you do that maybe I would get myself a cup of tea or something like that. If you're feeling nice.)

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