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Hello and welcome! My name is Emma and I've been a bookseller for over a decade. I also 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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My bookstore is an affiliate of Bookshop.org, so we will earn a commission if you click through my links and make a purchase. I, personally, am also an affiliate of the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and will likewise make a commission if you click through those links and make a purchase. Having to use Amazon doesn’t fill me with joy, but they’re the only good affiliate program for used books available right now. So…that’s the way it is.

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