Another really good but sadly the penultimate entry of the Culture series. Felt quite short, even though it’s one of the longer books. Time really flies when doing something one enjoys…

Very well written in my opinion, excellent humor, especially when the character of Demeisen is involved. It does exactly those things well that I complained about in Inversions: It has a great finale, but the arc leading up to it is also very engaging. I think Demeisen embodies everything that I like about this book series.

The story hinges on the “War in heaven”, a conflict about the morality of artifical, punitive afterlives, a.k.a. hells. With the absence of deity-based religions, some civilizations created their own hells to provide a realistic threat of (almost) eternal punishment for potential “sinners”. Reminded me of Roko’s basilisk and I have no mouth and I must scream. The war is also being fought inside virtual realities, as ironically both sides agree that real war is simply too barbaric. Circumstances in these simulated hells are described in excruciating detail, which I found intriguing in their absurdity.

I think I give up trying to classify whether I like this one more or less than some of the other books that I really liked. It seems a bit pointless to reduce such complex concepts as the experience of reading a good book to a single ordering. They all have their qualities and shortcomings.

However, some things I would have like to have had included are I guess this constitutes spoilersa description of the other afterlives, i.e. heavens and how the dead are actually brought to either. In Look to Windward, a device called a soulkeeper is introduced that can capture the mind-state of a person when they die. A Culture neural lace can be used for the same purporse, but the Culture isn’t running a hell and Chel is merely mentioned and only in a different context.