While still alive, they enter the Pavulean Hell on a mission to reveal the existence and details of this Hell to the general population. Prin and Chay belong to a species that use the threat of Hell to control the behaviour of their population. He is instrumental in the decision to cheat-first by attempting to hack into and subvert the war-game, and when this fails by moving the simulated war into the real world. Vatueil is a soldier who has fought his way up the ranks of the war game to a position where he can determine policy.

The Culture, fiercely anti-Hell, has opted to stay out of the war while accepting the outcome as binding. The outcome of the simulated war will determine whether societies are allowed to run artificial Hells, virtual afterlives in which the mind-states of the dead are tortured. As the book begins, a war game-the 'War in Heaven'-has been running for several decades. Some of the plot occurs in simulated environments. The events occur six to eight hundred years after the 'Chel Debacle', depicted in the earlier novel Look to Windward which is set seventy-eight years after the events in Use of Weapons.Įach chapter of the book covers one or more of the six main protagonists-Lededje Y'breq, a chattel slave Joiler Veppers, an industrialist and playboy Gyorni Vatueil, a soldier Prin and Chay, Pavulean academics and Yime Nsokyi, a Quietus agent. The events of Surface Detail take place around 2970 AD, according to Banks.

Banks is a science fiction novel in his Culture series, first published in the UK on 7 October 2010 and the US on 28 October 2010.

Surface detail banks