The curious thing is that rather than therapy, crying, family or friends, it was a science fiction book that comforted me for the loss of my grandfather. He raised me from a year-old cub to a fifteen-year-old. He was my mother and my father, the pillars on which my universe was founded.

He died on another continent and was cremated within the day. I, whose last visit had been before the illness struck, was left with a nothing, total vacuum, no more constellations to navigate by. No last words, last kisses, funeral wailing from me, time to take to bed and weep for forty days and nights. It was like coming back from a business trip and finding your city vanished, barren land in its place.

I chose to cry for an hour one morning, staple a smile to my face, and sit my Physics finals within days. I came away with first class honours, and the great crack in my mental landscape retaliated to its suppression by coming through in dreams. Ten years later, the tectonic plates are still restless from the magnitude of that event. I can’t resist quoting Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:

‘But later too, and the next day and the third day, she still found no words in which she could express the complexity of her feelings; indeed, she could not even find thoughts in which she could clearly think out all that was in her soul.

She said to herself: “No, just now I can’t think of it, later on, when I am calmer.” But in dreams, when she had no control over her thoughts, her
position presented itself to her in all its hideous nakedness….’

In all the literature I have ever read, only in Look to Windward is my loss put into fitting words.

The avatar of the ship Mind Lasting Damage describes the aftershock of losing its twin. Here is the story of how it came to have a twin.

The Culture is composed of humans, human-equivalent sentient machines called 1.0 value drones, a variety of intelligences greater than them increasing all the way up to the ship Minds, who are ‘close to gods, and on the far side’. (That phrase would make a lovely bit of poetry.)

The Mind of the Lasting Damage goes missing, presumed destroyed, during the Idiran war. Its backed-up personality is booted up in another craft, and it fights on. Later, the original mind is found to have survived. The original and the new Minds request to serve in the same battle fleet during the battle of Twin Novae.

If the point of literature is to depict the universal nature of the most important human experiences; the point of science fiction for me is to do the same, but against a backdrop of the entire universe, across all imaginable time and space. Banks crafts his theatre of operations on this exuberant scale.  The battle of Twin Novae, in which ‘entire worlds are snuffed out’, culminates with the Idirans exploding twin suns, forcing twin supernovae.

Lasting Damage II dies, all the while maintaining a real-time link with its twin. Nevertheless, the Culture’s technology ensures the immortality of the perished Mind, because each twin carried a backup of the other. In addition, the survivor recorded, at a level of detail which we could not come close to grasping, the battle experience, struggle and death of its twin. To all intents and purposes, the destroyed twin lives on in the survivor Mind. Retrospectively, I myself would have given anything for such a link to my dying one. But there’s a rub.

***Spoiler follows***

The book ends with the survivor Mind, eight centuries afterwards, going into oblivion (the Mind equivalent of suicide, but without the anguish – it just seems to switch itself off for ever, no backups). Its reason for so doing continues to resonate with me, and every time I read it, it affords me a measure of solace for my own loss:

‘I am tired, Quilan. I have waited for these memories to lose their force over the years and decades and centuries, but they have not. There are places to go, but either I would not be me when I went there, or I would remain myself and so still have my memories. By waiting for them to drop away all this time I have grown into them, and they into me. There is no way back I consider worth taking.’

It comforts me that a godlike machine, whom I could understand only to the extent that my cat understands my thoughts, who lives in an immortal society, finds that some loss has to be endured for all existence. The magnitude of its loss is underlined by its revelation that:

‘It leaked away to nothingness in the end, pulled to pieces until it just dissolved into a mist of sub-atomic particles and the energy of chaos. The last two coherent things it held onto were its name and the need to maintain the link that communicated all that was happening to it, from it, to us.We experienced everything it experienced; all its bewilderment and terror, each iota of anger and pride, every last nuance of grief and anguish. We died with it; it was us and we were it. And so you see I have already died…’

The intensity of my loss is a torment but also a comfort, since it testifies to the strength of my bond with the lost one. The ship Mind’s reason for oblivion is a validation of my own experience that if my loss grows less keen, it would lessen who I am.

There is much to admire in the rest of the book: the zippy conversation, the humour, the pomposity of one character, the mild serenity of another, the fierce exile of a third – in short, all the cruelty, malice, splendour and space-operatic inventiveness that is Banks’s trademark.

But I shall leave any further admiration, and any criticism, to other readers. To me, this will always be the book that frames our human experience of loss within a truly a universal meaning, thereby affording my own loss a bearable perspective.