This depressing conclusion is sadly persuasive. And some of those afterlives would, inevitably, contain hells. Banks posits that some civilisations would create afterlives.
Many civilisations in Banks's imagined future are able to record mind-states, to rehouse old minds in new bodies and to allow disembodied minds to inhabit virtual environments. The idea of hell is at the heart of the book. Dotted through the book are the moving travails of Prin and Chay, elephant-like aliens who have infiltrated their society's version of hell to expose what goes on there but find escaping harder than they'd hoped. Interlaced with her story is the tale of Vateuil, a universal soldier fighting a never-ending war on fronts as diverse as the siege of a medieval castle and an attack on an ice-fortress by barely corporeal energy beings.
So we follow the fortunes of Lededje Y'breq, an indentured slave marked with a full-body tattoo – branding her as the property of the vile Veppers, as she attempts to escape and have her revenge.
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