A virtual war over virtual hells

I just finished my favorite work of SF since Charles Stross' Singularity Sky.

Iain M. Banks was also a Scot, like Stross; Banks died in 2013. He produced 9 books in a "Culture series" about an advanced civilization, the Culture where AI-run ships and drones have achieved full sentience and are granted equal citizenship and rights.

The first four chapters are just setting up the main characters, so do give it at least until chapter 5.

The protagonist is Lededje, an "Intagliate" who was tattooed at birth right down to her DNA. This marked her as the property of Joiler Veppers, the richest and most powerful man of the Enablement, a less technically and politically (and morallly!) advanced civilization than the Culture.

I won't spoil the story by giving details on how Lededje gets away from Veppers and into dealing with the Culture. But the basis of the story runs several complex threads around a war that several civilizations have agreed to fight only in a virtual environment (like a computer game) to decide the fates of several Hells. These Hells are also running as virtual environments, and the technology exists to transfer the consciousness at death from the body of an unfortunate into one of these Hells.

The complexity of the story threads and the way Banks brought them all together with their interplay with the Culture ships (notables of these named Sense Amid Madness, Wit Among Folly and Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints) is just dazzling. There's also quite a bit of discussion of the sociology and political interplay between the Culture and several other intergalactic civilizations that exist at the same time and several of which are competing in the War Over Hell.

Five stars! You may want to read one previous Culture novel to get your bearings; I'd recommend The Player of Games if you want to read one before this one.

I experienced this as an Audible audiobook, which is the way I "read" almost all fiction these days.