Consider Phlebas

Stands up well on rereading, 30 years after the late Blessed Iain M. first delighted up with his canny, rich and witty snapshots of life in the Culture, his post-scarcity, post-irony and post-Singularity society. The humanoids are just as angst-ridden, the planets just as bizarre and the AIs just as snarky as I remembered.[return][return]If I have one quibble, it's that there is some serious padding: there are one-and-a-half unnecessary chapters, and the final showdown in the abandoned tunnels beneath the ice-bound Planet of the Dead is ground out almost beyond endurance. But I don't blame Banks: the fashion in the 80s for SF novels was for doorstop length.

I read this book first on release, and I was shocked, on picking it up again, to see that it is now 25 years old. But I wanted to re-read the Culture novels in light of Ian Banks' appallingly early death. I'm pleased I have started down this road.

This was Banks' first sf novel, and indeed is based around a novel he wrote quite some time earlier. And yet there is so much of the Culture already worked out but unstated in the book. The very first line made my jaw drop open when I re-read it; it was something that neither I nor anyone else could possibly have noticed on a first reading, because we all still had the whole Culture to discover.

"The ship didn't even have a name."

Reading that as a newcomer to Banks' SF, still to discover what show more the Culture was about, that sounds just like a striking opening line that grabs the attention. But just read that again, this time in the light of everything we've learnt since about the Culture, Minds, and the sort of gonzo names Ships choose for themselves.

"The ship didn't even have a name."

Now we see that the situation isn't just life and death, it's much more serious than that. This is a Mind in extremis, who is having to put its very survival before everything else. Of course, by the end of the book, we see that same Mind and the name that it chose for itself; and it's a name that has personal resonance for it, not just a throwaway comment on the nature of Life, the Universe and Everything (as someone else once said).

And it shows that Iain Banks could store up surprises for us that could go off like a depth charge in our own fragile minds years after he committed the words to the page.

We are rapidly thrust into an interstellar war, and again we are somewhat confounded, because the story is told from the point of view of a character working as a spy for the side we would not assume Banks would be rooting for. The Culture is painted for big segments of this book as the villains; only as we get closer to the end (and the appendices) do we realise that Banks is taking the big view here.

The Idirans, the religious race opposing the Culture, are painted a bit as central casting warriors - all big, Brian Blessed voices and 'today is a good day to die'. Yet the Idiran characters are also drawn with reasonable sympathy. And whilst the main character, Horza, has a series of adventures that could be out of any "space pirate/mercenary" story, the characters in the rag-tag band he allies with, are equally well-drawn. It's true to say that the cast of characters contracts rather towards the end of the book, and as the cast list gets smaller, the remaining characters get better described. And that includes the mechanicals. Banks has intelligent machines in his Culture universe, and they are characterised as well as the biologicals. The drone in this story, Unaha-Closp, comers over a slightly peevish and irritable, but essentially a solid character who delivers when the chips are down.

The protagonist's nemesis, the Culture agent Balveda Perosteck, seems to be playing the femme fatale at the beginning of the book; later, when she is taken prisoner, she begins to display Munchhausen-like symptoms as the situation changes around the band of protagonists.

This book came out in the general renaissance of space opera that took place in British sf during the 1980s and 1990s, and it has its share of what Brian Aldiss called "wide-screen baroque" set-pieces. These are carried off with cinematic relish. There is also some of the Banksian grand guignol that he was renowned for from his first novel, The Wasp Factory. Those of a squeamish disposition and vivid imagination might be advised to look elsewhere. And the humour is specifically Iain Banks' own, as well. It's a particularly Scots wit, and none the worse for all that.

On reflection, as I have read Banks' later Culture novels, I've come to think that the problem some people have with this book is rooted precisely in its place in Banks' writing career. Consider Phlebas is a straight space opera: admittedly one with a fantastic imagination for detail churning away under the surface, and a great precursor to what was to come; but at root it is a science fiction adventure story, written with an eye to selling it to a publisher as a solid entry in an sf catalogue. With this introduction to the Culture out of the way, Banks' later explorations of this universe are very different in pace and plotting.

The novel ends with something of a whimper rather than a neat conclusion (and with a 'Rosebud' moment). But isn't that what life's like, the big difference between reality and novels? Real life doesn't often have neat endings with all the loose ends tied up, and neither does this novel. But above all, the book is an introduction to the Culture universe, a rich and fascinating playground that Banks never finished exploring. Later novels may well have been deeper and may well have had more literary complexity; but when I first read this book, I was blown away and wanted to read more. And in the years that followed, I was duly rewarded. What more can you ask? show less

My reaction upon finishing this book:

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

I stopped myself from writing a review immediately because my initial impulse was to throw things at the wall...

For about 50% of the book, I was feeling pretty positive about the story. The opening scene was the most inventive execution idea ever, and I approved of it. (Seriously, drowning from the excrement of the participants of a feast held in your honor? GENIUS!) I didn't quite follow all the descriptions of how technology looked or worked but focused on the story of Horza and the raggedy band of mercenary misfits he fell into. And then there was the island scene which I did read in one go, cringing and horrified, because cannibalism is one of the triggers that turn show more me into NO NO NO Cat. After Horza finally got off the damn island, I set the book aside and nearly didn't pick it back up again.

But I did. And I was fine until shit really started getting real in the caves of the Planet of the Dead.

Everybody dies. EVERYBODY. Except the drone and the Mind. But EVERYBODY. And there was just that little itty bit of hope at the end when Beleveda manages to carry Horza's battered, broken body back onto the ship and I actually believed that Banks might have some way of pulling the ending out of the pitch dark pits of despair but NO. And really, was the epilogue bit where Beleveda puts herself into stasis and then, after she is revived, kills herself really necessary?

I did end up giving this book two stars despite how much rage I feel about the ending because Banks made me viscerally care about the plot and the characters, which isn't a mean feat. I appreciated the world-building and the writing, and even the leap of faith to do what he did by not having a happy (or even remotely hopeful) ending. show less

This is a book that seemed to start as standard space opera and which didn't seem at first to be as good as it turned out to be. It became poignant at the end, but it was fun throughout, thoroughly described but without overdoing it. The action "choreography" was great, and it was imaginative overall. It made me want to read the latter books to find out more about the Culture.
Horza's story was heart-breaking. At first I thought he would be shunted to the side for Balveda's story, since I thought it would focus more on the Culture. Instead, it focused on an individual, doomed quest that ends up shedding more light on the subject than if it had gone full-Culture from the onset.
I found Fal 'Neestra's chapters kind of pointless, though show more they tried to give a broader view of the Culture, they led nowhere. That was one of the few weak points.
Overall, amidst all the action (there's a lot), there are some questions that are timeless, about identity and war and fanatism. It isn't as heavy-handed as it sounds, for they're handled well in this sci-fi setting, without preaching or drawing simple parallels to contemporary events. But they're interesting nonetheless.
The later chapters in the Command System were what made the book great for me. The beginning and the middle were good, with some ups and downs, but the ending was great. It had echoes of Alien and all the great claustrophobic sci-fi horror, and the train sequence was awesomely written, gaining speed and momentum until the stunning conclusion.

I'll have to read the other books in the series to better gauge this one, but it's really good, fun but not lighthearted, and deeply sci-fi without boring the reader with too much technicisms. show less

I really enjoyed this book, until there was one too many brutal murders and I realised how little I cared about the fate of the protagonist and I put the book down. For the first half of the novel, I just reveled in reading a space opera, which is a genre I almost never read. I loved how relentless the action was and the sense that big ideas were at stake.

I think the book is very well written, with the prose describing the action clearly. I felt like the writing was very well thought through. For instance, it's always hard to keep track of characters with alien names, especially when there are lots of them introduced at once, but Banks dues a good job of reminding the reader who is who on a regular basis. Yes, it occasionally results in show more a certain character walking past screaming, "Goddammit!!" just to remind you who they are, but on the whole it was relatively subtle (for a space opera). I also loved the way Banks zooms in and out, following a plot but also taking time to put his hands on his hips and admire the technologically advanced works of the future.

However, I just found the motivations of Horza, the Idirans and the Culture a bit thin. If a character is going to do heinous things, to me it needs to be in aid of something worth believing in, not just a combination of hatred and self interest. There's a reason people hate the Changers, and it's because they're pretty grubby.

It's pretty unusual for me to fail to finish a book and then put the next book of the series in my to read list, but that's what I'm doing with the Culture series. The universe is too intriguing to ignore altogether and Banks' prose is of a rare quality for a science fiction author, even if I didn't find this particular book worth sticking with. show less

I finally finished! Rarely do books take me this long to read, especially space operas. But this one just dragged and dragged, and there wasn't much to compel me to keep reading.

Horza could have been a good character, but there really wasn't much to him - we're told he was restless on Schaar's World, we're told he is attracted to Yalosn, we're told he hates The Culture... but there's never any motivation behind any of it.

The Idirans are well enough explored (militaristic, huge and imposing, fiercely religious and dogmatic), but The Culture is barely touched on. There are sentient robots, people don't need to work and can focus on pleasure, money is no longer necessary... and that's about all I know. I couldn't really understand Horza's show more hatred towards them - something about soulless machines sapping what it means to be human from actual humans, but when he meets an actual sentient drone from The Culture he refuses to interact with it and recognize that it is actually sentient.

Many many things happen in this book that aren't really, well, necessary. I know space operas are long, but when things happen they have repercussions for the overarching plot, and that didn't happen here. Oh, Horza almost died on some planet impersonating a statesman? Oh, his new crew of pirates tries to rob both a temple and a huge ship and both schemes go terribly wrong? Oh, Horza gets stuck on an island where the inhabitants are lead by a hugely obese cannibal who only allows them to eat shit? All of these things sound hugely interesting! But they have nothing to do with anything, and are forgotten about as soon as they're introduced. I'd be fine with that happening, like, one time, but when it becomes a pattern, it takes away my reason to care about events.

And the amount of explanation! There's so much it literally feels like I'm reading about nothing. What should have been exciting space battles or tense moments, like the Temple of Light reflecting the crew's lasers or the approaching train underneath Schaar's World were instead dull and tedious, seeming to take forever.

I did like the anti-climactic ending, though; Horza fails terribly and everyone is killed. The Mind he's seeking, not remembering very much except that someone named Horza took place in important events in it's life, names itself after him and goes on to live an illustrious life. Disappointing and ironic, yes, but unfortunately realistic. show less

In some ways, I think that "Consider Phlebas" gets everything right. It introduces the concept of the Culture, a galaxy-spanning empire and/or cultural phenomenon, and the world it extrapolates from this premise often feels both sociologically rigorous and comfortably lived-in. It's crisply and efficiently written, having a well-constructed "ticking bomb" structure that goes on for hundreds of pages but which often feels admirably tense. The action scenes here are, well, awesome, but they still felt a bit like action scenes in a summer blockbuster, though that may just be my literary fiction guilt talking. That aside, the descriptions of this novel's technologically super-advanced, ridiculously abundant universe have a weird, sleek sort show more of beauty. And some of the marginalia that Banks includes here really fascinates. If anything, this book's accounts of Culture history and social structure made we want to pick up the second novel in the series, even if I didn't love everything about the first.

Despite all this, there's enough about "Consider Phlebas" that I don't like to make me wonder if I'm really in the right section of the bookstore here. Banks has obviously given some thought to character development -- especially when it comes to tough guy shapeshifter protagonist Horza. At the same time, a lot of these space adventurers seemed too close to science fiction stock characters, especially since one of them seems to be some sort of sexed-up furry. I certainly didn't travel across the galaxy for that.The main complaint I had about "Consider Phlebas" that I had, though, is that the novel's both a self-contained space-thriller and a galaxy-spanning historical romp, and, talented as its author obviously was, what he seems to be trying to pull off here is still pretty difficult. I'm not sure that he makes it work. There wasn't enough in here about what the Culture actually might be to satisfy my curiosity about it. Most of the book concerns a motley band of none-too-successful space marauders trapped miles underground on a barren planet, which is certainly an odd way of introduce a breathtakingly ambitious series of books about a world-conquering space civilization. A lot of "Consider Phlebas" feels a bit like a prelude, which makes it a bit unsatisfying. That doesn't mean I'm not going to give the Culture series another shot, mind you. show less