Consider Phlebas

I picked this book up and a group read for a book club. There are a lot of reasons why I shouldn't like this book. 1: I prefer fantasy over sci-fi. 2: It's one of those stories where there is no good or bad guy. The author presents both sides of the war, and they both have merits and flaws. 3: There is not a lot of the text devoted to explaining the world's precepts.

But I loved it all the same.
Several scenes just seemed to linger after I read them, especiallywhen Horza is taken prisoner by a creepy cannibal cult. I couldn't read the book as fast as I wanted because I had to incubate on some ideas or decompress at the end of certain adventures. The world-building was integral and made sense without any blatant exposition of it. And show more though there was no clear victor/ villain, I still felt connected to its eclectic cast of characters: Horza (a shape shifter fighting for the Idirans), Perosteck (a culture secret agent), a rag-tag crew of space pirates, and Unaha-Closp (a droid with an attitude). 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

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Title: Consider Phlebas
Series: The Culture #1
Author: Iain Banks
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 545
Format: Digital Edition

Synopsis:

There is War between the Idirans, a culture of 3 legged beings with religious mono-mania and The Culture, a decadent collection of self-serving beings who live for pleasure and are ruled by AI and their machines.

We follow the story of Horza, a humanoid with the ability to change his face and body, a Changer, who is show more allied with the Idirans, as he attempts to capture a Culture Mind that has done the impossible and * insert super science term * jumped onto a planet, against all known rules of everything.

The Iridians want to capture the Mind to learn it's tricks or at least to prevent The Culture from learning how it did what it did and The Culture wants it to learn how it did what it did. Unfortunately, it chose to jump onto a Dead World, a world that is supervised by a vast, intellectual non-corporeal being. One that brooks no interference or even cares about the differences that the Iridians and The Culture have.

Horza goes from one bad situation to another right up unto the end where he is betrayed by the Iridians, who view the Changers as no more than vermin even while using them. In the process he loses his lover and newly conceived baby and most of his Changer compatriots.

The book ends with everyone involved dying in one way or another and a history of the war and it's conclusion. Bleak stuff.

My Thoughts:

Whereas the Player of Games really struck me as a dishonest take on the idea of Utopia, this book felt more honest and how humans would actually react. This was a novel about The Culture from it's enemies perspective. That allowed us the reader to see things that we couldn't in Player of Games. I would definitely recommend reading this one first just so Banks can't sell you on the idea that The Culture is a true Utopia.

I ended up feeling bad for Horza for most of the book. He's rescued from a death sentence only to be tossed out of an Iridian spaceship that's about to go into battle. He's then captured by pirates and has to kill a crew member to join. He then participates in several failed piratical ventures and in the final one is stranded on a Orbital that is going to be destroyed by The Culture in 3 days. He does escape and make it back to the pirate ship and takes it over as it's captain. But a Culture agent is on board. The same agent who got him the death sentence at the beginning of the book. He then makes his way to the Dead World and gets permission by the Overmind to land. Only to have Iridian Covert Ops teams try to take him out even though he's on their side. And while all the Iridians die, they also manage to kill everyone except Horza and The Culture agent. And it gets better. Horza dies just as he's taken to a ship with the medical facilities to heal him. The Culture Agent can't handle the guilt and so she goes to sleep for 300 years only to commit suicide when she wakes.

Now normally that much bad stuff would depress me. But this time around? It simply re-affirmed my faith in human nature, ie, that we're a bunch of no good sinners who can't pull ourselves up by our bookstraps. I love it when Utopia minded people get a good dose of fallen nature. Wake up and smell the coffee you idiots.

So far, all threats to The Culture have been external. I'm wondering when Banks will write about some local, internal threat that wants power. While the AI's might be in charge, it's definitely not as pronounced as it is in Neal Asher's Polity series. I'm also still not convinced of The Culture as something real or viable. No central authority, no defining characteristics. It just doesn't jive with my understanding of humanity.

What makes this a 4star book is the fact that the author is aware of everything that I've mentioned and takes it into account. I might think he's wrong, but he's not oblivious and it takes some good writing to promote something even while mainly showing its flaws.

★★★★☆ show less

I am so disappointed by this book. What makes it all the harder to bear is that it has so much potential. Iain Banks clearly has a great imagination. His worldbuilding is interesting and clearly influenced many authors after him. The whole concept of the Culture fascinates me.

However, a great world is not much good if the stories happening in that world are boring and the characters who populate it are all unsympathetic and flat.

It isn't fair. Almost any other story he could have told in this world would have been better. I would have happily read the story of a drone's quest for personhood in a world that doesn't recognize it as sentient. I would have read a story about Culture contact from the point of view of the civilization show more contacted. Anything but the story of Horza, who is a completely inconsistent character who barely seems like the same person from chapter to chapter - and no, I'm not talking about his ability to shapeshift, I'm talking about his personality and motivations.

For those who want to read a transhumanist novel with fascinating characters and plot, don't read this book; please read [b:Glasshouse|17866|Glasshouse|Charles Stross|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309197136s/17866.jpg|930588] instead. show less

A war is raging between some very alien aliens and a humanoid spacefaring society known as the Culture. But the aliens believe in honour, god, truth and justice and are fighting against humans that seem to be in thrall to machines. It's all very confusing and it takes a while to work out who to root for, if anyone, because, this being a war, everyone is trying to be as beastly as possible to one another and, this being a war, mostly getting away with it.

Horza is a secret agent and a changer (a humanoid who can alter his appearance to impersonate others, a valuable talent to have as a spy), an honest and honourable man in the middle of a dirty war. He's sided with the aliens.

And this is war on a stellar scale. Banks takes us not just to show more alien worlds but to artificial alien worlds, giant orbital rings pulled together as convenient habitats where there is no handy planet to colonise, like the ultimate camper van. And if you are going to build a world, better make it a fantastic one, in this case one that is predominantly ocean and is endlessly sailed by huge 'megaships'. Having created this fabulous world, Banks has even more fun destroying it.

This is science fiction at it's grandest. The aliens are proper alien, all reptilian, with three legs, green skin and everything. People have ray guns and anti-gravity harnesses. Space ships vary from gloriously grotty cargo ships used by pirates, mercenaries and scavengers through to vast sentient ships that can lurk in suns.

The alien ships all have bold, purposeful names, like 'The Hand Of God'. Culture ships take their names from, it would appear, the big book of mad-arse abstract ideas. This is in part designed to piss off the serious aliens still further (and it works) but also reflects the nature of the vastly powerful machine Minds that control the ships, when you're that powerful, you don't need to give a toss about anyone's opinion.

Culture citizens tend to have a given name, a family name, the name of their birthplace, the name of their current habitation and their profession. Of course, this being a science fiction novel, they all have really cool, exotic and hard to pronounce names that I suspect were created using that tried and tested method of banging ones head against the keyboard and hyphenating the resulting 127 characters. In real life, the Culture naming system does not work too well, which is why you never meet anyone called Barry Collins Newport Pagnell Stoke Screwfix Assistant Manager.

The plot is straight sci-fi. Mercenary is recruited for incredibly dangerous mission to recover an artefact. He is the only man for the job because, this being a science fiction novel, the artefact is on a world guarded by an immensely powerful and unpredictable alien being. The mission takes place against the backdrop of an interstellar war where space battles take place across vast distances almost instantly and whole worlds are sacrificed as immensely powerful machine minds and a few select humans develop the strategy that will win the war. It's also played out against the personal intimacies, rivalries and power-struggles of the half dozen or so crew of the mercenary/pirate ship Horza finds himself serving on.

Banks also appears to have a rather broad sadistic streak. One of the set pieces takes place on an island on the orbital scheduled for destruction, where an Apocalypse cult await The End. They do this by being very, very nasty to other people. What's the only thing worse than torture? Torture by what are essentially religiously insane hillbillies while the clock is ticking on the entire world being destroyed.
Amid the chaos of galactic conflict, mayhem and explosions, he novel is structured around a number of set pieces, stitched together with some breathless action sequences. If you like space battles but at the same time appreciate desperate hand to hand combat, you're well catered for. While the majority of the novel romps along at a satisfyingly terrific pace, some of the set pieces do occasionally seem to drag, jarring the narrative somewhat. show less

This was my fluff read between "serious" books and... I don't know it just left me a little cold. Maybe it was the way Banks seemed to dislike every one of his characters or how the protagonist not only did NOT have an arc but seemed to be written in a completely different way in the back third of the story. All characters trended towards caricature. Granted, this was just a fun space opera but I got the impression both from other fans of the novel as well as the writer himself that Consider Phlebas aspired to be something more. Taken as a disposable piece of fluffy entertainment it was fine. Taken as anything more and I'd consider it a failure.

Ehhhhhh. It's Banks, so I was never *not* entertained, but overall the book fell short for me.

I've read a number of these novels, and Banks is, for me, all over the map in terms of quality. Some of his novels are great, and some are a hot mess. This was definitely in the hot mess category.

I liked Horza (the mc). Banks does his characters well; they're complex, they're interesting, they're funny. His dialogue was great. There were some good moments in the novel, and some genuinely great moments. I think Banks fans would still enjoy it, and it's more information about the Culture, as ever (the main reason I chose to dip back and read it.)

So. Why the low rating? In nutshell, because novels which aim for greatness and miss by a narrow show more margin, often fail harder than novels which aim for mediocre and hit. Banks always aims for great, but it's (apparently) 50/50 whether he nails it. For "Consider Phlebas", he missed.

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Some specifics, for those who are interested:

Structurally, the novel felt sloppy (see: comments above re Hot Mess). If I were beta reading this, I'd be leaving notes about the plot behaving too randomly, about events simply occurring without a strong narrative thread to pull them together. About the tension and pacing arcs being off balance. Things like that. But I'm not, and it's already published, so we'll leave it there. This aspect of the book may not bother anyone except other writers.

In relation to concepts, Banks often has good ideas. But, again for me, he doesn't explore them enough. He introduces ideas, then leaves them hanging; the equivalent of a man who walks into a room, starts a conversation, and the disappears as soon as he has your interest. To varying extents, even his best novels do this, so I think it's a personal style he's chosen rather than an unintended flaw.

I suppose there is scope to say he leaves these issues for your own intelligence and imagination, but I don't feel the need to test my own imagination and intelligence; it's sufficient. I'm here to investigate *the author's* intelligence and imagination. Talk to me about these ideas. Explore them. Shying away is frustratingly coy.

The story itself was ultimately... unsatisfying, and didn't justify the build up IMO. For example, I took an entire star off for some of the deaths which occur in the book (not a massive spoiler, that people die in a SF book). Every single death was wholly predictable, to the point where as soon as a character was introduced, I had a pretty good idea of whether or not they'd live to the end of the novel. Only one of my guesses was wrong and they all died to incredibly predictable and preventable situations.

Given how much the various characters survive against the odds when the story requires, the deaths felt extra annoying because they smacked of authorial fiat. Another improbable solution could have been contrived to save them, and it would have been no more unrealistic than their other escape attempts they endured to that point (probably less) but it didn't happen, because the plot needed them gone at X point. So add a "forced" to that predictable and presentable.


TLDR: Yes there were things to like, and it was written well enough to engage me; and in a weird way, I'm glad I read it, if only for the additional context. But I finished the book far more frustrated than I began it, with a feeling of exasperation--because this could have been great, and wasn't. show less