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Loading... Consider Phlebas (Culture) (original 1987; edition 2008)by Iain M. Banks (Author)
Work InformationConsider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks (1987)
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I deliberately waited to start The Culture and it was worth the wait. Fast paced, exciting, perplexing in places, I thoroughly enjoyed reading my first Iain M. Banks. Straight on the The Player of Games. ( ) I wasn't taken with my first Iain Banks book, The Wasp Factory. We read it for book club, so I did not plan on reading him again. However, someone mentioned that his science fiction was markedly different and I should give Consider Phlebas a try. It didn't turned out well. The writing style is not terribly strong and the story is substantially worse. The problem with the plot seems to be the same as The Wasp Factory: pacing. There isn't really a lot of structure and too much time is spent on irrelevant side stories. I was never actually engaged in the book. It wasn't all bad though. The author invented an interesting futuristic game (eg, The Glass Bead Game) and the war setting was reasonable. Nevertheless, this is the type of useless action novel that really ruins the name of science fiction for the public.
The choice of name was definitely not an attempt to gain literary credentials or he would have ditched the ‘camp aliens and laser blasters.’ He has acknowledged the similarities to the poem in that the main character in Consider Phlebas is drowning and later undergoes a ’sea-change’ – this being a motif running through The Waste Land – but that is far as it goes. But there are a number of parallels between the two works, whether deliberate or not on Iain’s part. To prove my point I will take a brief look at Consider Phlebas and then at The Waste Land, followed by examples of how the latter informs the former.
Fiction.
Science Fiction.
HTML:The first book in Iain M. Banks's seminal science fiction series, The Culture. Consider Phlebas introduces readers to the utopian conglomeration of human and alien races that explores the nature of war, morality, and the limitless bounds of mankind's imagination. The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender. Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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