114 of 127 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Culture and The Culture, November 18, 2000
_Consider Phlebas_ is not out of print, although Amazon apparently doesn't have it. It's been re-published recently by Orbit (ISBN 1-85723-138-4) and it's worth tracking down.
Like David Brin, Dan Simmons or Poul Anderson, this is high concept space opera. But unlike them, this book, and the subsequent books about The Culture, are morally ambiguous. Horza, the protagonist, despises the machine intelligences and moral laziness of The Culture. But his embrace of and alliance with The Culture's enemies in this galaxy-wide war reveals them to be intolerant, racist, religious zealots. He is much more comfortable with the agent of The Culture who infiltrates his band of pirates than with his erstwhile allies. Through plot twists, when he fights his allies with the help of his enemy, Banks makes many points on many levels.
The book is amazingly compelling. As Horza careens from debacle to disaster, fighting a battle in which he only partially believes, you come to care a about him. Which is surprising, because by any sane standard he an amoral criminal.
Banks is a good but not exceptional writer. But he produces very remarkable books. Even the coda to this book, in which Bank reports the war, of which this story is a tiny, tiny part, caused 850 billion casualties; even the coda underscores the ambiguity of the tale.
What makes a culture "good" or "bad"? In the course of telling a very good story, Banks makes you wonder if you are asking the right question.
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61 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Top-class SF, January 24, 2003
By A Customer
This was the first Iain M. Banks book I read and it blew me away. It is one of many SF books to explore grand concepts like Artificial Intelligence, huge spaceships and Interstellar War, but it is one of very few to it believably and with dramatic tension.
The war is between the Idirans, who are driven by religion and natural aggression born from a harsh home-planet, and the Culture, a luxury-loving empire largely run by machines. Until attacked by the Idirans, the machines spent most of their time mixing drinks for the Culture's biological citizens, but are now having to apply their (artificial) intelligence to war.
The plot traces the story of Horza, an Idiran secret agent trying to capture a Culture Mind (Minds are big thinking machines that do most of the Culture's planning and strategy) which has gone to ground in neutral territory. Far from the Idiran front line, Horza is thrown very much on his own resources. He has to enlist help from the sad detritus of neutrals, each trying to get by and if possible profiteer at the margins of the war, to attempt to reach and capture the Mind. Naturally the Culture is also trying to recover this machine, and sends an agent who inevitably clashes with Horza. The trouble is that, across a gulf of fanaticism and violence, the two agents quite like each other.
Banks' execution of this plot is totally absorbing. Huge concepts spring beautifully to the minds' eye, and the characters evoke interest and sympathy. The book starts with a prologue of the Mind's near-capture by Idiran ships and taking refuge on a neutral world. How do you describe the twists and turns of a super-intelligent machine trying to escape a host of hostile pursuers? Try beating that prologue.
One of the best SF books ever written.
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36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting story, but lacks cohesion and moral tension, February 14, 2005
I found it somewhat of a chore to finish this book.
The story follows the adventures of Horza, one of the last Changers, people who can alter their physical appearance to resemble others, possess intricate control over physiological processes, and have several built-in weapons, such as retractable poisoned fangs and the ability to produce poison and acid through their saliva or sweat glands.
Horza is an agent for the Idirans, a race of large, three-legged aliens who are at war with the Culture -- the most advanced segment of human civilization. Horza despises the Culture for their amoralistic over-reliance on machines and technology.
The Idirans dispatch Horza to retrieve a Mind -- essentially an extremely advanced AI created by the Culture to help them win the war -- that has crash-landed on an icy planet controlled by a fearsome, god-like alien power.
Horza's main adversary is an agent of the Culture's "Special Circumstances" unit, who is also charged with recovering the Mind. Although mortal adversaries, the two nonetheless develop grudging respect and even affection for each other.
This backstory and tension between the two main characters are the most compelling parts of the book, but they never really get the attention they deserve. Instead, Horza lurches from crisis to crisis, finding himself variously fighting for life aboard a mercenary vessel, locked in a chaotic laser battle in a temple, nearly devoured alive by a horrifying fat man grown to Jabba-the-Hutt-like proportions, and observing a deadly futuristic card game. These random incidents are entertaining and even gripping when considered alone. But as part of the same storyline they seem too disconnected from one another and I kept wondering how they were going to all tie together. They never do.
Only the final third or so of the book deals with the main mission to recover the Mind. This part is fairly fastpaced, and Banks deftly spools out a number of different threads before finally weaving them all back together for a dramatic finale, which is unfortunately diminished by not really being all that final.
Banks turns out competent, even inspired prose. Some reviewers have found his use of laser beams and hyperspace drives a bit trite, but c'mon, it was 1987, and he supplies enough twists and fresh interpretations to make those things interesting even today. The book's most horrifyingly imaginative parts -- the aforementioned fat man, who eats people alive with various sets of razor-sharp steel false teeth, the card game in which losing hands are punished by killing off a member of the player's team -- are also the best. Banks is certainly not lacking in the imagination department.
But while it may be the case that, as has been suggested in other reviews, Horza was written as a morally ambiguous character, even an anti-hero, we still learn too little about why, exactly, he hates the Culture and what makes their reliance on extremely advanced technology so reprehensible in his eyes. It seems we are supposed to view Horza as a true rogue, one who uses and discards other people for his own ends in the same way that he can discard his physical appearance. But he is also given to acts of great selflessness, good humor, and honor, severely undercutting this "bad guy" cred.
It is probable that this moral ambiguity -- in the portrayal of both Horza and the background war -- is the intent of the author, and is supposed to make the novel sophisticated and thought-provoking. But without a strong moral component to drive the tension, I was simply left wondering, as I read the final passages, why I should care about anything I had just read.
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