Customer Reviews

Consider Phlebas: A Science Fiction Novel

5 star:		(55)
4 star:		(39)
3 star:		(29)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

_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.

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.

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.

After hearing about the works of Iain M. Banks for ages, with almost unanymous praise, I finally decided to check out some of his works. The author writes both regular fiction (under the name Iain Banks) and science fiction (under the name Iain M. Banks). His "Culture" novels fall under the SF category, and "Consider Phlebas" is generally considered the best starting point.

The setting for this novel is the galaxy-wide war between the technology-driven Culture and the religious Idirans. The Culture is a loose group of human planets, living in wealth and freedom through their powerful technology. The true masters of the Culture are the Minds, incredibly powerful artificial intelligences, often fitted in big ships like GCU (General Contact Units) or GSV (General System Vehicles).

One of these Minds is lost at the beginning of the story. The Idirans want to capture it, because studying it will provide them with useful techonological knowledge in the war. The Culture wants to prevent them from finding it, for obvious reasons.

Horza, a human shape-changer employed on the Idiran side, is sent out to find the lost Mind. In his search, he teams up with a group of mercenaries and, after many adventures, travels to the planet where the Mind is hiding out.

"Consider Phlebas" is a very exciting novel, filled with aliens, immense space-ships, Orbitals, ... Everything you need for a good, old-fashioned, sensawunda-filled space opera. If that's what you enjoy reading, look no further. I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of the Culture series.

Several of the negative reviewers have remarked that "nothing happens" in this book. Actually, although I can understand why they feel this way, the fact is that this book is about nothing more than "things happening." However, it feels subjectively as though nothing is happening because the characters have no depth. Horza is a lab-rat responding to stimuli. Is he actually a person with thoughts and feelings? Nothing above the most superficial. The author himself is focused on nothing but the externals: impressive technologies, fight scenes, war, social concepts, and torture. At the end, it seems as though "nothing has happened" because no actual person seems to have deeply experienced anything or learned from anything. Banks' writing style, mechanically speaking, is not bad, but his vision is completely superficial. It reminds me of the current trend for big, garish, special-effects blockbuster movies to take over the cineplexes and crowd out anything thoughtful. Will science fiction writing suffer the same idiotic fate? I hope not!

This is my first Iain M Banks novel. I have known *of* him for a long time, and thought it was high time I read some of his work.

So, I asked a friend to recommend one sci-fi and one contemporary work, and this is the former nomination (thank you Dazey!).

For me, starting a sci-fi book is a perilous time. I need to be convinced within the first few pages, else I will be turned off. And in sci-fi, getting convinced can take some doing.

But Banks pulls it off with consummate ease. He is a truly natural story teller, and his writing has great fluidity and reality whether the location is Glasgow or Schars World.

And so to the specifics of this novel.

We follow the adventures of Horza from the first page of the book, where he faces certain death, to the last, where... he faces certain death!

Along the way... yep, you guessed it, he faces certain death.

Horza lurches from one disaster to the next, but all along he is following a path which seems to be destiny. A return to Schars World, where his past, and his love, were left behind.

These are not normal times in the galaxy. The backdrop to Horza's odyssey is a war raging across 100,000 light years, fought between the Culture and the Idirans. The scale of this war is breathtaking, with billions dying and battle ships that are kilometers long.

In such times, the journey of Horza and his rag-taggle company could pass unnoticed, except that Horza has been working for the Idirans, and Schars World holds something that both sides of the conflict are desperate to capture.

Thus Horza becomes a mortal in a war between Gods. That sounds like a greek reference, and indeed there is more than a hint of greek mythology in the epic tale.

Where this book really *works* for me is in the meshing together of this personal odyssey and the galactic war. Horza as a tiny piece of flotsam on a stormy ocean.

Along the way he constructs a very credible universe, a convincing hero and manages to find time for humor, pathos and tragedy.

Consider Phlebas is space opera of the highest, most defining, variety.

Consider Phlebas is a tough one to review. On one hand I love Banks' voice, his big ideas and up until the end this book moves at a good clip. On the other hand I found the plotting to be random and a bit contrived. I'll weigh the pros and cons in a second -

There is a war of galactic scale going on between the mega-utopian Culture and the super-religious Idiran. A sentient mechanical device called a Mind has taken refuge on a planet called Schar's World after an Idiran/Culture conflict. Horza, a mercenary who can change his physical appearance (a Changer) is employed by the Idiran to retrieve the Mind before the Culture snag it back for themselves. This isn't so easy, soon Horza finds himself unlucky as he goes from one screwed up situation to the next.

There's a lot to like here. The scope of the war is massive, I found Horza to be mostly likeable (though not quite as developed as he could have been). Iain does a great job painting the scenes. I love some of the ideas he implemented, even if some of them aren't his own.

On the flip-side I have substantial gripes. First, this novel is little more than a few massive digressions surrounded by the thin underlying plot. The crazy adventures Horza finds himself on have almost nothing to do with the underlying story. The version of this book I have is 468 pages long and I bet only 130 pages are dedicated to the underlying plot. Unfortunately it turns out that the few pages that are dedicated to the plot just aren't all that good.

I found the ending to be quite lacking. I'm not going to spoil it here, but Banks attempts to pull off an emotional ending and really it just falls flat. Banks will use contrived plot devices to attempt a whiz-bang ending (a convenient pregnancy to try and pull at emotions later on, for instance) but really it just doesn't work here, there's just not enough going as far as character development, or emotional investment to pull an ending like this off and make it memorable. Unfortunately when we finally get to the real meat at the end of this novel is when the book slogs a bit. In the end the book spins off into multiple threads showing the POV of the conflict from all angles, which is great, *but* he spends too much time trying to create tension. Unfortunately the 130 (or so) pages could have been whittled down to 50 or less without much loss.

So, Consider Phlebas isn't exactly a dud. The trademark Banks prose is there, the big ideas are there, we get a good dose of Culture history and such, but in the end (literally) it falls a bit flat. Check it out if you already love Banks, if you have never read a Culture book then start with Player of Games and come back to this one later on.

This book basically has two parts: Before, and after the main character arrives at the destination presaged in the early chapters of the book.

These two parts very nearly read like two separate books. The first part is somewhat interesting. He introduces the interesting science fiction ideas (though few are truly unique), and creates some conflicts between characters, etc. But once the character reaches his destination, it's a boring slog of action scene after action scene with what were _supposed_ to be allies - and no real interesting story or character drama. Yeah, a couple of bad/neutral personalities are rescued. But, nothing really grand - other than battle scenes.

In fact, even though the first half reads a touch more interestingly, I'd say the entire book is more a narrative of action and place than a well woven character / story novel. The author spends a lot of time describing the scenery. When that scenery is technology - a'la huge floating, artificially-constructed inhabited platforms in space - it's kind of interesting. Except that even then, the descriptions are REALLY long, and get tedious. And the sections / things that aren't technology are frankly pretty tedious.

For example, when a space (/air) craft on one of these inhabited-platforms-in-space slams into a floating iceberg, we're subjected to page after page of description of how the main character is running towards the stern of the craft (away from the collision at the front end). We read about him running down corridors and seeing windows in doors showing rooms he explored just a few minutes ago. We have him running along catwalks, then dropping to the next catwalk below as the first one collapses. Then, of course, there's the requisite jump to a rescue craft where he has to hang on by his fingertips. If you've gotten tired reading my paragraph here, then don't read this book; it's full of page after page of this type of action narrative.

I kept imagining that some short version of this book would be a screenplay for a Bruce Willis space action movie. But even then, there wasn't enough interesting drama to the overall story plot to make it a blockbuster movie.

Oh, and the end is a total anticlimax. Maybe from some art-y type perspective, it's interesting; but from a reader perspective, it's like he got tired of writing, so wrote this end to get the book off to the publisher.

But then, in retrospect, the book is a bit of a letdown overall. Better to spend your time reading something from Charles Stross or Neal Stephenson.

Oh, and like another review, I'm giving this two stars because one star means "Bad." This book isn't bad; it's just pretty well not good.

Ok the first thing you're thinking is "whats with the title", right? It's ok because it isn't some crazy flippo title dreamed up in Banks' imagination; along side all those ship and character names which come off a little half baked at times (ie, The ship named C.A.T or Clear Air Turbulance), but remain memorable nevertheless. The title is taken from T.S Eliot's 'The Waste Land'iv, where in the same passage he has found the title for his most recent work 'Look to Windward'.

The only meaning I can divine behind the books title is perhaps some veiled suggestion by Banks that in his view everything must evolve, die, change and transcend whether we like it or not; in many cases he seems to apply this same pragmatic/philosophically ambivelent logic to the treatment of the characters and their harsh invironments. Simply put Banks' characters are spared nothing, regardless of our emotional investment and what we might hope for them; they are strangers in a strange land lost in a wilderness of pain whose only small comfort comes via their success in superimposing a futuristic Piratical mentality over the top of their softer side.

Let me say from the outset that I loved this book once I surrendered myself to Banks' imaginary 'Culture' mentality. There were odd moments here and their in the early chapters where my mind wanted to compare it to 'other' works that I had enjoyed more in certain areas but essentially it's silly to do this. The only way to enjoy this book is to surrender to the concept, go with the flow and invest in the characters.

The lead character in this book is a brilliantly drawn fellow named Horza who is known as a 'Changer' or shapeshifter, able to take on the appearance of other people. In the opening sequence (which I found brilliant!) we are given a gritty insight into his world and the quality of life therein, as well as the Politics of the acquiescing, machine oriented Culture; whose 'Minds' do their thinking for them, versus the Idiran mindset, those giant muscular aliens who draw their ideology from a billion year old religion. It is the Idirans with whom Horza has sided and when one of the Cultures 'Minds' is attacked whilst travelling in deep space by an Idiran Star Cruiser, it's only way of evading capture is to use it's power to teleport itself deep into the abandoned, cavernous underground of the death planet called Schars World.

Schars world is off limits and considered a nuetral point by both the Idirans and the Culture but the race is now on to recapture the mind and for Horza to perhaps risk death recapturing it before the Culture does. This is Horza's mission as he goes undercover for the Idirans and the ride has many twists and turns along the way, among these some brilliantly paced action sequences whose imagery is breathtaking.

I absolutely loved this book and was on a high for a few weeks after having read it. There are not many ocassions when I am dissapointed when a book finishes to the degree that I was over this book and this is the reason I only give it 4 stars, the 'other' star that it doesn't get is for the people who have read the book to know and 'YOU' to find out for yourselves.

The novel that spawned the "new-age" renaissance in science fiction that we enjoy today. The taunt complex worlds of Peter F Hamilton and Dan Simmon's Hyperion/Endymion owe much to this 1988 breath of fresh-air. The novel is almost totally bleak, from its opening scenes to the ending. With disaster, failure and death in every sequence; an echo of the total war brushing the story's edges. Even in a war which fatalities are counted in "mega-deaths", Banks manages to get close to the 'human' side and the motivations that drive people. In a world of almost bewildering technology of immense powers, single fragile beings still make a difference. Banks was a surprise contender to the science fiction world, a writer whose work was normally described as "contemporary literature" and now in the UK often occupies two places in most bookshops. A champion, if you like, from the world of stuff literature, promoting just how good, really good science fiction is. If you like your science fiction realistic, gritty, imaginative and innovative. Then Banks is your man.