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Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

Iain M. Banks

Start date: August 1, 2009

Finish date: August 31, 2009

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What Members Thought

Jun 26, 2011 mark monday rated it really liked it

Shelves: z-iain-banks, x-culture, scifi-60s-70s-80s

Consider Iain M. Banks. an unsentimental, often ruthless writer. his characters are provided robust emotional lives and richly detailed backgrounds... all the better to punish the reader when those characters meet their often bleak fates. his narratives are ornate affairs, elaborately designed, full of small & meaningful moments as well as huge, wide-scale world-building... all the better to deliver a sucker punch directly to the reader's gut when those narratives turn out to be ironic, predeter Consider Iain M. Banks. an unsentimental, often ruthless writer. his characters are provided robust emotional lives and richly detailed backgrounds... all the better to punish the reader when those characters meet their often bleak fates. his narratives are ornate affairs, elaborately designed, full of small & meaningful moments as well as huge, wide-scale world-building... all the better to deliver a sucker punch directly to the reader's gut when those narratives turn out to be ironic, predetermined mousetraps. yet despite the cruelly intelligent design of his novels, a strong case can be made that Banks is a fiery humanist - if the idea of "humanism" is expanded to include all forms of consciousness, including the psychologically aberrant, including artificial minds. is there a genre specialist who is a more passionate yet clear-eyed (even cold-eyed) partisan for the right of all conscious beings to pursue their own individual desires, dreams, and destinies - while not fucking up the lives of other beings? even his utopic, galaxy-spanning civilization The Culture has its own major achilles' heel in their theoretically positive desire to improve the self-determination of other cultures.

Consider Consider Phlebas. now this is a SPACE OPERA. it has it all. multiple alien cultures in a race against time and each other. sentient machines. piratical mercenaries. world-hopping. the destruction of 'orbitals' and entire cities. a graveyard world overseen by a transcended being. an incredibly advanced, liberal, permissive society in conflict with barbaric, right-wing, militaristic religious fanatics. a shape-shifting spy for a protagonist (a very canny choice in regards to providing an outsider perspective on The Culture). it is filled to the brim with so many things, including a handful of long digressions in the first half of the novel, chapters that are pretty much only side-adventures (some of which seem like trial runs for ideas expanded upon in Player of Games and the non-Culture Algebraist). despite the length of the novel, despite wide-ranging adventures and misadventures, the blood & vengeance, the extreme presentations of eating & defecating, despite the in-depth detail present in all that running-about in the tunnels of Graveyard World, despite the whole sturm und drang of it all... this is an intimate novel. intimate in its character work and almost peculiarly intimate in the way that Banks allows his ethical concerns, his - one could say - almost rigid moralism to dominate the proceedings. this is not a tale of crazy adventures that eventually finds its way to a punchy end; this is a novel of rigorously political ideas (and, perhaps, ideals). those ideas are carefully encapsulated within each sequence, by the grand conflict at hand, and by the eventual fates of each one of its major characters.

the choice of the title is wonderful. how fitting! i was also reminded of another well-known passage:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Banks is not a depressing writer. he can have a light touch. his novels are full of life, full of wit and love and laughter and bravery and mindboggling invention. and yet they are often a rather depressing experience. i can see why some folks avoid him. i can understand why some dislike Consider Phlebas and its often uncomfortable combination of digressive high adventure and stark, moralistic political analogies. hey, the world can be an awfully shitty place and so why immerse yourself in more of the same? although he is easy to read, Banks certainly doesn't make things easy on readers and their various sentimental attachments. he chooses discomfort and tragedy at nearly every turn.

well who ever said that utopian ideals are an easy thing? striving for utopia should be hard! it should be long and difficult and heartbreaking and full of intensely uncomfortable ambiguity. it should make you want to cry, little baby.

...more

175 likes · Like · see review

Aug 27, 2013 Wealhtheow rated it liked it

Shelves: sci-fi

As an actual story, with characters and a plot, this is barely middling. The characters are hard to root for, the plot episodic and scattered. However, as a snapshot of a decades-long conflict between two utterly opposed ideologies, this is excellent. The dryly objective appendixes and epilogue add an unexpected and fascinating context and spin to the novel's events. ...more

7 likes · Like · see review

May 01, 2009 Gaijinmama rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction

This book was really good in most respects. I loved the characters, particularly the drone who reminded me of Marvin from
Hitchhiker's Guide. Banks' descriptions are brilliant, too.
That said, the gore and violence are over-the-top. Definitely not for most young readers, in fact many adults might have a problem
getting through certain scenes. I did, and I have a very strong tolerance for fictional violence (can't watch the news on TV, though...now
THAT stuff is too scary!!)
The reason I give this one ...more

4 likes · Like · see review

Sep 21, 2011 Banner rated it really liked it

Shelves: sci-fi

Banks has created an amoral and violent universe that is extremely entertaining. There is a nihilistic feel to this story that I haven't seen often in sf. Yet Banks does make it work.

I like the polarization between the Idirans and the Minds. Humans are caught in the middle, choosing sides along with the rest of the known universe. And as this story reveals not all humans think alike (however defining "human" can be a challenge). Humans, while playing a major part in this story seem to be a mino ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Jun 16, 2009 Nick rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction, scotland

I probably would not have read this book were it not a selection in a book club, but I'm really glad I read it. I usually don't care for "space opera" so much, but this one had a lot of intriguing mystery concerning the nature of religion, the universe, and the grand scheme of all things, in between the violent space chases. ...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Jan 18, 2012 Laure rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction-fantasy, novels-novellas

The writing is enjoyable and I find the worlds that Banks builds to be compelling. This book is somewhat inconsistent, however, with episodes that read almost like standalone short stories, interspersed amongst less interesting stretches and action sequences.

I really wanted to love this book, but found the ending to be quite anticlimactic and underwhelming.

The overall quality of the writing and world building was enough to sustain me, and I have since read the following two Culture novels, which ...more

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Sep 01, 2009 Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides marked it as decided-not-to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

OH MY GOD GOODREADS I HATE HOW YOU RANDOMLY CLOSE THE POPUP WINDOW I WAS WRITING A REVIEW IN AND ALL MY TEXT IS LOST. I'd gotten out of the habit of using that window because that always happened ... now I remember why. But, so convenient ... argh.

Anyway, short version: I made it a few pages past the "you'll have to make yourself a vacancy" scene, and decided that while the setting is interesting and the story may be interesting, the characters were not. So, I'm giving the series a pass unless s ...more

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Jul 31, 2009 Megan rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

Probably 3.5. Started strong, some drifting in the middle, interesting first book in SF series I will probably try again. There were many set pieces that seemed superfluous; as if the author had been storing up this cool scene until he wrote an SF novel where he could shove it in. Still, I liked the premise of the Culture, our eventual evolution into a hedonistic spacefaring society where we go to war cause we're bored. ...more

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