BotM: "Consider Phlebas" by Iain M. Banks

[Richard]

The Book of the Month for April, 2010 is Consider Phlebas , written in 1987 by Iain M. Banks:

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.

Consider Phlebas is the first of the seven novels on Banks' "Culture", which is one of the dominant fictional treatments of co-existence with post-singularity AIs. The Wikipedia introduction:

The Culture is characterised by being a post-scarcity society (meaning that its advanced technologies provide practically limitless material wealth and comforts for everyone for free, having all but abolished the concept of possessions), by having overcome almost all physical constraints on life (including disease and death) and by being an almost totally egalitarian, stable society without the use of any form of force or compulsion, except where necessary to protect others.

The effect and control that 'Minds'–the extremely powerful artificial intelligences (AIs) that administer this affluence for the benefit of all–have over the Culture is very central both to the setting and as a narrative constraint. As one commentator has expressed it:In vesting all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, AI Minds, Banks knew what he was doing; this is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved, by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control. The danger involved in this imaginative step, though, is clear; one of the problems with the Culture novels as novels is that the central characters, the Minds, are too powerful and, to put it bluntly, too good."

The novels of the Culture cycle, therefore, mostly deal with people at the fringes of the Culture–diplomats, spies or mercenaries–those who interact with other civilisations, and who do the Culture's dirty work in moving those societies closer to the Culture ideal, sometimes by force.

For more exposition, see the rest of the Wikipedia article.

[Larry]

Ah I read this last year-great book with one scene that's rather stomach churning! Truly a Goodread!

[David]

I'm about 20% of the way through. I wasn't going to read it yet....I had other books ahead of it but I started reading chapter one, just to see how it is and I could't stop reading it!

[Larry]

Good isnt it! I recently got a copy of his Player of Games too, will read that sometime.

[Liz]

i'm on about page 50 and i am unsure as to what i think about this book...maybe as i get further into it it will get better. i feel like i'm watching a slightly crappy sci-fi movie right now when i'm reading it. we shall see...

[Richard]

Actually, Liz, I think you're about right. There's a lot of clever stuff here, but the author doesn't seem to have the discipline (or awareness) to keep out of B-movie territory, or worse. I'm about 2/3rds through and, frankly, I've wanted to bail out far too often. But I've got friends that tell me the Culture series is one of the major series that deals with the Singularity, so I'm gonna finish it nevertheless.

[Liz]

oh no! well, i'll give it another go. perhaps when he gets to the "dead planet" or whatever that place was things will get more interesting.

[Larry]

Just you wait Liz, it gets hairy soon enough!

[David]

The Culture sounds like a society I'd like to read about. I previously read Inversions, which although it's a "Culture" book had little to say about the Culture. Consider Phlebas says more about the Culture - but mostly references to it by people who aren't part of the Culture. Are there any Culture books that take place in the Culture and are primarily about the Culture???

Even aside from Consider Phlebas mostly being about people who aren't part of the Culture and is not set in the Culture, a lot of it takes place in the "back streets" of the far future. We get a lot of detail about the detours Horza is forced to take to participate in the conflict between the Culture and the Iridans. From the point of view of what would have most interested me, this meant less about the Culture, less about the war, less about the Mind, less portrayal of the achievements of the far future...

It's somewhat like a Star Wars movie in which the main character wants to work for the Empire, but circumstances force him to spend a quarter of the movie working for space pirates before he is able to get back to his assignment for the Empire. That's just not a high reading priority for me.

David Brandt

[Tamahome]

So what's the verdict? Responses seem underwhelming.

[Larry]

Well for me it was one of the best reads for a long time!

[Scott]

I really liked it. Hard SF? I guess not, but a great read. I'll reading more Culture books.

I never wanted to bail out like others mentioned in the list, but I did find the story disjointed. I didn't care though, because I was so fascinated by all the crazy stuff that was going on! There are a few scenes here that aren't going to leave my mind any time soon.

[Larry]

Scott D. wrote: "I really liked it.
.......There are a few scenes here that aren't going to leave my mind any time soon. "
Yea like the bit on the 'island', you know, THAT scene!

[David]

Consider Phlebas had a good pace - I wasn't bored. But for me, an Indiana Jones or Star Wars adventure movie works for the 2 hours a film lasts. Star Wars, space pirates, Buck Rogers and that kind of adventure story is not what I want to spend 10 hours reading.

[Tim]

It had some good ideas, but in general I agreed with the negative comments that are well expressed on amazon.com - I didn't much care what happened to any of them, and the last part was just weirdly handled. One reviewer suggested looking up why he called it "Consider Phlebas"; I did so, and was left feeling that this book is itself a Phlebas.

[Larry]

David wrote: "Consider Phlebas had a good pace - I wasn't bored. But for me, an Indiana Jones or Star Wars adventure movie works for the 2 hours a film lasts. Star Wars, space pirates, Buck Rogers and that kin..."

Ooh bad comparison there I feel!

[Nick J]

With it's blend of cyberpunk and space opera, Consider Phlebas was a shocker in the late Eighties but it's easy to see why it is now being compared to Hollywood action movies. Rumpus ensues from page one. (I must admit, I found myself skipping the infamous icky bit.) All the back-to-back fast-paced action scenes in the first half, fun and mildly shocking as they are, just left me craving depth. The plot thickens in the second half, however, and the relevance of Eliot's title becomes apparent as the finale approaches and the morally ambiguous characters are shunted toward the climax, only to be literally derailed (they happen to be riding a kind of alien metro at the time) by a clever (if not surprising) twist. There's even a big explosion. As the dust settles there are glimpses of a larger narrative, mysteries are revealed and oddly, it is the information-heavy appendices and epilogue that leave us wanting more. There is implication that these afterwords were editorially redrafted out of the main narrative, but such frames have a long history in science fiction - The Time Machine, Frankenstein... Thus Banks expertly sets the scene for the epic Culture sequence. Definitely worth a re-read. Proper classic