Consider Phlebas: A Culture Novel (The Culture)

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Banks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1992. However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the For Iain M. Banks is a pseudonym of Iain Banks which he used to publish his Science Fiction. Dead Guy Junior: Despite having its memory of everything that happened on Schar's World erased, the lost Mind that drove the entire story chose to name itself after Horza. Years after the war, the Mind encounters a descendant of Balveda, who asks to hear the story behind its name. All of it dust now, all of their precious humanoid civilization ground to junk under glaciers or weathered away by wind and spray and rain and frozen ice - all of it. Only this pathetic maze-tomb left. One Last Job: Horza is planning to return to his Old Flame and retire after the mission. This trope works as well as it always does.

Horza can be cruel and ruthless, but many readers will find themselves rooting for him because he is an underdog. After all, he has taken on perhaps the most difficult assignment in the universe: outwitting a Culture Mind. As if that were not enough, Banks seems to almost enjoy twisting circumstance against Horza. In spite of his best-laid plans, things never seem to go as planned. Don’t you have a religion?” Dorolow asked Horza. “Yes,” he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. “My survival.” Changers] were a threat to identity, a challenge to the individualism even of those they were never likely to impersonate. It had nothing to do with souls or physical or spiritual possession; it was, as the Idirans well understood, the behavouristic copying of another which revolted. Individuality, the thing which most humans held more precious than anything else about themselves, was somehow cheapened by the ease with which a Changer could ignore it as a limitation and use it as a disguise.” Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Idirans hold firm religious beliefs in fighting to the death. For example:Consider Phlebas, first published in 1987, is a space opera novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks. It is the first in a series of novels about an interstellar post-scarcity society called the Culture. Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world’s destruction.” So in the end I would say that Consider Phlebas is not a complete success or failure as a novel, but its primary importance is in establishing the template and introduction to the fantastic and limitless potential of the CULTURE universe. I think the next two novels in the series, The Player of Games (1988) and Use of Weapons (1990), are frequently considered some of the best entries in the series, but I’ve also heard that Banks actually got better the further he refined his understanding of his own universe, so that later books in the series are also very good. That itself is unusual in a genre that is notorious for overlong series that essentially churn out the same stories shamelessly to an audience who reward this behavior by faithfully purchasing the next installment. So it’s quite unusual for an author like Banks to become so popular, but that’s a really good thing in my opinion. Consider Phlebas is Banks's first published science fiction novel, and takes its title from a line in T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. A subsequent Culture novel, Look to Windward (2000), whose title comes from the previous line of the same poem, can be considered a loose follow-up.

The Culture is an intergalactic utopia, but readers should not come to Consider Phlebas expecting dystopian narrative. The machines, led by their brilliant and sentient Minds, are benevolent and they seek to offer a paradise to the humanoids in their care. The novel is not even a dystopian narrative in the way Thomas More’s Utopia often seems disturbing in its stringent rules and guidelines. Readers are meant to envy life in the Culture. There are nice pieces of invention: the Megaships, the Game of Damage with real Lives – but they are not derived from the basic premises of the story, any more than the pseudo-mediaevalism of the Gerontocracy’s dungeon/sewer in which we begin, which could easily have leaked out of Pratchett.Xoxarle, who — after Horza and company capture him following a Ray Gun fight — spews insults at the Changer in a futile attempt to get himself killed and reunite with his fallen comrades, rather than face the shame of being taken prisoner. This Cannot Be!: Discussed, by the narration anyway. It's noted that a lesser AI might have this sort of reaction to learning that a human Referer can outsmart it, while the Culture Minds instead find this rather amusing. Look to Windward is a science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, first published in 2000. It is Banks' sixth published novel to feature the Culture. The book's dedication reads: "For the Gulf War Veterans". Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.”