Product Description

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 - a space opera of stunning power and awesome imagination.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2832 in Books
• Published on: 1988-04-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 467 pages

Review
'Banks is a phenomenon: the wildly successful, fearlessly creative author of brilliant and disturbing non-genre novels, he's equally at home writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance' William Gibson 'There is now no British SF writer to whose work I look forward with greater keenness' The Times 'Poetic, humorous, baffling, terrifying, sexy - the books of Iain M. Banks are all these things and more' NME

From the Publisher
Praise for Iain M. Banks

‘Banks is a phenomenon: the wildly successful, fearlessly creative author of brilliant and disturbing non-genre novels, he’s equally at home writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance’ WILLIAM GIBSON

‘There is now no British SF writer to whose work I look forward to with greater keenness’ THE TIMES

‘Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth’ THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION

Also by Iain M. Banks

The Player of Games
Use of Weapons
The State of the Art
Against a Dark Background
Feersum Endjinn
Excession
Inversions
Look to Windward

About the Author
Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, THE WASP FACTORY, in 1984. He has since gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both his mainstream and his science fiction novels.

Customer Reviews

Interesting , but slow moving Culture novel
"Consider Phlebas" is the first Iain M Banks science fiction novel and I think that it is fair to say that it is not his best. That said , it is well written ,witty and superior to the output of most other writers of this genre. The novel is a fairly straightforward adventure story about an unlikely band of mercenaries attempting to recover a fugitive Culture Ship's Mind from a labyrinth deep in the bowels of the frozen Schar's World ,against the backdrop of the Culture/Idiran War. The description of this conflict by Banks is the most interesting aspect of this book and it almost reads like an allegory about Earth's conflict between Islam and "The West" .Most of the action takes place on a massive Orbital called Vavatch and on Schar's World. The problem with "Consider Phlebas" is that it is overlong and the pace of the narrative gets bogged down with interminable descriptions of large spacecraft ,underground train networks and various shoot outs with enemy forces that add little to the plot. The book is probably best seen as an exercise in world building by the author and an essential background to a better appreciation of his later Culture novels. The characters in "Consider Phlebas" aren't the most sympathetic or well constructed and the only one I found myself liking very much was the uppity drone Unaha-Closp, a sort of cross between Marvin the Paranoid Android and C3P0. "Consider Phlebas" is a good book, but I think it would have been better if it was about a hundred pages or so shorter.

The Wasp Factory in space... brutally good.
Just as Iain Banks' first novel "The Wasp Factory" was a calling-card for his somewhat twisted world-view, so "Consider Phlebas", his first SF novel as Iain M, gives you a pretty clear idea of what to expect in his subsequent SF. Extraordinary as it may seem to anyone who has read much of his other work, this book takes first prize for scope of ideas and - most particularly - inventive emotional brutality. This is emphatically not an easy read. Yes, it's space opera. Yes, it's a gung-ho adventure story. No, it's not like any of the other 5 million books in this genre. For its sheer skill at leaving horrible images in your mind as a result of really quite limited violent episodes the only comparison which springs to mind is Julian May's "Intervention".
The story sees a man - well, not exactly a man - caught on the wrong side (defined as the one which is going to lose) in a galaxy-wide conflict. His efforts to assist his alien allies lead him into a spiral of death and destruction where even his identity is gradually stripped away. The pointlessness of his desperate struggle is finally confirmed in the appendix, where in a couple of lines Banks creates the final, overwhelming message of the book as a whole. Of course, he gave it away in the title.

A ripping yarn on a vast stage
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 humour, pathos and tragedy.

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