The captured Idiran, Xoxarle, frees himself and in the ensuing impact and firefight the remaining members of the Clear Air Turbulence are killed. 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. Despite growing up in beautiful Hawaii, he spent most of his time reading as many SFF books as possible.

Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Played straight with the Idirans, at least until the appendices reveals this as an inversion. This is the central dilemma in Consider Phlebas, and it isn’t really resolved with a satisfactory conclusion. Illustration: Guardian Design ‘It was the day my grandmother exploded’: the first line of Banks’ The Crow Road (1992).They were soft and pampered and indulged, and the Contact section’s evangelical materialism provided their conscience-salving good works. And it sets you thinking what difference, if any, it would have made if Jesus Christ, or Karl Marx or Charles Darwin had never been. It’s not a war of tribes or nations—it’s a war across planets, and it seems to be notably lacking in the glamor or heroics of certain other space operas about interplanetary war that one could name.

Banks always uses the names of his sapient spaceships – chosen by the Minds themselves – as ironic commentary, and this novel contains some of his best, such as the Ethics Gradient, the Not Invented Here, the Frank Exchange of Views, and the Zero Gravitas. Banks’s vision of a starfaring, post-scarcity civilisation run by AIs, in which people can change their DNA at will and live for 400 years, is publicly admired by tech giants such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – even as they toil along with us in the capitalist present. In any case, there isn’t much struggle for supremacy in the Culture, because it is a decentralized and post-scarcity society, one in which the ideals of self-expression and self-fulfillment are considered the highest priorities, so that humans and AIs are free to pursue whatever interests them most, and can enjoy long, hedonistic lives simply doing their favorite hobbies (or not, if that’s what they want). Idirans are able to fight the Culture on pretty impressive terms in space as well (winning even one battle with the Culture is not to be sneezed at), indicating that they must have incredible natural reflexes and multitasking capabilities.

So essentially we have a complete inversion of the usual space opera tropes, in which the main character (it’s hard to consider him the hero) has sided against the more ‘enlightened’ Culture by fighting for the intolerant religious extremist Idiran Empire in their holy war against the machine-dominated Culture. Repulsive and depraved it certainly is, of course, but it is also poetic and horribly funny: its narrator, 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, comes over as a cross between Holden Caulfield and American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. His parents wished to name him Iain Menzies Banks but his father made a mistake when registering the birth and he was officially registered as Iain Banks. More Hamburger icon An icon used to represent a menu that can be toggled by interacting with this icon.

Madame Sosostris Madame Sosostris The name Madame Sosostris is reminiscent of Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana, from Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow, which was published in late 1921 while Eliot was working on The Waste Land. It is then followed by a coda in which Banks pulls the camera back from the minutiae of our story and gives a much broader perspective of the Culture-Idiran war, and we come to realize that all the actions of the book haven’t amounted to much difference at all to the final outcome of the conflict.A note on the post titles: they are drawn from the names of Culture ships that appear in those novels. Karmic Jackpot: Unaha-Closp, despite being being repeatedly insulted by Horza and treated as little more than a robot by everybody bar Balveda, saves ( or at least attempts to save) the entire team twice by ramming Xoxarle and warning them all of the oncoming train, then proceeds to save Balveda and Horza again, the latter rescue nearly costing him his life.

In 2008, Banks said that his own best book was The Bridge, a phantasmagorical story of love and coma over which looms the Forth Bridge in both real and spectacularly imaginary versions.Then picture having unlimited creature comforts at your fingertips, no need for money, and built-in drug glands that can supply hundreds of customized drug cocktails that can enhance any experience you’d care to undergo. Had to Be Sharp: The Idirans are a Proud Warrior Race who serve as proof that to thrive on a monster-infested and highly radioactive planet, you'd better become the scariest monster of all. Fantastic Racism: Horza hates and despises sentient machines (to be sure, he doesn't believe they're really sentient). He despises the Culture for its dependence on machines, and the fact that Culture's machines seemingly rule over the Culture humans, which he perceives to be spiritually empty and an evolutionary dead end. The fools in the Culture couldn’t see that one day the Minds would start thinking how wasteful and inefficient the humans in the Culture themselves were.