Unaha-Closp plays a vital role at the end of the novel, contrary to Horza's implicit discrimination against the drone. Now we meet our protagonist, Bora Horza Gobuchul. He is a spy, from a species known as Changers—humans who are able to alter their appearance to impersonate nearly anyone they like, which obviously makes them extremely valuable spies. They have other interesting characteristics as well: venomous teeth and nails, for instance. 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 is, however, one shred of mystery left at the very end… the rescued Mind, the McGuffin of the whole business, decides to call itself by Horza’s name… Now why should that be? Has the Changer somehow managed to transfer his infinitely adaptable personality… ?

So Consider Phlebas is about a military conflict between the Culture and the Idirans, a powerful and militant race that is united by its belief that its mission is to spread its religion to all other races, generally by force. The Culture is diametrically opposed to such behavior, so it reluctantly finds itself embroiled in a far-ranging galactic war that will eventually involve trillions of casualties and the destructions of thousands of planets, Orbitals, GSVs (General Systems Vehicles), Minds, etc. In the book, despite its length, we only get to see a tiny glimpse of this massive conflict via a few key characters and events. Batman Gambit: Xoxarle breaks one of Balveda's arms, and leaves her hanging on for dear life to a gantry with the aim of forcing the incredibly pissed-off Horza to choose between avenging his pregnant girlfriend and saving her... He chooses the latter. This allows Xoxarle to ambush the Changer, inflicting the injuries which ultimately kill him.The novel revolves around the Idiran–Culture War, and Banks plays on that theme by presenting various microcosms of that conflict. Its protagonist Bora Horza Gobuchul is an enemy of the Culture. The Culture and the Idiran Empire are at war in a galaxy-spanning conflict. A Culture Mind, fleeing the destruction of its ship in an Idiran ambush, takes refuge on Schar's World. The Dra'Azon, godlike incorporeal beings, maintain Schar's World as a monument to the world's extinct civilisation and the dangers of nuclear proliferation, forbidding access to both the Culture and the Idirans. Horza, a shape-changing mercenary, is rescued from execution by the Idirans who believe the Dra'Azon guardian may let him onto the planet as in the past he was part of a small group of Changers who acted as stewards. They instruct him to retrieve the Mind. Ziller lives in self-imposed exile on Masaq', having renounced his privileged position in Chel's caste system. He has been commissioned to compose music to mark a climactic event in the Idiran-Culture War. Upon hearing of Quilan's visit, and suspicious of his reason for travel, Ziller scrupulously avoids him. Small Name, Big Ego: Kraiklyn, for the most part, comes off as a desperate wannabe badass-mercenary-leader, who, while a reasonably competent fighter, is terrible at planning heists and fails to portray his crew as anything more than the bunch of interstellar thugs they are.

Novels with mysteries at their hearts need to be based on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “What you can’t talk about, you have to be silent about.” The space at the centre may be so precisely delimited that you can measure its shape, or its dimensions, though perhaps not both at once… Or it may be like the Escher drawing, where the descent of one staircase towards the solution is suddenly revealed as being the ascent of another one away from it. Endless, only vaguely explicable, carnage is not the answer. Villain Protagonist: Horza is vehemently opposed to the Culture, which is of course the "heroes" of the series and which comes across even in this book as a lot more sympathetic than the Scary Dogmatic Aliens that Horza is trying to help fight them. However, aside from a few brief point-of-view chapters from Culture characters, the book is all about Horza's trials and tribulations as he tries to capture a Culture Mind for Idiran study. He ultimately fails and dies, though he does get recognised as a Worthy Opponent by his victorious enemies. Ban on A.I.: the Idirans are against AI for religious reasons and use limiting devices to ensure their computers don't become sentient. Shur Fine Guns: One character dies when his projectile weapon has a barrelcrash, meaning the blast waves of the explosive shells he's firing explode a shell while it's still traveling down the barrel.Quayanorl suffers mortal wounds and is left behind. Gruesomely injured, blind, and dying, he still manages to drag himself to perform one last action against his enemies, which averts the impending happy ending and turns it into a kill 'em all. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2011-02-11 18:06:39 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA138124 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City London Comment Removing Scanfee from Billable Books scanned before June 2011 which appear to have manually set scanfees Donor Phil Daoust in The Guardian said the story was an "enjoyable romp" and described Quilan as "one of the misguided yet decent villains who are a feature of these [Culture] tales". [1] He went on to complain of the heavy emphasis given to the consequences of war and that the Chelgrians were too thinly disguised humans. [1] Gerald Jonas in The New York Times praised the sophistication of Banks' writing and said "he asks readers to hold in mind a great many pieces of a vast puzzle while waiting for a pattern to emerge". Jonas suggested the ending might appear to rely too much on a deus ex machina. [2] Spanner in the Works: Quayanorl. Or more specifically, the fact that Irdians are Made of Iron to such a ridiculous extent that he survives an attempt to Make Sure He's Dead, clinging on to life just long enough to pull a Taking You with Me on Horza's party.

Consider Phlebas, the first of Iain M. Banks’s CULTURE novels, introduces readers to the Culture, a machine-led intergalactic civilization that offers its biological humanoids a carefree, utopian lifestyle. Though most centuries are free from worry, Consider Phlebas takes place in the middle of the Idiran-Culture War. His latest book was a science fiction (SF) novel in the Culture series, called The Hydrogen Sonata, published in 2012. What Happened to the Mouse?: Thanks to the Fat Bastard I'm a Humanitarian Prophet, Horza loses a finger. In fact, he has to pull the bones, now completely stripped of flesh, off his hand himself. No mention of his missing digit is ever made again. Did he regrow it? (He was changing to a semblance of Kraiklyn at the time) Are his crew just that incurious? Who knows?Dave Langford reviewed Consider Phlebas for White Dwarf #90, and stated that "Banks pumps in enough high spirits to keep this rattling along to his slam-bang finale in the bowels of an ancient deep-shelter system whose nuclear-powered high-speed trains are used for... well, not commuting." [4] In other media [ edit ] Cancelled TV adaptation [ edit ] 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. Excession is the favourite of many Culture fans, though Look to Windward (hello again, TS Eliot) and the extremely dark and brilliant Use of Weapons are also deservedly revered. Consider Phlebas, like most of Banks's early SF output, was a rewritten version of an earlier book, as he explained in a 1994 interview:

Athens and Sparta: A galactic-scale version with the Culture versus the Idirans. The former are a pleasure-seeking post-Singularity Utopia who love sleek shiny technology and are ruled by their machines, while the latter are a Proud Warrior Race of Scary Dogmatic Aliens who utilise Boring, but Practical technology and are convinced A.I. Is a Crapshoot. Given that the Culture are determined to 'enlighten' the less developed civilisations in the galaxy and bring them round to their way of thinking, while the Idirans are more concerned about converting everybody to their religion, war between the two was pretty much inevitable. 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 Forth Road Bridge. As Horza ponders these matters, floating alone in the depths of space, his suit alerts him to an incoming vessel. Who is it? And what are they going to do with Horza—who, it should be remembered, still looks like an elderly politician with thin hair and sallow skin. We’ll find out in two weeks, in the next section of the Culture re-read. 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.Bora Horza Gobuchul is a Changer and an operative of the Idiran Empire. He was one of a party of Changers allowed on Schar's World, and for that reason is tasked by the Idirans with retrieving a Mind that had crashed to the planet. Horza is humanoid, but committed to the Idiran cause despite the fact that he does not believe in their god and does not agree with their harsh and aggressive expansion. 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 fate of Phlebas in the poem is similar to that of Uagen Zlepe in the novel. The title may also refer to the state of mind of the Masaq' Orbital Hub Mind and Major Quilan, both already having died in spirit during their respective wars. Chekhov's Gun: Balveda spits out a tooth during the final battle, apparently from an injury. It isn't. That tooth is actually a "memoryform" containing a powerful laser gun that she uses to finally kill Xoxarle. Shapeshifting: An interesting, relatively "hard" example: Horza's species was genetically engineered to have a limited (but still useful, for a spy) ability to shape-shift. Horza can take on the appearance of another person, and eventually replace them. This is a complex, lengthy process in which the physical structure of Horza's face and body are gradually altered by his specialized biology. Shapeshifter Baggage and other common shape-shifting tropes are averted. As with his friend Ken MacLeod (another Scottish writer of technical and social science fiction) a strong awareness of left-wing history shows in his writings. The argument that an economy of abundance renders anarchy and adhocracy viable (or even inevitable) attracts many as an interesting potential experiment, were it ever to become testable. He was a signatory to the Declaration of Calton Hill, which calls for Scottish independence.