A Taste of Culture! | Consider Phlebas

book: Consider Phlebas | Iain M. Banks

books:


	• Consider Phlebas Iain M. Banks Orbit, 2008 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 96 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good Read

This is the beginnings of great scifi series. I will recommend this book to anyone who likes the space opera scifi. It was an interesting story, and made me want more when it was done.

A Taste of Culture!

The Culture is a civilization of sentient beings, both organic and "machine" (think artificial intelligence with all the rights of intelligent life forms) based. There is no need for money except to use in less evolved cultures. The Culture doesn't even have goals of planetary conquest. They just build enormous artificial habitats in space.

But the Culture does pay attention to those other civilizations that can upset the status quo, or keep the Culture from its path to enlightenment.

In Consider Phlebas, author Iain Banks follows one small chapter in the decades long battle between the Culture and the Idirans. The Idirans have been very successful in expanding their sphere of influence, and the godless Culture is a dangerous irritant. Religious passion is an alien concept to the Culture, and their Contact branch, and the Special Circumstances division within Contact, must fight a war.

As a story within this battle, a Mind (AI) is stranded on a peculiar planet (protected for reasons unknown by a vastly powerful entity that allows no armies to approach). A team of Changers has had a historical presence on this planet, and the Idirans have one Changer loyal to them (Horza) who used to be stationed there. His mission is to return to the planet, locate the Mind (with its secrets of the Culture's technologies), and turn it over to the Idirans. The Culture simply wants to rescue one of their own, the Mind. They are confident in an eventual outcome of the war in their favor, but they recognize that the capture of the Mind will delay success for a few years. They are very analytic.

This book is the tale of Horza and his extraordinary adventures in getting to the planet hiding the Mind, and finding the Mind on the planet. The uniqueness of AI sentience, the Culture's technologies, the physiology of the Changers, and determination of the Idirans, all make this an intriguing tale and a unique sci-fi offering. Banks makes Horza a horrible person who seems to care not a wit who is hurt or killed (usually killed) in his search for the Mind, while trying to make the reader sympathetic to his life and loves. I'm not sure this works. However, what does work is the introduction of the Culture. This is the second Culture book that I've read (the first was The Player of Games). I was told they don't have to be read in any particular order, and that certainly is bearing true.

The Culture series is an exciting addition to the sci-fi literature. You'll finish that last page, close the cover, and find yourself just sitting and thinking. Isn't that what great sci-fi is all about?

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"Dazzlingly original." -- Daily Mail
"Gripping, touching and funny." -- TLS

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.

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