Hello everybody, my name is Rachel and
welcome to my channel Kalanadi. Today I'm
going to talk about Consider Phlebas by
Iain M. Banks. This is one of his science
fiction Culture novels. It was published
in 1987, and I think that usually the
Culture novels are put in publication
order, which means this would be the
first one that many people read. It's
actually my fourth Culture novel. I've
been reading them in kind of an
idiosyncratic order. So I have read
Player of Games, Use of Weapons, and
Surface Detail before this one, and I have
to say right up front this is kind of in
the middle. It's not my favorite (that
would probably be Use of Weapons), but
it's not my least favorite either. I
really kind of hated Surface Detail. This
is very much middle-of-the-road for me. I
enjoyed it. There are some things about it I really
loved, but there are also some things
about it that I think make it a less
strong book in some ways. I am not going
to try to explain what the Culture is or
really what this universe is like - that
would be beyond me. I am not very
knowledgeable about the Culture and this
series in general, since I've been
reading the books very slowly over the
past five years. But it's very clear I
think that this is set very far in the
future, very far away from Earth. Earth
doesn't really figure into any of this
and the Culture is one of many
spacefaring civilizations. There are many
human civilizations. The culture is one
of those and there are also many truly
alien civilizations. The Culture is very
technologically advanced and does kind
of have a policy of not super
interfering. They're not expansionist,
they don't actively conquer territories,
but they will interfere in subtle ways. I
think that Consider Phlebas - the
events of this book are kind of set - like
predate other books by a considerable
amount of time and I think that the
Culture presented in this
is younger, not as wise, hasn't figured
out as many of its policies yet. And that
the the war in this book is kind of a
real test of what the Culture is. I could
be wrong about this, but that's the main
sense I came away (with) - that this was a
major turning point for the Culture and
then a lot of the other stories are set
after it. That explanation aside, what is
Consider Phlebas actually about?This
book mainly follows a man named Bora
Horza Gobuchul who is a
humanoid man - he's from a species of
human called Changers that can change
their physiology. They can impersonate
and take on the appearances of other
people. Horza is fighting on the side of
the Idirans in their war against the
Culture. So he's not Idiran. He
doesn't particularly like or agree with
Idiran policies, but he hates the
Culture more. It's a very classic case of
"the enemy of my enemy is my friend", and I
think that he literally says that at
some point in the book. The Idirans are
not humanoid; they are a completely alien
species. They are expansionist, they're
religious fanatics, they are trying to
conquer all other civilizations and
species as basically part of a religious
war, I guess. So why does Horza hate the
Culture though? I think essentially it
boils down to he's afraid of them and
he's afraid of their technology. He
claims that the Culture is ruled by
their technology, that the humans in the
Culture are dominated and controlled by
their drones, by their technological
Minds, and that the the technology is
just kind of putting up with the humans
and the humans are obsolete. And I think
that Horza interprets this as a lack of
control, a loss of control for humans, for
"real" people, and he is very afraid of
that. So at the beginning of the book
Horza is on a mission for the Idirans
on a planet. He has been impersonating
someone
in the government. He's been found out
and is jailed and he's about to die.
While he's been on this planet, he has
met the undercover Culture agent, a
woman named Balveda. And while they're
not friends, they've come to know each
other quite well. I think that Balveda
is the only human face that Horza
can put to the Culture, and now that he's
seen someone he's interacted with - a real
person from the Culture - he can't really
truly think of her as an enemy that he
should kill or be cruel to or anything,
and that complicates things a lot in the
story. So Horza has been sentenced to
death and then right as he's about to
die, am Idiran space ship arrives.
They rescue Horza. They take Balveda
prisoner, and then on the ship they order
Balveda to be executed and Horza believes
that she is now dead. And then the Idirans
send him on his next mission. They kind
of eject him into space in a spacesuit,
on a trajectory towards a planet called
Schar's World, where they want him to land,
find, and capture an escaped Culture Mind
that had had survived the destruction of
the ship that it was in. But while Horsa
is in his spacesuit flying toward Schar's
World, he is intercepted and captured by
another ship, and the next 400 pages are
all about the misadventures of Horza as
he is continually waylaid. He's always
trying to get to Schar's World even when
he is being dragged off in pretty much
the opposite direction. And through this
you learn a lot more about him, about his
past, about his beliefs, and about this
war between the Idirans and the
Culture, and all the people and such that
he encounters along the way. This is
probably the one thing about this book
that really kept me from being fully
immersed in it, the one thing that I
thought was a bit off about the book. it
takes a really long time to get to its
point. There were a couple of times when
I actually forgot what Horza was trying
to do. I forgot that he was ultimately
headed towards Schar's
World. I wasn't quite sure why that was
so important to him and I think that
it's just a little bit too long. Some of
the events of the book take too long. The
pacing is off.
We're not reminded enough of what Horza
is really trying to do. I wanted it to be
shorter, a little bit less bloated
somewhere in the middle. But maybe it's
also that I didn't quite grasp the theme -
the point of the book - until quite late.
Maybe I was kind of blind to it. What
do I think this book is actually about? I
think that it's about an identity crisis
in a way. It's about how a man starts to
kind of lose his belief that he is doing
the right thing or that he's going about
it in the right way. I the beginning of
the book Horza is very willing to argue
his stance about why he is fighting on
the Idiran side, about why he hates the
Culture, and he seems very confident in
his stance. But as the book progresses,
this is called into question more and
more I think, and he's more
short-tempered about it. He's less
willing to really talk about why he's
doing what he's doing. He has chosen one
evil over another and the black and
white situation that he has continually
presented to himself is much, much
murkier in reality, and he is faced with
that multiple times. By the end of the
book he doesn't know himself. He
literally has changed his face and his
body and his name. Who is he? There's an
interesting sequence from another
person's point of view - there are some
interludes with a woman named a Fal
N'geestra in the Culture . She's like a human
"Mind", in a way, in the Culture who can
kind of function the same - with the same
ability that the technological sentient
Minds do.
And she at one point is thinking about
what the Culture is and that the Culture
in this war is also going through its
own identity crisis. Asking why did we
get involved in this? We have to decide
one way or the other. This war is going
to shape what the Culture is, and she's
thinking about if the Culture is this
thing, what does that make you, Horza?
if your enemy is so terrible, if you
think your enemy is so terrible, what
does that make you when you go to such
extreme terrible lengths to do your job?
Like Horza leaves a wake of cruelty and
bodies behind him as he's trying to
fulfill his mission for the Idirans, so
by the end it's like he's become the
thing that he hates, and that, I think, may
be the point of this story. But for most
of it - the whole bit in the middle - I
think that got lost. However, there are
many things that I really enjoyed about
this book. The one first and foremost
that I have to point out is that like
all the Culture novels I've read - whether
I liked the the meat and the content of
them or not - it's super well-written.
This is dang good science fiction and
for a book published in 1987 it hasn't
dated very much, in my opinion, with the
the type of science fiction that it is -
that it's so far in the future, it's so
far removed from our world now, it's not
dated in its science or its technology
or in the world building. I still felt
very much like modern science fiction to
me and it's just so well written. Banks
was a great writer and a great
storyteller and just on the prose level,
the sentence level, this was an excellent
book. Another thing that I really enjoyed
about this is that it's not from the
point of view really of the Culture. It lets you see the Culture from an
outside perspective, of somebody who
doesn't like them, who doesn't
necessarily believe that the Culture is
all that great.
And that's really different from the
previous books I've read, which are
really all about the Culture kind of
from the inside: people working for them,
citizens of the Culture, or allies of the
Culture. And this one - very different. And
I think that the truth is somewhere perhaps
in the middle. I don't think that Horza
really knows what the Culture is like
but it's interesting to have a differing
opinion on whether the Culture is really
as good as it presents itself. I really
liked that. I also really enjoy the depth
of the politics, of the philosophies
being argued. The dynamics in the story
are very complex. There's a lot that you
can dig into here. There is a lot going
on under the surface. And and even if I
think that it's maybe a little bit
bloated, that maybe some of these things
would have appeared sharper if it had
less of a word count, I do think that all
the parts of this story do actually hang
together quite well. S those are my main
thoughts and major impressions of
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks.
Definitely let me know if you have read
this book or other Culture novels. What
do you think of them? Leave me a comment
down below. Thank you very much for
watching this off-the-top-of-my-head
video and I will talk to you again soon,
and until then - bye!
