One of Banks’s trademarks is the loving description of the horrible things that humans and other sentient species can inflict on each other. Horza falls in with a shipful of space pirates who are looking for easy pickings on the periphery of the light-years-wide war zone, and attempts to use them to carry out his own quest while letting them continue to think they’re going about their buccaneering ways.
Needless to say, space opera on a high plane ensues. But his Idiran friends intervene dramatically at the last second, and we’re plunged into the flash and fog of war.ĭid I mention that the Idirans are nine-foot-tall, three-legged, keratin-plated religious fanatics? Or that Horza is a Changer, member of a humanoid race of shape-shifters? And that he is on a quest to capture a Culture Mind, one of the infinitely complex and intelligent machines that has been marooned on an off-limits planet in its escape from the war zone? And he’s being chased by Balveda, a Culture field operative whose high-tech tricks make James Bond look like a caveman pounding to rocks together in hopes of making a fire? As the book opens, he is about to be killed indeed, tortured to death in an extremely grotesque fashion. Horza is a mercenery, a spy, an assassin in the employ of the Idirans, who have goaded The Culture into its first-ever war in its many millennia of history.
Indeed it is only slowly and obliquely that we come to see The Culture as something less than the monstrous entity it is to Bora Horza Gobuchul. For the first 100 or so pages, we are introduced to The Culture as seen through the eyes of someone who hates it. To demonstrate just how audacious a book Phlebas is, consider this: It’s the first Culture book, but its protagonist is an enemy of The Culture. It’s been better than 20 years since he started writing sf books about what he calls The Culture, and Little, Brown has released a new set of trade paper editions of them on its Orbit imprint, starting with the first in the series, Consider Phlebas. Banks is one of the most creative in a field of highly creative contemporary British science fiction authors.
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