Consider Phlebas: A Culture Novel (The Culture)

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It’s not clear if Banks actually anticipated that his CULTURE series would eventually extend to 10 volumes, and mark him as a very literary and subversive practitioner of the SF genre, one who could be popular with a certain devoted fan base while at the same time thumbing his nose at the more low-brow wish-fulfillment aspects of space opera. Mostly likely he didn’t. Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The book ends with a brief summary of what happened to the surviving characters. Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Horza dies, and so does everyone on his ship, except for the drone and Balveda. Balveda rescues the damaged Mind that Horza was attempting to retrieve. A post-war report at the end of the novel then goes on to say that Balveda later offs herself, and that Horza's species (the Changers) ceased to exist as a species. RYAN SKARDAL, on our staff from September 2010 to November 2018, is an English teacher who reads widely but always makes time for SFF.

I don’t care how self-righteous the Culture feels, or how many people the Idirans kill. They’re on the side of life—boring, old-fashioned biological life; smelly, fallible, short-sighted, God knows, but real life. You’re ruled by your machines. You’re an evolutionary dead end.” 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.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. They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement...” 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. Perhaps the most interesting authorial decision in Consider Phlebas is that the protagonist, Bora Horza Gobuchul, is a Changer (a shape-shifter) who chooses to side with the Idirans, despite the fact that they are religious extremists who don’t mind exterminating other species, because Horza despises the Minds of the Culture, choosing the “side of life” instead. Although he freely admits that the Culture has never done him wrong, he categorically hates what he considers a decadent and arrogant civilization that considers its lifestyle and values superior to all others. Relish the thrilling horror of Frankenstein in Folio’s stunning new edition. Mary Shelley's darkly disturbing tale is illustrated by Angela Barrett and newly introduced by Richard Holmes.

Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Iain Banks was educated at the University of Stirling where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife.Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Balveda's escape from the Hand of God. Made more awesome by how matter-of-fact she is about it. Failure Hero: Horza is a Failure Anti-Hero— barring his miraculous escape from The Ends Of Invention, almost everything he sets out to do goes horribly wrong... And it usually isn't even his fault, either. Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain. And what the Idirans”

Always a Bigger Fish: The Dra'Azon are a race of almost unfathomably powerful Energy Beings that care little for the physical galaxy besides preserving Ghost Planets as monuments to futility and destruction, including Schar's World. Neither the Culture or the Idirans want to risk pissing them off. Or maybe he only wanted to pretend that he would find it very difficult; maybe it would be no bother at all, and the sort of bogus camaraderie of doing the same job, though on different sides, was just that: a fake.” Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. "My survival."

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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. The Planets is a thrilling tour of our solar system by Andrew Cohen and Professor Brian Cox, in a Folio edition with breathtaking NASA photography from the latest space missions.

Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world’s destruction.” 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.STUART STAROSTA, on our staff from March 2015 to November 2018, is a lifelong SFF reader who makes his living reviewing English translations of Japanese equity research. Despite growing up in beautiful Hawaii, he spent most of his time reading as many SFF books as possible. After getting an MA in Japanese-English translation in Monterey, CA, he lived in Tokyo, Japan for about 15 years before moving to London in 2017 with his wife, daughter, and dog named Lani. Stuart's reading goal is to read as many classic SF novels and Hugo/Nebula winners as possible, David Pringle's 100 Best SF and 100 Best Fantasy Novels, along with newer books & series that are too highly-praised to be ignored. Driven to Suicide: In the " Dramatis Personae" epilogue. Despite successfully saving the lost Mind from the Idirans, after the war ended the Culture agent Balveda asks to be placed into suspended animation until the Culture could "statistically prove" that more people would have been killed by the Idirans than actually died in the war. She is awakened only around 430 years later once the terms are met — and kills herself only a few months later. 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.