Consider Phlebas: A Culture Novel (The Culture)

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The Culture is an intergalactic utopia, but readers should not come to Consider Phlebas expecting dystopian narrative. 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. It's noted that a lesser AI might have this sort of reaction to learning that a human Referer can outsmart it, while the Culture Minds instead find this rather amusing. Today is the first proper post of the series, and we’re off with the prologue and chapters 1 and 2 of Consider Phlebas. Horza, though something of a spy-novel cipher at times, is not without compassion or tenderness, as we’ll see again later.

Had to Be Sharp: The Idirans are a Proud Warrior Race who serve as proof that to thrive on a monster-infested and highly radioactive planet, you'd better become the scariest monster of all. 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.There are nice pieces of invention: the Megaships, the Game of Damage with real Lives – but they are not derived from the basic premises of the story, any more than the pseudo-mediaevalism of the Gerontocracy’s dungeon/sewer in which we begin, which could easily have leaked out of Pratchett.

After all, he has taken on perhaps the most difficult assignment in the universe: outwitting a Culture Mind. 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. Homomda, who at the time were a shade ahead of even the Culture, had assisted the Idirans in the past at least partly because of their shared tripedal ancestry, and even supported them for a time during the Culture-Idiran War.With this novel, Banks rebooted the 19th-century domestic saga long before Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections; it’s probably the masterpiece of his Earthbound output. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

Phlebas the Phoenician Phlebas the Phoenician Ezra Pound, a mentor of Eliot’s, helped him edit the poem. Just before the Clear Air Turbulence went back into warp and its crew sat down at table, the ship expelled the limp corpse of Zallin. In the context of the play, Ariel says this line in a song to Ferdinand, describing Ferdinand’s father’s supposed death by water.