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Consider Phlebas (The Culture)
 
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Consider Phlebas (The Culture) (Paperback)

by Iain M. Banks (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
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Frequently Bought Together

Consider Phlebas (The Culture) + The Player of Games (The Culture) + Use of Weapons (The Culture)
Total RRP: £26.97
Price For All Three: £17.70

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Product details

  • Paperback: 467 pages
  • Publisher: Orbit; New edition edition (14 April 1988)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1857231384
  • ISBN-13: 978-1857231380
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.2 x 3.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 4,518 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #1 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > B > Banks, Iain M.
    #3 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > B > Banks, Iain
    #75 in  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction

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Product Description

Review

'Banks is a phenomenon: the wildly successful, fearlessly creative author of brilliant and disturbing non-genre novels, he's equally at home writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance' William Gibson 'There is now no British SF writer to whose work I look forward with greater keenness' The Times 'Poetic, humorous, baffling, terrifying, sexy - the books of Iain M. Banks are all these things and more' NME

Product Description

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. Consider Phlebas - a space opera of stunning power and awesome imagination.
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What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Consider Phlebas (The Culture)
84% buy the item featured on this page:
Consider Phlebas (The Culture) 4.1 out of 5 stars (68)
£5.96
The Player of Games (The Culture)
5% buy
The Player of Games (The Culture) 4.5 out of 5 stars (38)
£5.27
Use of Weapons (The Culture)
4% buy
Use of Weapons (The Culture) 4.4 out of 5 stars (64)
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Excession
3% buy
Excession 4.3 out of 5 stars (74)
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Customer Reviews

68 Reviews
5 star:
 (37)
4 star:
 (12)
3 star:
 (9)
2 star:
 (8)
1 star:
 (2)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.1 out of 5 stars (68 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars The Wasp Factory in space... brutally good., 4 Jan 2004
Just as Iain Banks' first novel "The Wasp Factory" was a calling-card for his somewhat twisted world-view, so "Consider Phlebas", his first SF novel as Iain M, gives you a pretty clear idea of what to expect in his subsequent SF. Extraordinary as it may seem to anyone who has read much of his other work, this book takes first prize for scope of ideas and - most particularly - inventive emotional brutality. This is emphatically not an easy read. Yes, it's space opera. Yes, it's a gung-ho adventure story. No, it's not like any of the other 5 million books in this genre. For its sheer skill at leaving horrible images in your mind as a result of really quite limited violent episodes the only comparison which springs to mind is Julian May's "Intervention".
The story sees a man - well, not exactly a man - caught on the wrong side (defined as the one which is going to lose) in a galaxy-wide conflict. His efforts to assist his alien allies lead him into a spiral of death and destruction where even his identity is gradually stripped away. The pointlessness of his desperate struggle is finally confirmed in the appendix, where in a couple of lines Banks creates the final, overwhelming message of the book as a whole. Of course, he gave it away in the title.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting , but slow moving Culture novel, 15 Mar 2006
By L. Davidson (Belfast, N.Ireland) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
"Consider Phlebas" is the first Iain M Banks science fiction novel and I think that it is fair to say that it is not his best. That said , it is well written ,witty and superior to the output of most other writers of this genre. The novel is a fairly straightforward adventure story about an unlikely band of mercenaries attempting to recover a fugitive Culture Ship's Mind from a labyrinth deep in the bowels of the frozen Schar's World ,against the backdrop of the Culture/Idiran War. The description of this conflict by Banks is the most interesting aspect of this book and it almost reads like an allegory about Earth's conflict between Islam and "The West" .Most of the action takes place on a massive Orbital called Vavatch and on Schar's World. The problem with "Consider Phlebas" is that it is overlong and the pace of the narrative gets bogged down with interminable descriptions of large spacecraft ,underground train networks and various shoot outs with enemy forces that add little to the plot. The book is probably best seen as an exercise in world building by the author and an essential background to a better appreciation of his later Culture novels. The characters in "Consider Phlebas" aren't the most sympathetic or well constructed and the only one I found myself liking very much was the uppity drone Unaha-Closp, a sort of cross between Marvin the Paranoid Android and C3P0. "Consider Phlebas" is a good book, but I think it would have been better if it was about a hundred pages or so shorter.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars The first and the best in some ways., 4 Aug 2001
If you want some of the best and most imaginative book scenes ever wrtiten, then buy this book. There, I said it. I find it almost scary to say that this book isn't Banks at his best (Use oF weapons is), but it was always a book that Banks had to get out of his system.

Someone has already mentioned that they've experienced nightmares from this book and quite frankly, I don't blame him. The eaters episode is delicously disgusting and future encounters (the damage game, the fight against the idirians), only serve to demonstrate that Iain M Banks is a truly stunning writer.

This, being the first book, serves as the starting point for the culture novels and if you're new to the culture then I reccoment this one first, before moving onto the even more complex ones.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding!
I was wondering through a book shop one weekend, as you do, and I saw Iain's book Matter on the shelf. Read more
Published 1 month ago by M. Carter

5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent sci-fi
This is sci-fi for adults. Intelligently written, huge scope and imagination. Out of all the culture novels, one of the best. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Lee Andre

5.0 out of 5 stars Rip-roaring, adventurous, horrifying and thoughtful - all under one cover.
Iain M Banks: if you're a sci-fi fan and haven't read him yet, you're missing out on an icon. His Culture series is, quite simply, the best of science fiction under production... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Mrs. Danielle F. Kaye

5.0 out of 5 stars A discourse on identity
If Player of Games was, in its structure, a paradise left and paradise returned to, Consider Phlebas is about identity (although ostensibly referring to a nostalgic mortality)... Read more
Published 5 months ago by L. Glazier

2.0 out of 5 stars bad ending
Sorry to of those people who thought this book was so great, I didn't. Yes very well written and very gripping in place, but a rubbish ending. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Kevin Allen

5.0 out of 5 stars Probaly my second fav Culture novel
I think Excession is my personal fav, but this one is a close second and probably should be read before Excession. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Timothy Hawthorn

5.0 out of 5 stars Best of Iain Banks' culture novels
For me, this is the best of the Culture novels. The intriguing thing about the Culture novels is watching a liberal, interventionist society try to balance the needs of... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Moray McC

5.0 out of 5 stars Good, eventually.
This is a wonderful novel but it's a tough cookie. It's the first of the Culture novels and so it seems to me there's a lot of bumph which slows the pace of the book down but... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Ladyfigure

4.0 out of 5 stars A great find
If you enjoy Peter Hamilton you'll enjoy this. I just wish there was more of it
Published 10 months ago by A. M. Kenny

5.0 out of 5 stars The Eaters
Consider Phlebas is one of those books that I hesitate to recommend, for two reasons: a) avid readers of science fiction often seem to miss the contemporary political commentary... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Jason King

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