VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (18)
By:
September 3, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
CONSIDER PHLEBAS | IAIN M. BANKS | 1987
When an author takes the title of a sprawling, maximal space opera from The Waste Land, it’s a good bet that said space opera operates — as much as it fully entertains on space opera terms — on a mindful, self-aware, and explicitly contemporary plane. The first of Banks’ Culture series, Consider Phlebas takes place in the early stages of a war between massive galactic powers: the Idiran empire — militaristic, fundamentalist, vaguely reptilian — and the Culture, a looser (if also enormous) conglomeration of quasi-human society based on intelligence, tolerance, and — in the interests of intelligence and tolerance — intense meddling in the affairs of other worlds. Significantly, the most powerful members of the Culture are not human at all, but the hyper-intelligent and powerful Minds operating its ships, orbitals, and facilities of all kinds. Broadly — which the book first suggests, and then complicates with all sorts of exceptions — the Idiran War could almost stand in for the West’s struggle with fundamentalism or Communism, yet the details are consistently more subtle than any broad stroke.
The plot concerns a Culture Mind’s unlikely survival of the destruction of its ship, escaping, all but powerless, to an isolated Planet of Death, a frozen mausoleum to a vanished species. Hiding in a labyrinth of underground tunnels, the Mind is sought for rescue by the Culture, and for capture by the Idirans, most specifically by Horza, a mercenary serving the Idirans out of an ideological hatred for the Culture’s unquenchable, narcissistic expansion. As a solitary agent operating between greater powers, Horza’s journey becomes a meditation on the connections that make a society — from the bonds that join a ship’s crew to the ethos of a civilization (especially one made of many cultures and/or species).
The confidence and authority with which Banks sketches his imaginary universe — and the endlessly offhand level of detail — is truly captivating. His vision is at all times maximal, deliriously asserting scale far beyond any reader’s Earthly experience while never losing hold of the story or the world-building. Equally impressive is how his narration walks a tightrope between full engagement with his characters and their circumstances and just a touch of stepped-back, ironic distance that allows us to preserve a critical eye. The story advances in a string of elaborate set pieces, each more audacious than the last: space battles, mercenary raids, heists, ship collision, human sacrifice, nihilistic spectacle, world destruction, murder, love, heartbreak, all of it leading to the final trek into the lifeless tunnels of Schar’s World, where nothing works out the way anyone hoped it might. For all of the obvious pleasure undergirding its creation, Consider Phlebas remains cold-eyed and truthful about the costs of empire and war, of compromise and its refusal. No one wins here.
VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on SNOW CRASH | Mandy Keifetz on THE GENOCIDAL HEALER | Matthew De Abaitua on SWAMP THING | Carlo Rotella on THE PLAYER OF GAMES | Lynn Peril on GEEK LOVE | Stephanie Burt on THE CARPATHIANS | Josh Glenn on DAL TOKYO | Deb Chachra on THE HYPERION CANTOS | Adam McGovern on KID ETERNITY | Nikhil Singh on THE RIDDLING REAVER | Judith Zissman on RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE | Ramona Lyons on PARABLE OF THE SOWER | Jessamyn West on the MARS TRILOGY | Flourish Klink on DOOMSDAY BOOK | Matthew Battles on THE INTEGRAL TREES | Tom Nealon on CLAY’S ARK | Sara Ryan on SARAH CANARY | Gordon Dahlquist on CONSIDER PHLEBAS | Alex Brook Lynn on VURT | Miranda Mellis on STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND | Nicholas Rombes on RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH | Adelina Vaca on NEUROMANCER | Marc Weidenbaum on AMERICAN FLAGG! | Peggy Nelson on VIRTUAL LIGHT | Michael Grasso on WILD PALMS.
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