Subject: CONSIDER PHLEBAS by Iain M. Banks

From: throopw@sheol%dg-rtp.dg.com (Wayne Throop)
Date: 14 Oct 91 19:53:11 GMT

This is a large, subtle book, with many layers.  Much of the
interest in it is the contrasts and juxtapositions of the various
layers of events, and the irony/tragedy/whatnot that comes from an
outside observer making connections between meanings that none of the
participants can see because they are embedded in them.

Or so it seems to me.  In fact, I'm pretty sure my interpretation
of the book wouldn't match others'.  I get the impression that I'm
missing many of the allusions and impressions that the author may have
intended.

In other words, I liked it but I'm not sure I can fully analyze why.

What I'll describe, however, is the superficial level of the
technological background, and the gross plotline.

The book is set in the "Culture-Idiran War".  To quote from the supplied
supplementary material at the end of the book:

    STATISTICS
    Length of war: forty-eight years, one month.  Total casualties,
    including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and
    non-combatants: 851.4 billion (+/-3%).  Losses: ships (all classes above
    interplanetary) 91,215,660 (+/-200); Orbitals 14,334; planets and major
    moons 53; Rings 1; Spheres 3; stars (undergoing significant mass loss or
    sequence-position alteration) 6. 

    HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
    A small, short war that rarely extened throughout more than .02% of the
    galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population.  Rumors persist of far
    more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of
    time and space.  Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy's elder
    civilizations rate the Idiran-Culture war as the most significant
    conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of the singularly
    interesting Events they see so rarely these days. 

In short, we've (sort of) got an updated version of the middle phase of
the Arisia-Eddore war.  Or another way of putting it is that it's an
attempt at a Post-Vinge-Singularity culture, with hints of further
cultural/technological singularities to come with several references to
even more advanced civilizations, and with updated technology drawn from
more recent speculations than those of Lensman days, eg, ringworlds and
such. 

And in further contrast to those super-science tales of yore, the
sociodynamics, the personalities, and the scenarios in general are much
more fully fleshed out.  This story has plenty of technological flash,
but rather than describing "coruscating rays" and such to invoke a sense
of wonder, the technology is heavily understated.  Perhaps the nearest
equivalent setting to the Culture might be Cordwainer Smith's
Instrumentality of Mankind (though I vacilate over whether it deserves
quite *that* much praise). 

Against this background, the plot follows the adventures of a member
of a dying species, the Changers, who is acting as an agent for the
Idirans against the Culture for ideological reasons.  The book then
is superficially an adventure tale, containing a fairly large number
of sub-adventures as the protagonist concentrates on local problems of
such interest and peril as to make the larger stage fade away from
the reader, and snap back into focus as the smaller adventures are
resolved.  

In fact, this changing focus is one of the interesting aspects of the
book.  In addition to showing the situation from various levels of
detail as the story progresses, the reader is presented to various
points of view also, both from various characters closer-to and
farther-from the "main" adventure story, and from the dispasionate
appendix material. 

Of recent works, it vaguely reminds me of Cook's _The_Dragon_Never_Sleeps_. 
Of older works (as I said) it reminds me of Smith's Instrumentality of
Mankind.  I hadn't encountered this author before, but this book has got
me looking forward to his next work set in the Idiran-Culture war:
_Use_of_Weapons_. 

%A   Iain M. Banks
%C   New York
%D   October 1991
%G   ISBN 0-553-29281-1
%I   Bantam
%P   497 pages
%T   Consider Phlebas
--
Wayne Throop  ...!mcnc!dg-rtp!sheol!throopw