By 1987, when the rewritten Consider Phlebas saw publication, Iain Banks was an established literary figure in non-genre circles. He’d also become fairly well known as the kind of writer who was always Up To Something, always working to create intricate metatextual games running inside complex plot-devices. It’s not surprising, therefore, that his first Culture novel should set the tone for those that followed by continuing this trend: in its first appearance, the Culture starts out as the adversary in a sprawling galactic conflict, classic space opera’s “comsymp hive of baddies” antagonist to the novel’s protagonist and to the civilization that employs him as a mercenary (Clute 1995b, 28). Phlebas was also the first novel to come out under the name Iain M. Banks—Macmillan had requested this addition as a way to distinguish his genre novels from the non-genre ones (Clute 1995a, 28). In the long run, this doubling in publishing identity would saddle Banks with a doppelganger figure of sorts and, worse, provide him with a fairly constant source of irritation for being a useful tool in the hands of those interested in keeping SF separate from mainstream fiction.1
Part of the problem also consisted of the mode of SF that Banks had chosen to write. When Wilson Tucker issued his now famous condemnation of space opera as “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn” in 1941 (qtd. in Pringle 2000, 35), the subgenre wasn’t even twenty years old, yet it already appeared exhausted. For all its insistence on grand vistas of space, mighty technological constructs, and universe-shaking events, space opera seemed juvenile, shackled to formulaic plots, and possessed of a simplistically anthropocentric ethos that saw the universe as fundamentally comprehensible by humans because it had been made for humans. And since the universe was really ours to play with, so space opera held, it would be welcoming of traditional human power structures—empires, oligarchies, patriarchies, Victorian-capitalist machineries, satrapies of various superficial hues—and dichotomies—human and machine, human and (subordinate or doomed enemy) alien, male and (subordinate) female, good and evil.
The subgenre endured, however. For all its faults, audiences treated it as the guilty pleasure it was and kept reading. Also, it proved capable of growth: it followed the gradual maturation of science fiction at large from its early pulp-magazine days to the Analog golden age of the 1940s and ’50s, all the way to the New Wave of the 1960s and early ’70s. Throughout those years, it gave us gems like Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953), Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), and Cordwainer Smith’s stories of the Instrumentality of Mankind, so that by the time Brian Aldiss, who had previously defined the subgenre’s writing style as “Widescreen Baroque,”2 wrote his introduction to the 1974 collection Space Opera: An Anthology of Way-Back-When Futures, he had a slightly more flattering, appropriately nostalgic description to provide:
Science Fiction is a big muscular horny creature, with a mass of bristling antennae and proprioceptors on its skull. It has a small sister, a gentle creature with red lips and a dash of stardust in her hair. Her name is Space Opera…. Science fiction is for real. Space opera is for fun. Generally. What space opera does is take a few light years and a pinch of reality and inflate thoroughly with melodrama, dreams, and a seasoning of screwy ideas…. [It is] heady, escapist stuff, charging on without overmuch regard for logic or literacy, while often throwing off great images, excitements, and aspirations [xi].
Nineteen seventy-four was also the year the last of the great New Wave space operas, M. John Harrison’s The Centauri Device, saw print. Beginning in the mid-’60s, writers like Samuel Delany, Aldiss, and Harrison had begun re-crafting space opera into renewed shapes. Novels like Aldiss’ The Dark Light Years (1964), Delany’s Babel–17 (1966) and Nova (1968), and The Centauri Device treated the vastnesses of the subgenre as playgrounds for the artist’s imagination, great star-spangled canvases against which a mature writer could craft aesthetically rich narratives. The space operas of the 1960s and ’70s purposefully ramped up the melodrama and the screwy ideas in order to encourage readers to view them primarily as artistic enterprises and aesthetic constructs. They also injected previously unknown levels of complexity into their characters’ interactions, casting the intricacies of the human psyche against the backgrounds of star-fields, nebulas, and hyperspatial planes of reality. More than once, those vast spacescapes became Rorschach tests against which the characters projected their desires and fears, thus allowing space opera to meaningfully import J. G. Ballard’s inner space into its outer-space territories.
It was those renewed shapes Banks found when he began reading science fiction. The writers of the New Wave who dabbled in space opera showed him that it was possible to utilize classic adventure plot structures and explode them to problematize and ultimately reverse the simplistic ethos they underwrote, marrying large-scale action scenes to advanced forms of literary expression. Speaking to James Rundle in 2010, Banks remembered:
I just loved the scope of it—again, to quote Mr. Aldiss, he came up with “widescreen baroque space opera,” that was brilliant! And there were a lot of things that I was trying to do with it, to use a fairly epic format to demystify, to bring it down from heroes and princesses to the level of the grunts … I love space opera and I love the opportunity it gave me to work a huge canvas. I also felt that there was a moral high ground in space opera, and I wanted to reclaim it for the Left! I was fed up with reading these otherwise enjoyable books that ultimately turned out to be ultra-capitalist, or almost proto-fascist at times. I wasn’t having this [n.p.].
Banks did reclaim the moral high ground for the left, and he did demystify the garish glamour of space opera, but that wasn’t all. He also rejuvenated the entire subgenre, which had spent the intervening years in limbo, sidelined by the emergence of more contemporary modes such as, for example, cyberpunk (Langford 2005, 170; Rundle 2010, n.p.). In the years after Phlebas’ publication, as Banks kept adding novels to the Culture series, a number of writers followed him into the faraway territories, each providing new viewpoints, new stimuli, and a new appreciation for the craft of writing space opera in the information age. Vernor Vinge, Colin Greenland, Paul McAuley, Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, Lois McMaster Bujold—they and many others either followed in the footsteps of Consider Phlebas or, if they had already published space opera before its appearance (Vinge and Bujold, for example), found that the post-Phlebas market had become more receptive to their material than it had been before. The novel ended up being, among other things, something of a trailblazer.3
It’s a heavy title to lug around, Consider Phlebas. The injunction comes from section IV—“Death by Water”—of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922):
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you [16].
“Phlebas,” Banks commented in a 1994 interview with Science Fiction Chronicle, “is the drowned Phoenician sailor in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ which is my favourite poem, if you exclude Shakespeare.” While Eliot’s politics appalled Banks, he still thought of the Modernist poet as a “genius” and of The Waste Land as his “masterpiece”; plus, he liked the sound of the title (Melia 1994, 7).
The resonances between Banks’ novel and Eliot’s poem are relevant to Phlebas’ very structure. Both writers, in Banks’ phrasing, “use a fairly epic format to demystify [it], to bring it down from heroes and princesses to the level of the grunts”; Eliot demystifies the epic format of the quest for the Holy Grail, Banks the epic format of space opera, which, like many other romance genres, models its plotlines after the quest-patterns in the great heroic cycles of Western culture. The Big Dumb Object, the Lens, the Kwisatz Haderach, the intelligent mega-weapon asleep at the heart of the galaxy, the planet that feels, the Ship Who Sang, and their myriad cousins are the Holy Grails of space opera. Finding and using—owning—them, or at least receiving the truth they bring, turns the universe in the same way finding the Grail turns the song: it’s an instant of wholeness that heals the wounds of the world and allows us to glimpse the vista of greater places and mightier times. And maybe those mightier times are not ours to own, but it is enough to know that our descendants will possess them, in the aftermath of the unstoppable human hegira into the depths of creation that, as foretold, no alien hand can tame. This is the promise of space opera.
And Banks, as he himself said, wasn’t having it. The title Consider Phlebas is indeed a prophecy, but it is a prophecy of failure. It is also a warning: Phlebas the Phoenician is irrevocably sundered from the Grail Quest in The Waste Land, and so is Bora Horza Gobuchul, the protagonist of Banks’ novel upon whose shoulders the burden of Phlebas’ destiny rests—“for there is no miracle of the Grail for Semites, according to Mr. Eliot. So with the protagonist of this novel. Though no hint of racism ever begins to touch Consider Phlebas, the title does inescapably evoke an exile that is unredeemable, a death without point. The hero of Banks’ book—let us make this absolutely clear—is Phlebas. And he is as utterly doomed as Phlebas to a useless death, sans Grail” (Clute 1995b, 29). Banks himself commented on the necessity to have Horza die:
For the first few weeks that I was planning the book Horza didn’t die; in fact at first he won…. Then as I thought through the story I decided he couldn’t win; it didn’t feel right … I thought, shit no; he’s got to die; it’ll feel like a children’s story if he doesn’t. The whole burrowing, obsessive movement of the story was pushing toward just that result [Melia 1994, 42].
But before we get to the doomed knight, we have to see the Grail. The novel’s prologue introduces us to it—a nameless Culture warship, vacuum-ridden and without crew, desperately built out of the cannibalized parts of other craft and sent out into the galaxy to possibly escape the destruction of its parent dockyard and reach friendly space. Nestled at the heart of the vessel’s motley collection of force-fields, armor plates, and sensor arrays is the treasure, “the vastly powerful—though still raw and untrained—Mind around which [the dockyard] had constructed the rest of the ship” (3). When hostiles intercept the warship a few days after it has departed the doomed dockyard, the Mind inside opts for the only course open to it other than capture—a risky hyperspace jump directed at a nearby planet. When its pursuers find out what it did, they find themselves at an impasse: the planet is called Schar’s World, and they cannot land or even get near it because “it was one of the forbidden Planets of the Dead” (5). For the time being, the mind is safe.
The Grail is now in its niche, both hard to capture and difficult to rescue because guarded by God—God, that is, in the shape of the Dra’Azon, one of the galaxy’s elder civilizations. Upon reaching civilizational peak hundreds of thousands of years before, the Dra’Azon had decided to Sublime:
Subliming was an accepted if still somewhat mysterious part of galactic life; it meant leaving the normal matter-based life of the universe behind and ascending to a higher state of existence based on pure energy. In theory, any individual—biological or machine—could Sublime, given the right technology, but the pattern was for whole swathes of a society and species to disappear at the same time, and often the entirety of a civilization went in one go … to Sublime was to retire from the normal life of the galaxy. The few real rather than imagined exceptions to this rule had consisted of little more than eccentricities [Look to Windward, 164–165].
In the case of the Dra’Azon, these eccentricities consist in picking out and cordoning off planets whose dominant species committed civilizational suicide, either through war or environmental mismanagement. Schar’s World attracted the Dra’Azon’s attention when its inhabitants annihilated themselves with biological weapons eleven thousand years before the beginning of Phlebas. Now a Planet of the Dead, it is kept in pristine condition inside a so-called “Quiet Barrier”; the Dra’Azon won’t allow anyone anywhere around it unless invited (90–91). The Mind, which the Dra’Azon allowed to pass because it was in distress (92), now resides inside the military Command System of one of Schar’s World’s long-gone nations. This Command system is a huge network of subterranean train stations and rail lines, including the trains themselves (90–91). When its pursuers try to send a recovery team to the surface of Schar’s World, the Dra’Azon attack them immediately (25).
The knight on the quest for the Grail, inside whom the curse of Phlebas waits for release like a secret poison sac, appropriately makes his appearance immediately after the prologue. Bora Horza Gobuchul is a Changer,4 member of a declining species of humanoids that can alter their appearance at will to mimic the form of any other humanoid race. He is fighting the Culture for two reasons: first, because the Changers as a whole are fighting against it. Some time before the beginning of the war, their asteroid homeworld had ended up drifting inside the sphere of influence of the Culture’s adversaries, the Idirans—a militantly religious race of functionally immortal, tripodal giants vaguely resembling overgrown preying mantises. The Idirans do everything loudly; their voices hurt human ears, as do even simple shipboard alarms, and their steps boom against the metal plates of their ships’ corridors like doom bells. They are zealots, owners of a vast empire of violently subjugated species to whom they bring their God’s often-brutal enlightenment. Resistance or simple lack of compliance triggers extermination (20–28; 403), so the Changers had little choice but to let themselves be employed as mercenaries and spies in the war against the Culture.5
And yet Horza works for the Idirans without complaint—enthusiastically, even, which brings us to the second reason. “I don’t care how self-righteous the Culture feels, or how many people the Idirans kill,” he tells Balveda, a captured Culture agent. “They’re on the side of life—boring, old-fashioned, biological life; smelly, fallible, and short-sighted, God knows, but real life. You’re ruled by your machines…. The worst thing that could happen to the galaxy would be if the Culture wins this war” (29). The Culture’s decision-making routines, administrative duties, and high-level planning are indeed the province of the Minds, fully post-human AIs whose thought processes are several orders of magnitude faster, more complex, and more cogent than anything flesh sentients can muster. Their ships have crews but no captains, their orbitals and planets have populations but no rulers—the Minds run everything (86–87). It is this yielding to the machine that Horza can’t countenance, and it is loathing of everything the Culture stands for rather than appreciation of the Idirans’ cause that drives him to risk his life for his employers.
For the first hundred pages or so of Consider Phlebas, Banks appears to play the game of space opera to the letter, enriching it with plenty of highly skilled pageantry but otherwise seeming to remain within the ethos of the classic template. The Culture presents itself to us through its machinery first and foremost, which in classic space opera terms means that it’s evil—the rise of machine sentience almost invariably triggers homicidal wars against flesh sentients. The prologue contains no Culture biologicals, either human-shaped or otherwise; only the Minds and the massive space-dwelling artifacts they reside within are in evidence. And when chapter one gives us the first Culture human—Balveda—she is accompanied by yet another living machine: a knife missile (13).
The Idirans, on the other hand, appear mainly through the character of Xoralundra, the officer in charge of the mission that captures Balveda. Aside from ordering the annihilation from orbit of several cities on a planet whose ruling class had made the mistake of siding with the Culture, and apart from throwing some of his soldiers around like rag dolls, he seems like a nice guy. Uncommonly for an Idiran, he treats Horza with respect, possesses a good deal of tactical and strategic sense, and even displays a wry sense of humor—all good and proper space-opera mensch stuff, the raw matter out of which Those Who Have to Make Tough Decisions for the Common Good are built (20–26). He forces the Culture knife missile to self-destruct and captures the Culture agent, at which point we learn that it was the Culture that originally antagonized the Idirans. The latter were busy expanding their empire and converting heathens, to be sure, but they hadn’t actually threatened any part of the Culture itself or initiated any hostile action against a Culture ship or Orbital. The Culture got in the way of the Idiran Empire because the former felt that the latter’s expansionist drive needed checking (28).
So far so good, it seems, and everything as per instruction manual. The Culture is a machine-ruled, socialist collective of meddlesome bad guys, the Idirans are—cautiously speaking, and hedging one’s bets a lot—the good guys, and Horza is their Dominic Flandry. Xoralundra has a mission for him: years before, Horza had been assigned to the Changer base on Schar’s World,6 whose establishment the Dra’Azon had allowed for their own unfathomable reasons. Xoralundra believes that they will let Horza back in on the strength of his previous dealings with them, so he tasks the Changer with capturing the refugee Mind (22). On condition that he and another Changer among the Schar’s World complement, with whom he’d once had a relationship he wishes to rekindle, be allowed to opt out of the whole war in the wake of the mission’s successful completion, Horza agrees.
True to form, complications ensue. A Culture General Contact Unit attacks the Idiran ship and captures it, but not before Xoralundra manages to put Horza inside a combat suit and eject him out of an airlock. Drifting in space, he is picked up by Captain Kraiklyn’s Free Company, a bunch of mercenaries flying the starship Clear Air Turbulence (or CAT), which has a pedigree that would make the Millennium Falcon proud (56; 58–59). Forced to fight for his right to remain onboard, Horza kills his opponent and takes his place in the Company (44–50), all the while trying to figure out a way to return to his quest. Without little choice but to go along for the time being, he follows his new crew in a disastrous raid on a temple on a remote planet, during which several of the Free Company’s members lose their lives (68–82). Determined to become the captain of the CAT by killing and impersonating Kraiklyn, Horza bides his time.
It is at this point that the first expressly dissonant note intrudes into the well-practiced melody that the novel is supposed to be playing for us. In a fashion similar to that of The Bridge, the plot of Consider Phlebas is parsed into a fairly complex chapter structure. This structure is arranged in such a way that, at irregular intervals, the narrative removes its focus from Horza’s adventures to concentrate on characters belonging to the Culture. Three of these intervals, each called State of play and consecutively numbered one to three, feature a “Culture Referer” by the name of Fal ’Ngeestra. A fourth interval, Interlude in darkness, briefly zeroes in on the escaped Mind hiding in the tunnels of the Command System, while the fifth and final is not so much an interval as an epilogue, written in the form of three Appendices, a Dramatis Personae list of the surviving characters, and the epilogue itself.
We begin with State of play: one (85–95). A Culture Referer is a unique creature, “one of those thirty, maybe forty, out of … eighteen trillion who could give you an intuitive idea of what was going to happen, or tell you why she thought that something which had already happened had happened the way it did, and almost certainly turn out right every time. [Fal ’Ngeestra] was being handed problems and ideas constantly, being both used and assessed herself. Nothing she said or did went unrecorded; nothing she experienced went unnoticed” (87). Her role in the novel, foregrounded by the titles of the three sections where she appears, is that of master strategist. She is the great chess player, Ingmar Bergman’s Death sitting in front of the board; she is the one flesh sentient in the novel who receives the most recent information on the chase for the Mind, and the one afforded the overall view not just of the action itself, but also of the strategic landscape surrounding it, short- and long-term. Because she truly is unique, she is unmatched. No such figure appears on the Idiran side, or in the Free Company. Every other character in the novel, with the exception of the Minds, is a pawn in the wargame Fal plays for the Culture.
In a standard space-opera context, Fal would be either a prisoner of the machine empire, forced under some sort of threat to betray her people, or the ultimate expression of that empire’s inhuman reach—a machine herself, typically, frigid except for her hatred of flesh, working the mathematics of war like an immensely souped-up version of the W.O.P.R. from Wargames (1983). In Consider Phlebas, however, she is nothing like either. She is a happy, well adjusted, good-hearted flesh-sentient, and while her talent does warrant monitoring, those supposedly inhuman Minds have consented to let her indulge her favorite pastime—mountain-climbing—without any form of observation whatsoever. She lives in one of the thousands of Culture Orbitals in a beautiful house within easy reach of the mountains, and her machine companion, the drone Jase, cares for her with secret, avuncular love (89–90).7 And Banks makes sure to immediately dispel any suspicion we might entertain that her status as the ultimate oddity among the flesh-and-blood component of the Culture’s population is the reason for all the attention. With the exception of her talent, she is in fact pretty standard as far as Culture citizens go, both in terms of education and upbringing, and her essentially unlimited access to technologically highly advanced material goods and services is the rule in her society, not the exception (87).
As for the Minds, it becomes hard to see them as monsters after reading a passage like this one:
The culture had placed its bets … on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had…. Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sport, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems [87].
The Minds, it turns out, don’t hate flesh-sentients at all. They rather like us squishy bags of fluids, and the worst that can be said about their attitude is that every now and then it gets paternalistic. And when they find someone like Fal ’Ngeestra, someone “capable of matching and occasionally beating their record for accurately assessing a given set of facts,” they react with amused fascination rather than contempt (87).8
So where’s the dystopia? Where’s the machine hive-mind that moves us folk like puppets, or the Perversion that, in Vernor Vinge’s wonderful A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), makes otherwise independently-minded people speak like they’re reading the minutes at a Central Committee meeting? Even Horza calls the Culture a capital–U Utopia, if a little sneeringly (28), and Kraiklyn speaks in awed tones of the amount of genetic tinkering that makes every flesh-sentient in it very long-lived, healthy, disease-free, resilient, beautiful by whatever standards are relevant to their body-type, and equipped with glands capable of, among many other things, prolonging orgasm to astonishing lengths and secreting into the bloodstream a wide variety of recreational drugs without any negative side effects (64). So maybe we get to yell at the Culture for being decadent, although admittedly we’d do it to mask the envy; that aside, by the time the first State of play interlude ends it has become impossible to stay on script and see it as an unalloyed evil society.
It has also become impossible to see Horza’s mission as The One That Will Win Us the War, or Horza himself as anything other than Phlebas: as Jase tells Fal, if the Idirans were to lay their appendages on this Mind, their intelligence coup would extend the duration of the war by only a few months (93). This is the point in Consider Phlebas where the template of classic space opera collapses completely. Not only is the Culture surprisingly brutality-free for a machine-ruled civilization, and not only are the Idirans more than a little disappointing as good guys; the mission on which Xoralundra has sent Horza is nothing more than a sideshow. Instead of Triplanetary we have a topsy-turvy SF version of Saving Private Ryan, and instead of Kim Kinnison we have Captain Miller (or rather, we would if the Germans in Spielberg’s movie had had an equivalent of Tom Hanks’ character). Worst of all from Horza’s point of view, he doesn’t know any of this. Neither he nor his Idiran employers have realized that the Culture, which had hitherto been on the losing side, now stands a statistically overwhelming chance of winning—so much so, as we have seen above, that the Minds in the War Council have already established a likely timeline.
So, even before Horza gets to take control of the Clear Air Turbulence and bring the Free Company along to Schar’s World, his Grail Quest is already void. We’re not looking at the turning point of the war, nor are we witnessing the birth or rebirth of an individual consciousness with the power—and the implied manifest destiny that comes with it—to radically influence events. As Banks told James Rundle many years later, we’re looking at a relatively minor engagement featuring mostly mercenary combatants and narrated mostly from the viewpoint of the grunts themselves. The State of play interpolations serve to, among other things, bring home to us readers how removed from the larger scheme of things all the characters except Fal and Jase are.
We might have guessed all of this earlier, though. Banks loved to sprinkle clues to his plans throughout his stories, and there are plenty in Phlebas. Balveda is a particularly honorable and independently thinking adversary, for one; she pleads for Horza’s life when he gets captured at the beginning of the novel and does not relish having her allies reject her appeal (11–13). When Balveda in turn becomes a prisoner of the Idirans and Horza goes to visit her, the two trade justifications based on ideological positions, but it’s clear that each respects the other (27–31). Horza himself empathizes with Balveda’s plight as an agent of both Contact and Special Circumstances, and the insight he provides is revealing of the actual shape of the Culture’s bias:
Special Circumstances had always been the Contact section’s moral espionage weapon, the very cutting edge of the Culture’s interfering diplomatic policy, the élite of the élite, in a society which abhorred élitism…. It had about it too an atmosphere of secrecy (in a society that virtually worshipped openness) which hinted at unpleasant, shaming deeds, and an ambience of moral relativity (in a society which clung to its absolutes: life/good, death/bad; pleasure/good, pain/bad)…. No other part of the Culture more exactly represented what the society as a whole really stood for, or was more militant in the application of the Culture’s fundamental beliefs. Yet no other part embodied less of the society’s day-to-day character [30].
Thus, Balveda is as much a pariah as anyone in the Culture is likely to get because, in her militant practice of her society’s beliefs, she has become the paragon of everything it rejects. Like her fellow operatives, and like Special Circumstances itself, Balveda is now “the repository for the guilt the people in the Culture experienced because they had agreed to go to war in the first place” (30). She and Horza understand each other because they are both fundamentally alone, both inhabitants of that moral gray area in every war where two enemies look at each other and, willingly or not, recognize their own face in the one staring at them on the other side. Generally speaking, Balveda belongs to the Culture, but she is part of a subset that the main society looks at with fascinated horror. By the same token, Horza belongs into Idiran society only in the broadest terms; he is a Changer, and therefore part of a subset of the Idiran military that the rest looks at with suspicion and distrust.
So the culture does have a bias, and it does have an antipathy for certain behavioral and social categories, but the bias comes from guilt at its own inability to remain peaceful and interfere with Idiran expansion at the same time, and the antipathy is aimed at itself. It treats the embodiment of its own warlike tendencies like Henry Jekyll treats Mr. Hyde—a horrifying reflection in the mirror, a distorted Dionysian doppelganger it has to unleash but can’t bring itself to fully embrace. And even then, even when the Culture does show up under the guise of Special Circumstances, the “unpleasant, shaming deeds” it supposedly commits conspicuously fail to produce piles of corpses, mass graves, razed cities, or brutalized civilians. No Culture machine or flesh sentient is seen committing, advocating, or even lending ideological support to any atrocity or war crime, and every bit of information we receive about the Culture does not reveal anything worse than what we witness the Idirans commit without so much as a second thought. In fact, as the novel progresses it’s the Idirans that start looking progressively redder in tooth and claw. The way they treat their client species and allies in the war—the so-called Medjel—does nothing to endear them to us, and Horza’s deeply ambivalent feelings toward them only reinforce the sense that some terrible misapprehension lays at the heart of his reasons for fighting by their side. He knows that most Idirans are fanatically hostile to all other species, and he knows that the vast majority of people in the Culture are precisely the opposite, yet he clings to his beliefs on the strength of his relationship with Xoralundra alone (307).
And then there is Phlebas; the curse of the moneylender shadows every step Horza makes from the very beginning. We are introduced to him as a prisoner of the Culture’s allies, sentenced to death by drowning in a sewer cell, and the first thought that crosses his mind is the recollection of a passage in his Changer lover’s favorite book back on Schar’s World:
The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking’s immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Emphataur in its Sadness Season [9].
Two deaths by water, then—one literal and the other meta-literary. The passage from this pseudo-book, which comes back to haunt Horza at regular intervals in the novel, is remarkable because it refers to his specific function (he kills those he impersonates), and also because it connects Phlebas and Horza’s ultimate fate back to the Command System—which, because Schar’s World is currently in an ice age, is essentially locked under continent-wide swathes of solidified water. The place where Horza is supposed to find his Grail is basically the same kind of drowning chamber inside which he began the story, and his memories of the time he spent on Schar’s World with his Changer lover return to him only images of snow and death (299–301).
When, at the close of State of play: one, we return to Horza and the Free Company, the narrative devolves into a chaotic sequence of adventures with little seeming connection to the main objective. The Clear Air Turbulence ends up on a Culture Orbital called Vavatch, which the Culture itself is planning on destroying because it’s about to fall within the still-expanding Idiran sphere of influence. There, Kraiklyn plans on robbing one of the tourist mega-ships that ply Vavatch’s waters, and once again it all ends in disaster: yet more of the Free Company’s members die for no gain at all (99–136), and Horza ends up on a small atoll where a sect of bizarrely primitivist islanders led by an obese, cannibalistic “Prophet” try to eat him. He escapes again (139–173) and reconnects with Kraiklyn in Evanauth, Vavatch’s main city, where the captain of the CAT has come to play his favorite pastime, a game called Damage (185–206). When Kraiklyn is eventually kicked out of the game and leaves, Horza follows him and, after a brutal fight, murders him, taking on his appearance and returning to the CAT (206–225). There, he finds the remnants of the crew, including Yalson, a woman with whom he’d begun a relationship soon after becoming a member of the Company, and Balveda. The GCU had rescued Balveda from the Idiran cruiser, and Fal ’Ngeestra’s invariably correct predictive faculties had sent her once again on a collision course with Horza’s path. She is now posing as the Free Company’s new recruit, inevitably unaware that the Kraiklyn in front of her is actually Horza. This gets her captured again, along with Unaha-Closp, a maintenance drone who remains trapped onboard the Clear Air Turbulence when Horza kicks the ship into high gear and exits the General Systems Vehicle (also GSV) The Ends of Invention, on-site to evacuate Vavatch’s remaining population before the Orbital’s scheduled destruction. The escape, a terrifying flight across and through most of the GSV’s internal volume, culminates in a breach of the Ends of Invention’s outer hull, after which the Clear Air Turbulence finally heads for Schar’s World and the tunnels of the Command System (229–266).
If the synopsis in the paragraph above of the roughly two hundred pages that Phlebas dedicates to Horza’s spinning of wheels seems byzantine—which it is—it’s because we’re supposed to witness the gigantic post–Gothic machinery of space opera grind into action, and we’re expected to find it thundering and boisterous. Space opera, as Stephen King once said of the Gothic itself, is “PRETTY GODDAM LOUD!” (274). If anything, it is even louder than the standard Gothic mode (whatever that is), because together with the intricate, clanking Rube Goldberg clockwork of the plot it gives us the spacescape of the whole universe to look out at while we listen to the noise. It may be going too far to say that the plots of space opera are mostly excuses to show us vistas of otherworlds, but that is definitely part of the job, and Banks, who disliked the politics but loved the view, knew that. Phlebas spends a lot of time spinning its wheels because that’s part of the argument—if space opera is baroque and intricate without any particular reason other than to provide a few thrills, then a partly deconstructionist approach should in fact heap those aimless thrills upon one another and foreground the aimlessness. And since Banks is clearly having fun making stuff blow up, and because he likes to share the experience, we readers are having fun watching it all go. This is the good news.
The bad news, as John Clute points out, is that nearly two hundred pages’ worth of freewheeling come close to losing us completely:
The problems Iain “M” Banks had with Consider Phlebas … lay not in any absence of space opera paraphernalia, which he was markedly un-chary of supplying in crates, or from a lack of stylistic muscle, because he is a writer jovial with energy, a jostler of material, a flexer. What flummoxed Phlebas had nothing to do with any failure of excess, but with the fact that his tale of self-destruction and futility constantly argued with the space-opera frame in which it took place, so that whenever Banks flexed his muscles he tended to break every bone in the book. It all made an unholy racket … and Consider Phlebas ended up pounding the shit out of itself [1995c, 97].
Beginning with The Player of Games, the next novel in the series, Banks would learn to keep arguing with the format of traditional space opera without doing damage to the story. In Consider Phlebas, however, he indeed spends so much time making noise that we nearly get lost in it, and it’s only his skills as a writer—his stylistic muscle, as Clute put it—that keep us coming back to the story and hanging on until we finally glimpse the plot again. We do get a few thematic pointers, though: throughout his lonely peregrinations in those two hundred pages, Horza is never far from water—literally. Between the mega-ship, the island of cannibals, and the fight with Kraiklyn, which takes place by the shore under the thundering jets of a hovercraft, water chases the Changer, lapping at his heels with the patience of a curse, which it is. Before long, the progression of events in the novel starts looking like the increasingly more frantic and inevitably doomed attempts of a drowning man to save himself. We also witness Horza’s contempt for AIs when, while still on the island, he unnecessarily and without regret kills the mind of a shuttlecraft and flies the vehicle away on his own (168–173). In the middle of all the noise, we also get to briefly catch up with the Mind inside the Command system in Interlude in darkness (177–181), which serves the twin function of (1) reminding us that there still is a story to come back to and (2) of getting us to empathize with the prize everyone is looking for. Banks’ description makes it clear that the Mind inside the tunnels isn’t damaged—it’s wounded. Its higher thought substrates are inoperable (i.e., it suffered a massive concussion), its field-manipulation faculties are partly compromised (i.e., its hands are mangled), and the tools it has to work with to set up a defense perimeter are, from the rarefied viewpoint of the Culture’s technological state of the art, hopelessly crude. We get to look at its thought processes, which, even when forced to run at substandard speeds, still manage to convey the full dread and agony of having to hope in the face of overwhelmingly negative odds—otherwise how can one find the strength to survive? There’s no Fred Saberhagen berserker here, and no Agent Smith right out of the Matrix’s most xenophobic routines; there is, on the other hand, a wounded soldier behind enemy lines, whistling in the dark while it tries to build a hiding place out of sticks and stones.
Immediately before Phlebas finally brings us back to the quest, State of play: two returns us to Fal ’Ngeestra. She worries about the Mind, about the mission, and about her role in shaping events—she even has time to briefly empathize with the Idirans before a child manages to upset her with a callous comment on the outcome of the conflict (he believes the Idirans will win; 274–275). Most of all, she worries about Balveda:
She had stuck her neck out by insisting that Vavatch was the most likely place, and that the woman agent Balveda should be one of those to go there, and now it had all come true and she realised it wasn’t really her neck she had stuck out at all. It was Balveda’s [272].
Fal ’Ngeestra is as good-hearted and decent a human being as any of us are likely to meet either side of a work of fiction, but for all that, she is Death at the chessboard. Her decisions, whose consequences she never pays because, precious as she is, she’s kept several thousand light-years away from the fighting, will spell doom for a lot of people, which eats away at her. Fal knows she’s sending them to their death for the same reason she knew that Horza would be in Vavatch—she’s a Referer. She can also see, much as she wishes things were otherwise, that she’ll never get to meet Balveda, and that the Special circumstances agent won’t survive the war. Fal also sees Horza’s death, at least in the sense that, when she tries to zero in on an image of him, she can’t do it—“The Changer did not seem real” (273). Horza, whose calling it is to take on the faces of others, doesn’t seem to have a face of his own—that is to say, he doesn’t have an identity. He is, after a fashion, already dead because there doesn’t seem to be a set of core beliefs inside him to hold on to, or at least nothing more completely formed than his ideological hostility toward the Culture. This lack of foundation returns to haunt Horza more than once in the novel—most notably during Kraiklyn’s game of Damage, when Horza literally loses his sense of self for a few moments (203–206), and in a dream while onboard the CAT on its way to Schar’s World, when two ghostly, cloaked figures come for him and, after questioning his lack of beliefs, take his name from his head (296–297).
Finally, the Clear Air Turbulence gets to the edge of the Quiet Barrier, where it stops to ask the Dra’Azon permission to pass. “YOU MAY ENTER. THERE IS DEATH HERE. BE WARNED,” a titan voice tells the Free Company, which now includes the drone Unaha-Closp and Balveda, whom Horza has spared (295). He does not heed the warning, however, and for the last time, everything turns to ash. Once on Schar’s World and inside the tunnels of the Command System, Horza and his companions find the whole Changer complement murdered, including Horza’s former lover. The remnants of the Idiran attempt to rush Schar’s World in the wake of the Mind’s escape—a few full-grown Idiran warriors and a number of Medjel—had crash-landed not very far from the Command System, and after a deadly march in the miserable cold, which had accounted for yet more among them, had reached the base. Once there, they’d killed all the Changers for no particular reason other than their contempt for anyone not Idiran, after which they’d begun hunting the Mind (371–374). When the Free Company comes within range, the Idirans attack them too (346–352), and once again the action devolves into a chaos of death and accident and capture and disaster, at the end of which Balveda recovers the Mind, now even more badly wounded than before, the equally badly damaged drone, and Horza’s dying body. Everyone else, human and Idiran and Medjel, has died, including Yalson, who at the last moment sacrificed her life and that of the child in her womb—hers and Horza’s—to save the Mind from Idiran fire.9
The novel proper ends with Horza’s death under a starlit sky. After the one remaining Idiran soldier had used Unaha-Closp’s body-case as a battering ram against his skull (438),10 he’d never regained consciousness, and Balveda simply witnesses a letting go, a final release of his already slackened facial features indicating the departure of consciousness, forever. At the end, the Changer looks like a concoction of the bits of all those he’d impersonated during his life, and at the same time like nobody at all. His is a double death—a cessation of the biological processes of his life and an annihilation of the memory of it, because his life was either a blank or a shadow existence, subsumed and absorbed in those of the people he’d imitated (445–446).11
Phlebas is gone, and so is his quest. His allies, whom he’d been able to fool himself into seeing as honorable while he only had Xoralundra to deal with, are revealed to be nothing more than a gang of xenophobic bullies, cruel without reason and violent without point. There is no decency in Xoxarle, the Free Company’s temporary prisoner and main interlocutor in the hundred or so final pages of the novel. He killed the Changers on Schar’s World because they weren’t Idiran, and murdered everyone in the Free Company except Balveda and the drone despite being told—with proof—that Horza was his ally. “Fuck your animal soul,” Xoxarle tells Horza at one point (359), in a sentence whose simplicity perfectly captures the Idiran attitude toward everyone who isn’t them. The only mercy Horza receives comes from Yalson and Balveda, who are essentially Culture humans, and from Unaha-Closp, who helps him and tries to save his life despite Horza’s contempt for its machine being (315).
For once, Fal ’Ngeestra can’t help us see the details of what’s coming. State of play: three, wedged between the chapters set on Schar’s World, sees her back on top of a mountain, leg mostly healed and head clear of extraneous thoughts as she enters a meditative trance that she hopes will yield some insight into what might be happening. However, perhaps because she stands in the same freeze-dried water that buries Horza/Phlebas and everyone else inside the Command System, the insight the trance yields consists not of foresight concerning the Free Company’s fate (although she does know that Horza will die), but rather of an appreciation of the Idirans’ philosophical position with respect to the Culture’s. Both societies were born out of trauma: the Culture is, in Fal’s thoughts, a “mongrel race,” the end result of a “rowdy upbringing full of greedy, short-sighted empires and cruel, wasteful diasporas,” while the Idirans, originally a peaceful race of meditative creatures, had found themselves invaded thousands of years before the events in the novel, “pawns in somebody else’s squalid imperialism” (333). But while the Idirans, pure and unique in their god’s eyes even under their conquerors’ repressive regime, favorite even in defeat, only learned the wisdom of preemptive brutality and neverending aggressiveness, the Culture, spatchcocked together out of myriad parts, drew from its beginnings the conclusion that the universe doesn’t care, and that the meaning of one’s life is ultimately shaped by one’s own actions. We make our meanings as we go:
Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists…. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are [336].
In its fundamental underpinnings, this notion isn’t at all far from Slater’s philosophy of Ethical Hedonism in Walking on Glass; but while Slater is a liar who doesn’t practice as an individual what he preaches in his public statements, Fal ’Ngeestra is citizen of a society expressly built on the pervasive observation of Ethical Hedonism. This is a galaxy without gods, and there’s no doubt that, within Consider Phlebas’ internal economy, the Idirans are worshipping at an empty altar; Banks makes this point before the novel’s beginning through the use of an epigraphic passage from the Koran—“Idolatry is worse than carnage”—and continues to make it through his description of the island cannibals’ inane, self-harming ritualistic practices. The only reason why the Idirans are what they are is that they decided, in the wake of their suffering, to become the same thing as their long-ago oppressors: religious zealots excused in their behavior by a self-concocted belief system. Their very expansionist drive is described as a jihad in Phlebas (455).
But it doesn’t have to be this way. If space is cold and dead, technology can make it warm and alive. If the universe doesn’t care, we can do so ourselves through an essentially altruistic system of ethics. If flesh-sentients are intrinsically less capable of developing this system of ethics than machine intelligence, then the distant descendants of the first self-aware AIs to which we gave birth will take over the running of our society and leave us free to enjoy ourselves without doing harm to others. If the only godlike beings are self-upgraded sentients originally born out of the same muck as everyone else, the implication is that it is indeed possible for us to be better than we once were. And if one among the thousands of races in the galaxy grows cancerous, swallowing other civilizations and digesting them to make them exactly like it (ironically, the Idirans are, in their Von-Neumann-machine brand of single-mindedness, more machine-like than the Culture), then we can choose to intervene.
The ethics of intervention and the final outcome of the war constitute the subject of Consider Phlebas’ final part: the Appendices, the Dramatic Personae, and the Epilogue. Written from the point of view of the Culture’s people, both its flesh and its machine citizens, and from a relatively distant future, these three sections telescope us readers away from the novel’s ground zero and, going straight through Fal ’Ngeestra’s more refined viewpoint as well, slingshot us up and out into galactic history (Fal herself is listed among the dramatis personae). For the first and only time in Phlebas, we get the space-opera view of the world, the action on D-Day from a plane flying high above the beaches. But it’s a recording. The beaches are empty now, and there’s nothing left to do but retrace the steps. It’s all in the past. Also, as we should know by now, the territory looks nothing like the maps had led us to believe it would.
As Fal had correctly surmised, Balveda does not survive Schar’s World—not really. She lives through the end of the novel and goes on to fight far and wide across the expanse of the war. At the end of the conflict more than forty years later (462), most of her friends have died, and her own mind is still on Schar’s World, haunted by nightmares of dark tunnels. Eventually, unable to find peace, Balveda commits suicide (465). The other Culture survivors, both of the Command system and of the war, fare somewhat better, although everyone bears scars (466–467). Xoralundra, for his part, survives the GCU’s attack and continues fighting in the war until his death in battle towards its end (465). The Command System on Schar’s World, when the Culture finally goes back to it after the conflict, looks as if nothing ever happened there—with the exception of the debris and the bodies of the dead, which the Dra’Azon bury deep under the ice. At the bottom of the hyper-compressed pile of bodies and equipment lies a book, its first page open, and the story it tells begins with the line “The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two…” (467).
For Horza’s people, on the other hand, there is only an epitaph: the Changers do not survive the conflict. They die to the last of their species, and the tides of war carry them away and into oblivion (467).
The final assessment of the origin, causes, and nature of the war rests in the hand of a group of Culture historians. The brief extracts from their pseudotextual Short History of the Idiran War gives the conflict an overview that, in its turn, opens up a fundamental window into the soul of the Culture as a collective. The Culture’s post-scarcity industrial, technological, and scientific means, we read in the excerpts, put it “beyond considerations of wealth or empire … [it] had no need to colonise, exploit or enslave.” The one need its people do have that cannot be satisfied from within the Culture itself is “the urge not to feel useless”:
The Culture’s sole justification for the relatively unworried, hedonistic life its population enjoyed was its good works; the secular evangelism of the Contact section, not simply finding, cataloguing, investigating, and analysing other, less advanced civilisations but—where the circumstances appeared to Contact to justify so doing—actually interfering (overtly or covertly) in the historical processes of those other cultures…. Contact—and therefore the Culture—could prove statistically that such careful and benign use of [its resources] did work, in the sense that the techniques it had developed to influence a civilisation’s progress did significantly improve the quality of life of its members, without harming that society as a whole by its very contact with a more advanced culture [451–452].
By virtue of its moral convictions, when the Idiran Empire’s war-machine clanks into high gear, aimed at every civilization in its path, the Culture finds itself threatened not physically with destruction of territory and annihilation of life, but morally and ethically “with something more important: the loss of its purpose and that clarity of conscience; the destruction of its spirit; the surrender of its soul.” Faced with such prospects, and however reluctant to employ military force, the Culture girdles itself for war, which in the fullness of time it wins decisively (452).
Thus the Culture scholars, who write the history of the Idiran War from the point of view of the winners, which is the only viewpoint we usually get. But this pretend-historical overview comes at the end of a novel that showcases exactly what kind of values the other viewpoint held dear and exactly what they would have meant had it come out on top, and Banks’ tricking us into initially supporting the bad side out of simple genre-based expectations, a ploy reminiscent of those Fredric Brown used to favor in such stories as “Sentry” (1954), deftly removes the ground from under our feet, leaving us in the uncomfortable position of having to face the questionable nature of assumptions we can no longer safely retract. By and large, space opera had always been forgiven its unexamined biases; it was fun and colorful, and provided it didn’t try to think of itself as a serious literary mode, we left it alone to pretend that the hierarchies and the scarcity economies of the past could and should survive far along into the deep future and out among the vastnesses of space. But Banks wasn’t having it; he’d learned too much from too many people, and he knew what he wanted. It’s unlikely that Consider Phlebas will ever be regarded as among his best works, but warts and all, it remains a crucially valuable book, and for reasons that go beyond its simple status as the first Culture novel to see print. First of all, it’s worth considering that, despite the vast amount of space the book dedicates to largely aimless freewheeling, the plot does come home to us in the end. The thread of story, frayed thought it is at the conclusion, still connects us to the basic message—to wit, that post-scarcity economies, machine-ruled collectives, and hedonistic techno-hippie commonwealths are not only not necessarily evil, but they can also be merged into a single society embodying all their traits and broadcasting them into an environment within which they can be made to work for the owners and the owned alike, until there’s no difference between the two categories because owning loses its scarcity economy-derived meaning. To this day, the thought retains its revolutionary taste.
Secondly, and in connection to the first point, Consider Phlebas frees us from the obligation to obey the ubiquitous space-opera notion of the Great Human Hegira from Mother Earth of Long Ago, and that in the very same pages where the story seems to pay ultimate homage to it. Ken MacLeod explains:
A galaxy filled with humans is another Golden-Age premise. What makes this book radically different from its ancestors is that the humans are not descended from us. It is completely given, within the story, that evolution has converged on the human form—close enough for sexual attraction, different enough to be mutually sterile—on countless worlds. No explanation is proffered, and no explanation could be remotely plausible. This is what is given, but consider what is taken. With one clean cut, all the tedious backstory of human expansion—generation ships, faster-than-light-travel, conquest and Empire—is gone. There is no need for an imagined future between her and there [2003a, 1].
Nor is there an actual future, per se. As always, the clues are there, but subtle enough that we may miss them altogether: the passages from A Short History of the Idiran War, we find out on their title page, are an “English language/Christian calendar version, original text AD 2110, unaltered,” and together with a number of other materials, they form “an independent, non-commissioned but Contact-approved Earth Extro-Information Pack” (447). Accordingly, the timeline of the Idiran War is given in Earth years throughout, at which point we discover how truly belated our apprehension of these events is. The first skirmishes between the Culture and the Idirans began in 1267 and continued in infrequent bursts until 1327, when the war proper started. This main phase lasted more than forty years, ending in space in 1367 and planetside in 1375—a total of slightly more than one hundred years of war across expanses that beggar the imagination while we on Earth were busy with the Crusades, the bubonic plague, the beginnings of our own laughably tiny century-long war, and God’s plans for our self-evidently key role in shaping creation (461–462).
We’ve been contacted, in other words. Sometime in our future (the book was originally published in 2110, but when was it translated into English and distributed on Earth?), the Culture reveals itself to us and attempts, like they’ve done with countless techno-barbarian societies before, to teach us about the real state of things out there. Their hope is that we can be persuaded to be nicer to everyone else than we’ve thus far been to each other. Had Banks not inserted these tidbits of information, we bunch of unreconstructed anthropocentrists might have lulled ourselves into the comforting notion that the Culture exists in the distant future, and that, since it’s largely a pan-human civilization, we plucky Earthlings might have had something to do with its formation—thus space opera again, in all its classic self-satisfaction.
But we didn’t; the Culture exists right here, right now, and before as well. We’ve missed the party, and worse, we don’t get to wrap ourselves in the flag of utopia. We had nothing to do with its birth, and if anything, we have a lot more in common with the Idirans. The punch to the gut is considerable, and more far-reaching in its implications than the space operas that had inspired Banks had been. The New Wave writers, as well as those that began publishing around the time Banks did, still retained the notion of Earth as the starting point (even when it’s only a backwater, as is the case in The Centauri Device), and of our free-market economy as the engine that powers the expansion into the galaxy—a key example in this case would be C. J. Cherry’s beautiful Downbelow Station (1982). As we have seen, those novels were already divorcing themselves from the Golden-Age template of space opera, and to put them on the same level as the stories of “Doc” Smith, Edmond Hamilton, and A. E. Van Vogt would be doing them something of a disservice. Some remnants of the Fable still remained, however, and Banks decided to get rid of them as well—and just in case we’d missed the point, he had an as-yet unpublished story ready in which the Culture comes to Earth to take a long, hard look at us.
Finally, after thirteen years of mulling over the Culture and its adventures, Banks had broken through. Consider Phlebas was out, and whatever its flaws, it had become a commercial success. Banks would spend the next few years redrafting, correcting, and updating the Culture stories he had already written but been unable to publish at the time of completion. It was time to expand the envelope.