Shapeshifting: An interesting, relatively "hard" example: Horza's species was genetically engineered to have a limited (but still useful, for a spy) ability to shape-shift. Horza can take on the appearance of another person, and eventually replace them. This is a complex, lengthy process in which the physical structure of Horza's face and body are gradually altered by his specialized biology. Shapeshifter Baggage and other common shape-shifting tropes are averted. 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 Empathaur in its Sadness Season.” Ban on A.I.: the Idirans are against AI for religious reasons and use limiting devices to ensure their computers don't become sentient. Horza is an Idiran spy, and his unfortunate state is a consequence of being caught impersonating a high-ranking government official—he murdered the original, which is apparently Horza’s standard operating procedure—on a Culture-allied planet called Sorpen. (Sorpen is run by a “gerontocracy”, a ruling body entirely composed of elderly men. Typical Banks: this interesting idea, which might have formed a setting for a whole other novel, is used, noted, and never dealt with again.) Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Balveda's escape from the Hand of God. Made more awesome by how matter-of-fact she is about it.

Safe aboard the Idirian ship The Hand of God 137 (the 137 th ship to bear that name, Idiran ship-naming conventions being in strong contrast to the Culture’s predilection for jokes and irony), Horza gets cleaned up and learns his mission. Before he went to work for the Idirans, he was a caretaker on Schar’s World, and as such, he may be able to go there and retrieve the Culture Mind hiding there. Not anyone can just pop in on this planet; it’s surrounded by a “Dra’Azon Quiet Barrier” (precisely what this means is not revealed at this point), which will damage or destroy anything else that tries to land there. Horza agrees, and in classic One Last Job fashion, his condition is that once it’s done, he—and an old friend who, to the best of his knowledge, still lives on Schar’s World—will be given the resources to escape the war altogether. Beautifully illustrated by Ella Beech, this magical Folio Society edition of Clement C. Moore’s The Night Before Christmas will delight readers of all ages.Phlebas the Phoenician, a character from T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, part IV and Dans le Restaurant. Consider Phlebas, first published in 1987, is a space opera novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks. It is the first in a series of novels about an interstellar post-scarcity society called the Culture. We begin with a literal bang. A newly manufactured, still unnamed Mind—a Culture artificial intelligence, embodied in a fantastically dense ovoid and contained in a hastily jury-rigged ship—is jettisoned by its factory ship shortly before that ship’s utter destruction. Name your favorite story of a desperate parent making one last bid for their child’s safety—notwithstanding that these are artificial intelligences, that’s what’s going on here. It’s almost for naught, as the Mind’s ship is cornered by a hostile fleet, but it escapes through a complicated bit of four-dimensional jiggery-pokery, to take refuge on a planet called Schar’s World, “near the region of barren space between two galactic strands called the Sullen Gulf … one of the forbidden Planets of the Dead”. We don’t know yet what this means, precisely, but it’s not hard to guess: both the Culture and the Idirans will be interested in getting hold of this Mind, and it will not be easy. Chapter 1: Sorpen

Banks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1992. However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the For Iain M. Banks is a pseudonym of Iain Banks which he used to publish his Science Fiction. There's a big war going on in that novel, and various individuals and groups manage to influence its outcome. But even being able to do that doesn't ultimately change things very much. At the book's end, I have a section pointing this out by telling what happened after the war, which was an attempt to pose the question, 'What was it all for?' I guess this approach has to do with my reacting to the cliché of SF's 'lone protagonist.' You know, this idea that a single individual can determine the direction of entire civilizations. It's very, very hard for a lone person to do that. And it sets you thinking what difference, if any, it would have made if Jesus Christ, or Karl Marx or Charles Darwin had never been. We just don't know. [2] Literary significance and criticism [ edit ]urn:lcp:considerphlebas00bank:epub:8ff4460b-e321-4098-bfe6-a382ac656e93 Extramarc University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (PZ) Foldoutcount 0 Identifier considerphlebas00bank Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t56d6pj59 Isbn 0333441389 His latest book was a science fiction (SF) novel in the Culture series, called The Hydrogen Sonata, published in 2012. The Idirans possibly appeal less to the reader being of terrifying and nonhumanoid appearance. 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. Once you really get to know the Idirans things don't improve over the first impressions. Perhaps the most interesting authorial decision in Consider Phlebas is that the protagonist, Bora Horza Gobuchul, is a Changer (a shape-shifter) who chooses to side with the Idirans, despite the fact that they are religious extremists who don’t mind exterminating other species, because Horza despises the Minds of the Culture, choosing the “side of life” instead. Although he freely admits that the Culture has never done him wrong, he categorically hates what he considers a decadent and arrogant civilization that considers its lifestyle and values superior to all others. Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.”

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. Sympathetic P.O.V.: Horza hates the Culture and, for example, while the later novels draw humor from the humorous/macabre names the Culture gives to ships, he's disgusted by this apparent display of the Culture's cavalier attitude towards something as grim as interstellar warfare. It’s not clear if Banks actually anticipated that his CULTURE series would eventually extend to 10 volumes, and mark him as a very literary and subversive practitioner of the SF genre, one who could be popular with a certain devoted fan base while at the same time thumbing his nose at the more low-brow wish-fulfillment aspects of space opera. Mostly likely he didn’t. All for Nothing: Every damn escapade that Horza gets his team involved in ends in disaster. Yet, he still won't quit while he's behind.

Every bit as ambitious and prophetic as the film that shared its inception, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey remains a towering science-fiction classic. This Folio Society edition sees it illustrated for the first time. Gerald Jonas in The New York Times praised the sophistication of Banks' writing and said "he asks readers to hold in mind a great many pieces of a vast puzzle while waiting for a pattern to emerge". Jonas suggested the ending might appear to rely too much on a deus ex machina. [2] Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2011-02-11 18:06:39 Bookplateleaf 0003 Boxid IA138124 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City London Comment Removing Scanfee from Billable Books scanned before June 2011 which appear to have manually set scanfees Donor So in the end I would say that Consider Phlebas is not a complete success or failure as a novel, but its primary importance is in establishing the template and introduction to the fantastic and limitless potential of the CULTURE universe. I think the next two novels in the series, The Player of Games (1988) and Use of Weapons (1990), are frequently considered some of the best entries in the series, but I’ve also heard that Banks actually got better the further he refined his understanding of his own universe, so that later books in the series are also very good. 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. So it’s quite unusual for an author like Banks to become so popular, but that’s a really good thing in my opinion. Mary on Beyond The Exorcist: Five Movies That Explore Possession From Non-Christian Perspectives 3 hours ago