phlebas.html

tldr; I continue to think that this first book is not the place to start. The prose is a bit flat, the plot a bit neat (now you are in space. now you have a ship). It's punishing: filled with suffering and pointlessness as a foil. Start with <i>Use of Weapons</i> or (for the bold) <i>Excession</i>. But come back and read it last.

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<spoiler>
Despite being a bit rough in prose and plot, it has the most focussed treatment of the series' key tension: what does the Absolute Liberal do with their enemies? How do we live with people who don't want freedom, tolerance, management, intervention, mutually advantageous subalterity?

Banks chooses to introduce his utopia through the eyes of its enemy. He chooses to introduce his world through a repudiation of space opera: there is a cool giant war, but no character is doing anything central to it - certainly not commanding it. There's only one brief space battle. The space pirates do terrible things and die (most of them) for no reason. 

The protagonist is eloquent about the danger of seding your civilisation to machines, of taking "the chance out of life", of lacking strong evaluation, of freedom, of At Least It's An Ethos. He is <a href="https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/taylor-charles-1931/v-1/sections/strong-evaluation-and-the-self">Charles Taylor</a> with a plasma rifle, and no more convincing for it. He is also a rare example of a sympathetic moral <a href="https://thomashurka.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/nietzsche-perfectionist.pdf">perfectionist</a>: he is mostly unconcerned with suffering per se, unconcerned with killing per se, as long as it lets "life" develop and no hegemon form. Despite all the civilizations the Idirans have either throttled or destroyed, Horza fights, lies, and disgraces for them because "<i>they are on the side of life… boring, old-fashioned, biological life; small, fallible and short-sighted, God knows, but real life... The individual is the fruit of mistake; therefore only the process has validity</i>”. Nietzsche in space.

<blockquote><i>They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement... He could not believe that ordinary people in the Culture really wanted the war, no matter how they had voted. They had their communist Utopia. They were soft and pampered and indulged, and the Contact section’s evangelical materialism provided their conscience-salving good works. What more could they want? The war had to be the Mind’s idea; it was part of their clinical drive to clean up the galaxy, make it run on nice, efficient lines, without waste, injustice or suffering. The fools in the Culture couldn’t see that one day the Minds would start thinking how wasteful and inefficient the humans in the Culture themselves were.</i></blockquote>

<blockquote><i>"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, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?”</i></blockquote>


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But though Banks does have real concerns about hegemony, <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8383242/">severance</a>, and meaninglessness, which persist through the rest of the series - though all of the Culture individuals depicted here are a little annoying, a little chirpy, a little do-goodery - really the whole structure of this book is a masked argument for the Culture:

* Most of the book is thus about how terrible life is without a god: without the Culture. Predatory, random, desperate, poor. Despite his power and luck, the protagonist Horza is doomed from the beginning (Phlebas, doomed to drown and serve as a lesson to others), a corpse to contemplate, not a model to emulate. Despite appearances, he is walking away from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas">Omelas</a>, and is equally blind. 
* The contract of the genre (the reader automatically aligning with the competent protagonist) is subverted, the ending (the protagonist revealed to be fundamentally mistaken, betrayed, and perishing) punishes this.
* Horza accidentally delivers the Macguffin to his enemy.
* Horza does terrible things (murder, body horror, abandonment of the Eater innocents), all for nought.
* Horza is a bioengineered superhuman who modifies himself extensively, i.e. already most of the way to the Culture.
* A being with no fixed self is the worst champion of authentic natural individualism. 
* The Idirans are initially shown as militaristic but honourable. But their fanatical, murderous chauvinism is the actual alternative to losing one's purpose to machines. and who regard him as a disposable inferior. The only Idiran trooper shown in action is very intelligent but also animalistic,  i.e. evil. 
* He sides with anyone resisting the Culture, because the Culture is "<i>a cancer with no “off” switch in its genetic composition, the Culture would go on expanding for as long as it was allowed to</i>". But he ends up supporting the hard literal expansionists because he finds soft neocolonial influence icky.
* Banks strains to think of a way that the humans can be relevant, and does come up with the Referers, the probably-just-lucky superforecasters who the Minds obsessively consult.
* The Culture, who are losing the war throughout this book, are actually so dominant that <a href="https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/imperialism/readings/agricola.html">like Tacitus</a> they can humanise and <a href="https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Bora_Horza_Gobuchul_(Mind)">internalise</a> their enemies.
* The book begins with the Culture agent Balveda pleading for his, her enemy's, life. And through the long tedious endgame when he takes her captive, she is in fact secretly armed the whole time. She thus <i>chooses</i> to let Horza roam the endgame, chooses to sympathise with him and tries to save him. And like her society, she triumphs despite or because of her softness. You believe you are free, you believe you can do something, but in the face of superintelligence you are not. (Actually at this point in the timeline the Culture are potent but not omnipotent, but Horza's position can be taken as an omen of this later potency.)
* And after death he suffers the ultimate indignity: his critique is <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/DiscoElysium/comments/1hbqdfo/capital_has_the_ability_to_subsume_all_critiques/">nominally</a> internalised but without reform.

And yet for all his pathetic errors and ironies, he is not totally wrong. <a href="https://www.gleech.org/culture">There is</a> something missing, something dead about the Culture. Rather than get at Banks for his lack of imagination, this is my preferred explanation for why its humans choose to die after a mere 400 years of life, fun half-life. 

And so <i>Consider Phlebas</i> is much cleverer than I realised on the first read. Humans are not satisfied by fictional utopias; you have to <a href="https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/on-the-ones-who-walk-away-from-omelas">trick</a> us into accepting them. Not that Banks accepted his own.

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The writing gets better after this entry. I explain this as him being initially too enamoured of his own world-building (consider the pages and pages of description of the Schar's World bunker train system, or the never-revisited psychic card-game Damage). Also too cinematic rather than literary.

The climactic scene is thus more than 100 pages, and poorly paced, and with only one source of tension (i.e. Xoxarle clearly scheming to escape and murder everyone for 60 pages).

</spoiler>


<a href="https://www.gleech.org/culture">See also my series review</a>.