by Iain M. Banks
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Product Description
"Dazzlingly original." -- Daily Mail
"Gripping, touching and funny." -- TLS
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender.
Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 A universe of cliches, 2008-10-11
I bought this book based on the glowing reviews found on Amazon. I'll admit it's not entirely unreadable and for enthusiasts of military scifi, there are some things to like here (the cover art, for example, is awesome). However, taken as a whole this novel was far more irritating than engrossing.
The small annoyances: the back cover and the prologue inform us that the central conflict of this novel will be two interstellar nations racing to recover a powerful AI computer that's stranded on an off-limits planet. In the second chapter, the main character learns this as well, and the novel is set up. Promising, eh? Three pages later, our protagonist is thrown completely off the trail and spends an eternity doing things unrelated to the central plot. Meanwhile, the dialogue is awkward and every page has at least one poorly constructed sentence.
The real annoyances, however, are the clichés. Chapter 1 intends to introduce us to the main character in a dramatic prison rescue... straight out of any spy, romance, scifi or western novel you may have read. The primary aliens are giant monsters (who would have guessed that?), with 3-legs instead of two. They're also really loud. In chapter 2, we see the primary character make an escape from a starship under attack that's suspiciously similar to the opening scene of Star Wars episode IV. In Chapter 3, our main character is in a fight to the death to join a crew of pirates. Seriously, points for good taste apply, but I'd still prefer that you didn't rip off Alexandre Dumas and `The Count of Monte Cristo." The Captain of the pirates is a bit of a rogue who won his ship in a game of chance. The ship itself is a beaten down frigate, but the Captain swears that it's the fastest ship in this part of the galaxy. Some of his crewmates are basically humanoid, but covered in light brown fur. Honestly. Continuing the Star Wars motif, we soon see some ground combat (involving laser weapons) in a Temple on a planet looking suspiciously like Yavin IV. I could go on, but you get the point.
It's not entirely awful, and if you're a true scifi junkie you'll get your money's worth. For the non-enthusiasts who just want a decent story with some cool space battles, I strongly recommend Scott Westerfeld's "Succession" novels.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Good Read, 2008-09-12
This is the beginnings of great scifi series. I will recommend this book to anyone who likes the space opera scifi. It was an interesting story, and made me want more when it was done.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Big ideas, fun beginning, horrible 2nd half, 2008-09-10
I bought this book because I was intrigued by "Matter" and wanted to get in on the storyline before it, so I bought this instead. I was excited by the ideas: Minds, sentient AIs that are highly autonomous and the real leaders of the human empire, and huge space constructs: Rings, like in Niven's "Ringworld," and spheres that can encompass a sun and use 100% of the solar energy, among other things.
Unfortunately, after an exciting beginning and a strong entry into the plot, the book seems to completely lose direction and gets mired in small side-adventures that only occasionally flesh out the universe or add anything. The main character and his opponent from the other side of the battle have to work together for much of the end of the book, and the woman's actions make no sense, and her motivations are completely opaque. A hardened spy and assassin who cries and gets depressed while they search endlessly through boring tunnels? Give me a break!
I came very close to skipping whole chapters later in the book, when the characters do nothing at all except whine at each other for dozens of pages.
Other books do a better job of exploring the ideas presented here, without the frequent "dead air" chapters.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Flawed sience fiction, 2008-09-09
I'm dissapointed... :(
I relied on the glowing reviews here on amazon for my first SF novel, but instead of a thought provoking tale I got mundane social struggles in a Sci-Fi setting. This book is about war, the people that fight it and their motivations, not about any of the things that make sci-fi interesting for me.
In the end the story was quite standard with romance and lots of action, but barely any twists to speak of and even though the ending was unconventional, it was expected long before getting there.
Overall I'm unimpressed and I'm hoping "Player of games" (which I got with this one) is a lot better.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
A Taste of Culture!, 2008-08-16
The Culture is a civilization of sentient beings, both organic and "machine" (think artificial intelligence with all the rights of intelligent life forms) based. There is no need for money except to use in less evolved cultures. The Culture doesn't even have goals of planetary conquest. They just build enormous artificial habitats in space.
But the Culture does pay attention to those other civilizations that can upset the status quo, or keep the Culture from its path to enlightenment.
In Consider Phlebas, author Iain Banks follows one small chapter in the decades long battle between the Culture and the Idirans. The Idirans have been very successful in expanding their sphere of influence, and the godless Culture is a dangerous irritant. Religious passion is an alien concept to the Culture, and their Contact branch, and the Special Circumstances division within Contact, must fight a war.
As a story within this battle, a Mind (AI) is stranded on a peculiar planet (protected for reasons unknown by a vastly powerful entity that allows no armies to approach). A team of Changers has had a historical presence on this planet, and the Idirans have one Changer loyal to them (Horza) who used to be stationed there. His mission is to return to the planet, locate the Mind (with its secrets of the Culture's technologies), and turn it over to the Idirans. The Culture simply wants to rescue one of their own, the Mind. They are confident in an eventual outcome of the war in their favor, but they recognize that the capture of the Mind will delay success for a few years. They are very analytic.
This book is the tale of Horza and his extraordinary adventures in getting to the planet hiding the Mind, and finding the Mind on the planet. The uniqueness of AI sentience, the Culture's technologies, the physiology of the Changers, and determination of the Idirans, all make this an intriguing tale and a unique sci-fi offering. Banks makes Horza a horrible person who seems to care not a wit who is hurt or killed (usually killed) in his search for the Mind, while trying to make the reader sympathetic to his life and loves. I'm not sure this works. However, what does work is the introduction of the Culture. This is the second Culture book that I've read (the first was The Player of Games). I was told they don't have to be read in any particular order, and that certainly is bearing true.
The Culture series is an exciting addition to the sci-fi literature. You'll finish that last page, close the cover, and find yourself just sitting and thinking. Isn't that what great sci-fi is all about?
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