4thace@books.theunseen.city reviewed Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
Not on the required reading list for the books of Iain M. Banks
3 stars
This was the first of this author's Culture science fiction books, introducing his ideas about artificial ship minds, drones, weird habitats, and aliens in conflict. I felt like he was still trying things out as a genre writer, learning to portray convincing non-human voices, describing alien settings, and so forth. It is a long story with many substantial digressions more or less unrelated to the main object of the protagonist's quest, some of which I liked but mostly found they posed problems with pacing. I read this whole thing in fifteen to twenty minute sessions over nearly three months. I think that I would have been unhappy trying to finish it in just a few marathon sessions. The prose is mostly serviceable but sometimes gets overwhelmed when the plot runs to the absurd. At one point the ship the characters are on punches its way out of a much larger …
This was the first of this author's Culture science fiction books, introducing his ideas about artificial ship minds, drones, weird habitats, and aliens in conflict. I felt like he was still trying things out as a genre writer, learning to portray convincing non-human voices, describing alien settings, and so forth. It is a long story with many substantial digressions more or less unrelated to the main object of the protagonist's quest, some of which I liked but mostly found they posed problems with pacing. I read this whole thing in fifteen to twenty minute sessions over nearly three months. I think that I would have been unhappy trying to finish it in just a few marathon sessions. The prose is mostly serviceable but sometimes gets overwhelmed when the plot runs to the absurd. At one point the ship the characters are on punches its way out of a much larger vessel, getting away scot-free in a way that I thought pretty ridiculous. One experiment that I think worked better than expected was the way he wrote the personality of the drone Unaha-Closp in a way that was fairly convincing.
The author's later books show him much surer of his craft, with characters more fully realized and with interesting philosophical implications taken seriously. Since the Culture books are all standalone, this book isn't required to understand any of the later ones in the series.
