Rating: 
Summary: One of the best space operas...
Review: Bora Horza Gobochul is a pawn in an interstellar struggle between the religious and fanatical three-legged race of the Idirians and the libertarian humanoids hedonists of the "Culture"; the Culture is falling back and mobilizing for war as the Idirian sphere of influence expands.
Horza hates the Culture: he sees it as dead, humanoids kept as little more than pets by the AI entities that they built that now guide and control the Culture. The Idirians--noxious as they are--are at least on the side of life, Horza thinks. He sets off on a mission to achieve a singular intelligence coup for the Idirians, passes through many perils (of which the most interesting is the Culture's secret agent Peristock Balveda). It is a brutal novel. But it is the best space opera I have read in years.
Rating: 
Summary: Good space-opera romp, but not up to Bank's usual qaulity.
Review: Having read much of Iain Banks, I was looking foreward to Consider Phlebas (CP).
However, I found the book disappointing for such a talented writer. CP reads more like an epic space-opera -- warring mega-empires, flashy technology, politics, alien traitors, awesome space battles and a string of heroics. All very fun, but not intellectually fulfilling.
Although well written, CP lacks the deep issues that normally haunts Banks other works. In "State Of The Art," Banks explores dozens of issues in very few pages, condensing ideas and forcing the reader to re-evaluate his or her own views of society, capitalism, communism, war and "humanity." It is a pity that this classic Banks style was lacking in CP.
That said, CP is certainly a good read for any sci-fi fan. As ever, Banks' characters virtually leap off the page and grab your eye-balls, and bounce them up and down for a while. The lead character, Horza, is perhaps the most unattractive, disagreeable, hero I've seen in a long time. His murder of a young mercenary as a way of gaining passage on a ship is the first sign that he will do anything to reach his goal - even though he does not know *why* he really wants to reach it. Even Michael Moorecock would be proud of Bank's hero.
Overall, I would recommend this book only to hardened sci-fi readers... but those of you who like a good space-opera, will LOVE this book
Rating:
Summary: A Bit Dated; Still a Good Read
Review: Compared to all the top notch SF out there, Consider Phlebas is middle of the road. But taken for what it is, it's pretty good. And what is it? A first SF novel by a talented writer, with seemingly irrelevant, but highly entertaining, set pieces that eventually lead up to a pretty good conclusion. The negative points of this book are well documented by other reviewers. The plot meanders. Characters disappear. Some of the ideas are too Star-Trekkie for me, e.g. warp speed and laser guns. But I don't mind a little hokieness and growing pains if the story is good. And this disjointed story is good enough for me. The last 200 pages are tightly focused, a lot of things happen, and we don't always like the results. It seems British writers are less dramatic and a little more realistic about what happens in their stories without looking like they are trying to score "cool" points. Like Mieville and Alastair Reynolds, Banks is always ready to smack you with an unforseen twist. I was fascinated by the powers of the main character, the Changer called Horza. Where did he come from? Is he human? What else can he do? The mystery is revealed slowly, but Horza is a worthwhile character. I was encouraged to read Banks' other SF books, but I wanted to start at his creative beginning. Good show.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting story, but lacks cohesion and moral tension
Review: I found it somewhat of a chore to finish this book.
The story follows the adventures of Horza, one of the last Changers, people who can alter their physical appearance to resemble others, possess intricate control over physiological processes, and have several built-in weapons, such as retractable poisoned fangs and the ability to produce poison and acid through their saliva or sweat glands.
Horza is an agent for the Idirans, a race of large, three-legged aliens who are at war with the Culture -- the most advanced segment of human civilization. Horza despises the Culture for their amoralistic over-reliance on machines and technology.
The Idirans dispatch Horza to retrieve a Mind -- essentially an extremely advanced AI created by the Culture to help them win the war -- that has crash-landed on an icy planet controlled by a fearsome, god-like alien power.
Horza's main adversary is an agent of the Culture's "Special Circumstances" unit, who is also charged with recovering the Mind. Although mortal adversaries, the two nonetheless develop grudging respect and even affection for each other.
This backstory and tension between the two main characters are the most compelling parts of the book, but they never really get the attention they deserve. Instead, Horza lurches from crisis to crisis, finding himself variously fighting for life aboard a mercenary vessel, locked in a chaotic laser battle in a temple, nearly devoured alive by a horrifying fat man grown to Jabba-the-Hutt-like proportions, and observing a deadly futuristic card game. These random incidents are entertaining and even gripping when considered alone. But as part of the same storyline they seem too disconnected from one another and I kept wondering how they were going to all tie together. They never do.
Only the final third or so of the book deals with the main mission to recover the Mind. This part is fairly fastpaced, and Banks deftly spools out a number of different threads before finally weaving them all back together for a dramatic finale, which is unfortunately diminished by not really being all that final.
Banks turns out competent, even inspired prose. Some reviewers have found his use of laser beams and hyperspace drives a bit trite, but c'mon, it was 1987, and he supplies enough twists and fresh interpretations to make those things interesting even today. The book's most horrifyingly imaginative parts -- the aforementioned fat man, who eats people alive with various sets of razor-sharp steel false teeth, the card game in which losing hands are punished by killing off a member of the player's team -- are also the best. Banks is certainly not lacking in the imagination department.
But while it may be the case that, as has been suggested in other reviews, Horza was written as a morally ambiguous character, even an anti-hero, we still learn too little about why, exactly, he hates the Culture and what makes their reliance on extremely advanced technology so reprehensible in his eyes. It seems we are supposed to view Horza as a true rogue, one who uses and discards other people for his own ends in the same way that he can discard his physical appearance. But he is also given to acts of great selflessness, good humor, and honor, severely undercutting this "bad guy" cred.
It is probable that this moral ambiguity -- in the portrayal of both Horza and the background war -- is the intent of the author, and is supposed to make the novel sophisticated and thought-provoking. But without a strong moral component to drive the tension, I was simply left wondering, as I read the final passages, why I should care about anything I had just read.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointed
Review: Considering the amount of praised heaped on this book and the Culture series from friends and the reviews here, I came away from this book disappointed. The most interesting parts: the great war, the Culture society, the AI Minds, were all held in the background while the protagonist and his random adventures were put up front. Which was fine and entertaining for an SF action novel, but nothing original and somewhat frustrating knowing that those interesting elements were ignored. There are many cool parts though, such as the Oribitals and the giant Culture ships, but focusing on a cult on an island and a laser fight in a temple was too mundane for my tastes. Perhaps other books in the series will more epic and less random action, but this one was a disappointment.
Rating:
Summary: A Bit Dated; Still a Good Read
Review: Compared to all the top notch SF out there, Consider Phlebas is middle of the road. But taken for what it is, it's pretty good. And what is it? A first SF novel by a talented writer, with seemingly irrelevant, but highly entertaining, set pieces that eventually lead up to a pretty good conclusion. The negative points of this book are well documented by other reviewers. The plot meanders. Characters disappear. Some of the ideas are too Star-Trekkie for me, e.g. warp speed and laser guns. But I don't mind a little hokieness and growing pains if the story is good. And this disjointed story is good enough for me. The last 200 pages are tightly focused, a lot of things happen, and we don't always like the results. It seems British writers are less dramatic and a little more realistic about what happens in their stories without looking like they are trying to score "cool" points. Like Mieville and Alastair Reynolds, Banks is always ready to smack you with an unforseen twist. I was fascinated by the powers of the main character, the Changer called Horza. Where did he come from? Is he human? What else can he do? The mystery is revealed slowly, but Horza is a worthwhile character. I was encouraged to read Banks' other SF books, but I wanted to start at his creative beginning. Good show.
Rating:
Summary: A stunningly real tale in an entirley imaginary realm
Review: I was turned onto the writing of Iain Banks by a friend of mine who is a brilliant biological scientist who works in the same dpeartment at the University as me. Banks is his favourite author and science-fiction, as for many other career scientists - myself included - his favourite genre. Scientists are notoriously hard to please when it comes to sci-fi, because we deal in the inner workings of the universe on a daily basis. We are hyper-critical of sci-fi in general, and most of us tend to agree on what is good sci-fi and what is utter drivel. While we get entranced by strange, futuristic worlds and weird non-human characters, we do not want a Star Trek-esque space soap-opera. So where does Iain Banks fit into this? Well, to put a fine point in it, his work is paper-bound flawlessness. The concepts buzzing through that man's head would sear the brain of many a lesser author and probably each and every reader out there. He is not one of those who makes up new words to try to convey a thought to us; rather, with a few deft sentences, he transforms the concept he sees into something which you can easily visualise and appreciate. The various locales of Consider Phlebas - and I'm not sure who/what a Phlebas is; the term comes from a line of a poem by TS ELiot, as I recall - are likewise mindblowing in concept; particularly the Vavatch Orbital which is pictured on the cover; and I'm pretty sure that's where the idea for the SpacePort in Disney's Treasure Planet film came from. Well, what about the story? Alternatively subtle and punch-in-the-mouth direct, exhilirating and depressing, humorous and bleak, it contains aspects of something for everyone. The main characters are exceptionally vividly detailed; character arcs are well-defined and never veer off course. The beauty of Banks' prose, though, lies in his disregard for sentiment; he very much conveys the idea of "oh, well, deal with it" when various characters meet their demise. In some cases, it kind of happens off-camera and you are left to deal with the aftermath; in others, it occurs on-camera, but there is not time to grieve. While the story itself builds at an incremental pace, I found myself reading the last 200 or so pages in a single sitting, desperate to reach the climax. Banks seems content for the most part to let his ideas pan out, and I got the impression that he was waiting for parts of the tale to arrive in his head so he could finish off that section before moving on with things. At times, it happens frustratingly slowly, but the wait is worth it. This is the only novel I know of to actually script a worthwhile car-chase scene (although it is in fact a space-ship chase) and manage to keep you hooked. Be advised, though, that Banks pulls no punches. His richly-textured characters, major and minor, are not necessarily icons of great beauty, or paragons of virtue. You get them warts and all; entirely real creations who go about their day-to-day basics like eating, sleeping and visiting the bathroom in all the gory details; almost like Big Brother on crack, if you know what I mean. At the end of it all, I was struck with a sense of awe, wonderment and bit of bittersweet satisfaction. The ending itself is epic and tragicomic; there will be aspects you don't like of it purely because it is so brutal. But all in all, an utterly compelling read. I'm told this is not the finest of Banks' work; but I did prefer it to The Player of Games, which I bought recently. Banks also writes regular fiction under the same name, but without the middle initial. To date, I have not read any of his non sci-fi material.
Rating:
Summary: Why why why????!?!?!?
Review: Why can you not order this book in the US???? It is absolutely boggling that such a masterwork of brilliant sci-fi would be unavailable in the US!! Are we really that dumb that there is not a market for intelligent SF like this here? Have we really become a nation of morons who only like to read Star Trek series books or dumbed-down books based on role-playing games? Surely if people will read William Gibson or Alstair Reynolds, they would love Iain Banks.... Please, please, please, someone publish this in the US..trust me, you'll make money on it. Meanwhile, we'll have to head on over to Amazon.UK and order. You'll end up paying around 15$ per book, shipping and handling included (if the pound stays about where it is now). Well worth it for insane over-the-top dark poetic beautiful space opera. Nothing else can touch it.
Rating:
Summary: It [wasn't bad], But it Won't Expand your Mind Either.
Review: Really it's 3.5 stars. I enjoyed the book, though it took me quite some time to get through it. I did find it episodic with gimmicks to keep the protagonist engaged. I have always wanted to read a sci fi novel with a secret agent bent to it so this was my wish. Horza is James Bond w/o the pannache. I tend to like my sci fi with great characterization and with some kind of philosphical message on the way of the world. This really had neither element to any great degree. It was a straight forward story with some not entirely successful proclaimations on humanity and the pursuit of perfection. Idirans were religious fanatics blind to anything but their own purpose. The culture basically were bored hedonites. One wonders what would have happened if the Idirans hadn't declared war. I guess the worst thing I can say about this book is that after I finished the last page, I didn't find myself thinking about it's implications at all.
| 
