Consider Phlebas

[psocoptera]

Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks, 1987, the first book of the Culture series. I kind of think of my reading as breaking down into four-ish categories: trying to stay on top of the wave, stuff trailing right behind the wave that I didn't quite get to in time, older stuff that comes up in conversation that I'd like to be familiar with, and obscure older stuff that nobody's likely to refer to, I would just enjoy it if I read it. (Oh, or five, reading along with my kids.) This was definitely type three - it had seemed for awhile like the Culture novels were the one SF series that came up most frequently that I'd never read any of - and a gap in other things to read seemed like the right time to finally tackle it. And now I have. And what the fuck did I just read.

Spoiler cut for the rest of this. So, okay, the good: the set piece running-from-the-crash on the Megaship was pretty great. The kind of thing that these days would be five minutes of tedious action CGI in a movie but really came alive as written action. The somewhat similar sequence of flying the little spaceship through the big spaceship was also good. The big objects were nicely imagined and vividly described and I really do enjoy that kind of space-adventure action when it's that well written.

But... like... other than that... there was Banks' weird thing for shit, where first the protag is drowning in shit and then there's the island where they eat shit. There was the super-fat super-evil guy on said island, which is a trope I absolutely despise ("you can tell how corrupt this character is by how fat their body is!" no no no fuck all the way off). There was Banks' decision to, like, drop into Combat Time for the last quarter of the novel and tell us every six seconds where everybody was now for, like, hours; I have never prayed so hard for a train to finally crash and kill everyone and I cannot convey my betrayal when some characters managed to survive and the book still kept going. Is the Culture secretly a Terry Pratchett thing where you're not supposed to read them chronologically and I was supposed to find a reading order online? Only I did do some searches for one and they mostly said to start here. The only thing I really knew about these books in advance was "clever and funny ship names" and I guess I drew the erroneous conclusion that the books themselves were also clever and funny but that is not a description I would apply to this book.

(I guess I would be willing to believe a personal friend if someone wants to make the claim that there is a later book in the series that is clever and funny that I could skip to from here and enjoy, but only if you're also willing to claim that it has good pacing and no fat hate. I've been thinking some about how many second chances I'm willing to give authors who really piss me off to see if they'll do it again and the answer that I'm maybe leaning towards is "none, unless I have specific reason to believe that was a one-off failure". Pacing is hard and I'm more willing to be generous but it's not that hard to just not write a grotesque caricature where someone's "bad" body is supposed to signal their badness, bleah.)

Comments

[glynhogen]

tl;dr: I would not categorize Phlebas as a one-off failure, but Banks throws enough pasta at the wall that he fails and succeeds differently throughout the series. If you feel like trying another one, I suggest Hydrogen Sonata. If you don't feel like trying another one, that is okay, too.

There is a lot of Banks that will strike you as either a feature or a bug, and whether the features outweigh bugs is very much eye of the beholder.

You can read the books in any order. Connections between them are pretty indirect (if you want to order them, you can pick it up from internal cues or check Wikipedia, but really the relevant chronology is that all the other books happen after the Big War happening in the one you read.) Conventional wisdom is to start with Phlebas (first published and earliest in the chronology) or Player of Games (a pretty straightforward tale of foreign policy shenanigans). I think Use of Weapons is probably the most successful and I also have a soft spot for it because I read it when I was seventeen so it was probably the last book I imprinted on in the way you can imprint on books when you're young; you might approve of it being structurally deliberate. A lot of people are big fans of Look to Windward (which I liked more when I reread it than when it came out), but content warning for suicide (the main plot is built around a pair of deeply traumatized veterans). I think you might have more luck with Hydrogen Sonata, which is the last written and manages a better balance between "exuberant" and "self-indulgent" than other entries, and hits a lot of the notes of Ship Minds Screwing Around With Shiny Things Because They Can.

All of the Culture novels have a certain amount of "I'm going to stick in this random tangent, ranging from one paragraph to a hundred pages, because I'm just kind of fucking with you." There also tends to be a certain amount of modularity (especially with the earlier books, like Phlebas and Against a Dark Background, which technically isn't Culture but reads very much like one), where you could easily excise largely freestanding chunks without having an impact on the overall arc. I usually end up feeling like the sum of the parts of any given book are greater than the whole, but the whole of the series is debatably greater than the sum of the books (because they're about the setting and I find them interesting on a historical level, e.g. what do they look like versus the SF market at the time, or viewed as artifacts of post-different war eras), but those are all also very much in the YMMV category.

I think this book's the worst as far as grossness and body horror leaping into distasteful areas. (You should de-prioritize Surface Detail on any potential reading list; large portions take place in virtual hells so Banks, never terribly subtle, goes wild.) The books are overall good on humans not defaulting to white. Some of the species relations and gender stuff goes a bit evo-psych (in that way you get for generally feminist lefty gentledudes of a certain age whose, e.g., deployment of ubiquitous sex changes is a solution for sexism) which leads to the weird effect of three genders, which reads as pretty absurd in 2019. (I mean, it's a supposedly materially hedonistic post-scarcity society. It seems like if somebody said "There are three genders" the natural response would be "Challenge accepted!") Use of Weapons leans into the gender binary for character and theme, so I mind it less there where it's doing work (especially since I read it as having a strong dose of "take a look at this asshole" re: the main character), but I generally think Banks is more successful dealing with gender when he doesn't explicitly address gender. (Excession's what-the-fuckitude factor is particularly high.)

[psocoptera]

Belated reply here - I actually meant just that the fat-hate bit was a failure, not that the whole thing was. I mean, I'm not sure I think the whole thing was a success, exactly, either, if only because I don't know what Banks wanted us to walk away saying... Anyways, I much appreciate these thoughts about which if any of the rest of them I might want to consider. Clearly should have just asked you in the first place. :)

[elysdir]

There is no Culture book that is clever and funny in the way that the ship names are. That’s definitely not what Banks is going for, and I’m sad that the ship names misled you about it, even as I can totally see how that could happen.

My general reaction about Banks is that I always want his books to be better. He goes quite a ways in directions that I love, but never quite far enough for me.

I agree with glynhogen about Banks and gender; that’s my biggest example of Banks not going far enough. He does this Varleyish physical-sex-changes-are-easy-and-painless thing—and then he does things like have a man decide to switch to being a woman in order to have sex with another man (because apparently in the Culture there is no such thing as homosexuality? I’m not sure about that, it’s been a while, but that was my impression).

And the whole Special Circumstances setup is fascinating—the Ships have a kind of inverse Prime Directive going on, where they know by virtue of being smart (and authorial fiat) what’s best for a given culture. But that too ends up not playing out as interestingly as I would like.

The end result is that I’ve read half a dozen Culture books, and still intend to read the rest of the series, but every time I read one I end up mildly disgruntled/annoyed.

So I would recommend giving up now. I don’t think any of the Culture books are going to give you what you’re looking for, alas.

(But I may just be projecting, in that they don’t give *me* what I’m looking for.)

[psocoptera]

Thank you for this advice! I would definitely rather stop now than pour more reading time into being annoyed. :) I don't feel too bad about having been misled by the ship names; these books really do/did come up often enough (at, like, Readercon and things like that) that I was going to tackle them eventually.