Consider Phlebas
Apr. 3rd, 2019 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraConsider 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.)
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.)
