Therefore adopting a sort of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' mentality, he's thrown in with the Idirans, acting as an undercover agent for them until a unique opportunity presents itself. Although he's humanoid and although the asteroid his species calls home has been conquered by the Idirans, he believes the Culture to be an existential threat to biological life itself. Horza is a Changer, which means he can alter his body at will, copying a person he wishes to impersonate or giving himself unique physical weaponry like acidic sweat glands. ( )Ĭonsider Phlebas is a science fiction novel following an alien named Horza who's been caught up in a war between the Idirans, a species of religious crusaders, and the Culture, a group of various humanoid species whose artificially intelligent machines have become so advanced that they're arguably the ones running the show. I gave it four stars instead of five because it felt a little like he painted himself into a corner toward the end of the book, but even then he kept me interested. It's a quite good introduction to his work. The imagination on this guy and his willingness to see things through to their gruesome conclusions make for a sometimes jaw-dropping reading experience. One day it just showed up on my home screen, and I jumped right in as soon as I finished The Blind Side. The problem was, Consider Phlebas is hard to find, and I wanted to read it first.įinally, it came out in a Kindle edition, which I had preordered. In fact, everything I read about his work was so positive that I began collecting his sci-fi books before I read even one of them. Turns out, Banks is quite well-regarded by readers of science fiction ( Consider Phlebas is 100 percent space opera-frak-tastic space opera) as well as his more, er, literary efforts, which he writes as Iain Banks (no middle initial). He showed up on my radar when I read a particularly favorable cover blurb on his latest book, Transition, from William Gibson. If you're looking for some hard-edged, well-written science fiction, you'll like Iain M.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks