So Iain Banks has been dead for a few years now and I’ve only now gotten around to reading this, considered the first book of his Culture series. I’ve read short stories set in this universe before but never any of the novels. I always knew I was going to have to read this one day and perhaps it is appropriate to do so now as this novel is apparently going to be adapted for television.

The Culture are embroiled in an interstellar war with the Idiran Empire. During a battle, a young Mind, one of the Culture’s AIs, escapes using an innovative tactic and is pursued by the Idirans. It takes refuge on a dead planet protected by the god-like Dra’Azon. Horza is a Changer, nominally human but with the ability to slowly shapeshift to assume another person’s appearance, who voluntarily works for Idirans. He is assigned to recover the fugitive Mind as a colony of Changers is the only community allowed on the planet and he has served there before. His route there is a circuitous one however as the Idiran ship he is on is blown up. Taken in by a passing mercenary company he blends in for a while and eventually ends up on an orbital, effectively a gigantic artificial habitat in space, that is due to be destroyed by the Culture to prevent it from being used as a base by the Idirans. Meanwhile dogging his heels is his opposite number from the Culture, Balveda.

As noted, I am familiar with this universe and so I am well aware that the good guys here are the Culture. I therefore found it intriguing that most of the novel is told from the perspective of the Culture’s enemy and the main character is someone who opposes the Culture’s governing philosophy on principle. There are some scenes from the perspective of the Culture, notably those featuring Fal Shilde who is the strategist running the Culture side of the operation but never meets any of the other characters. However for the most part we see events from the perspective of Horza and the Idirans. The Idirans, a tripedal warrior race, are driven to dominate the galaxy by their religious conviction that they are the only species with immortal souls. Horza finds his employers distasteful but detests the Culture as he does not believe that artificial intelligences have the same moral status as biological beings and fears that the expansion of the Culture means the end of biological life.

The purpose of this appears to be to give them plenty of rope to hang themselves so that the Culture looks good in comparison. It works well enough but I didn’t find such motives to be particularly interesting or novel. The contrast is made starker when every encounter with Culture forces and agents only show how humane and reasonable they are. They are almost regretfully polite when they need to pull out the weapons and make every effort to take enemies alive. What I do love is that it upends the usual tropes of which civilization will emerge victorious in a conflict. The Culture is unapologetically hedonistic and only a tiny fraction of their people is even interested in the war with the Idirans. Of those who are, many appear to be motivated out of boredom such as the youth who Fal Shilde meets and is disappointed at being denied permission to be a member of the Special Circumstances team directly involved in the war. Even Fal Shilde, for all her intuitive genius at understanding the Idirans, is very much the armchair general, giving orders in between climbing mountains and lounging on the beach. The Idirans on the other hand are deadly serious, readily sacrificing the lives of their underlings and their own in pursuit of mission objectives.

Every work of fiction ever teaches us that the dedicated, ascetic warrior race will beat the indolent libertines every time. Amusingly the hermaphrodite Idirans are even sexless after giving birth. Yet in Banks’ universe the Culture is so strong that they are never truly in peril. Their very strength, rooted in how their tolerance for diversity allows them to grow without limit, enables them to be generous to even their foes. The story here doesn’t really offer a convincing picture of how it is the Culture does so well focusing as it does only on the exploits of Horza but the afterword that summarizes the rest of the Culture-Idiran makes it clear that the Idirans were outmatched in every way though they never realized it.

It’s a rich setting with very intriguing story possibilities. Unfortunately I found Consider Phlebas to be a very straightforward space opera that uses the setting as a mere backdrop. I suppose Horza does have an old-fashioned, rollicking adventure in space as he survives being ejected into space in his suit, gets into firefights with the mercenary company, goes underground in search of the Mind and even gets caught by a weird cult. By modern standards however I found the action scenes to be fairly ho-hum stuff and I found it hard to believe how incompetent the mercenary captain Kraiklyn is and why his crew still follows him. The prose is ordinary and much of the technology on display feels very dated, which isn’t altogether unexpected for a novel that was first published in 1987. On the other hand,, their starships wield mighty energies called gridfire from other dimensions. On the other hand, in firefights they still use bullets and lasers. I also disliked how Banks’ writing isn’t very descriptive, so I couldn’t picture what the Mind on its own looked like or how the drone Unaha-Closp worked.

This meant that I found reading this to be a real slog. I realized that it’s supposed to be exciting but it wasn’t so for me, especially when so much of modern webfiction has far better action scenes. I liked the idea of the Culture universe but honestly the afterword summarizing the war and the fates of the various characters made for better reading than the novel itself. I know that this was Banks’ first published science-fiction novel and I expect that he got a lot better after this but it’s still a very unpromising start.