Consider Phlebas was published by Macmillan in 1987, the first of Banks’s ten Culture novels. The Culture is a post-scarcity interstellar civilization — anarchist, hedonistic, technologically godlike, governed (loosely) by Minds (AIs of superhuman intelligence housed in ships and orbital habitats). The Idirans are their opposite: a three-legged theocratic species that believes in a single God and regards the Culture’s secular paradise as an abomination.
Banks’s genius was to tell the first Culture story from the perspective of someone fighting against it. Bora Horza Gobuchul is a Changer (a shape-shifting humanoid) who works for the Idirans because he despises the Culture’s dependence on machine intelligence. His mission: infiltrate Schar’s World, a Planet of the Dead (a world preserved as a memorial, forbidden to both sides), to retrieve a Culture Mind that has taken refuge there.
The novel is a picaresque — Horza travels from a temple where he’s being drowned, to a pirate ship, to a megaship gaming table, to an orbital being destroyed, to Schar’s World itself. Banks uses the episodic structure to display the Culture universe from multiple angles before the final confrontation underground.
Collecting Consider Phlebas
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1987): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $300–$800
- Very good in jacket: $100–$300
- Signed first: $600–$1,500