Amazing scope and depth, and manages for the most part to be believable.

I have some quibbles. The Dra'Azon are a little too convenient. The main character is just too hard to identify with some of the time. And quite honestly the authour struggles making humans relevant with all these god like computers and superior aliens floating around. Still, it's all quibbles. Even with the depressing ending, it's a great read. ( )

I really enjoyed this book, until there was one too many brutal murders and I realised how little I cared about the fate of the protagonist and I put the book down. For the first half of the novel, I just reveled in reading a space opera, which is a genre I almost never read. I loved how relentless the action was and the sense that big ideas were at stake.

I think the book is very well written, with the prose describing the action clearly. I felt like the writing was very well thought through. For instance, it's always hard to keep track of characters with alien names, especially when there are lots of them introduced at once, but Banks dues a good job of reminding the reader who is who on a regular basis. Yes, it occasionally results in a certain character walking past screaming, "Goddammit!!" just to remind you who they are, but on the whole it was relatively subtle (for a space opera). I also loved the way Banks zooms in and out, following a plot but also taking time to put his hands on his hips and admire the technologically advanced works of the future.

However, I just found the motivations of Horza, the Idirans and the Culture a bit thin. If a character is going to do heinous things, to me it needs to be in aid of something worth believing in, not just a combination of hatred and self interest. There's a reason people hate the Changers, and it's because they're pretty grubby.

It's pretty unusual for me to fail to finish a book and then put the next book of the series in my to read list, but that's what I'm doing with the Culture series. The universe is too intriguing to ignore altogether and Banks' prose is of a rare quality for a science fiction author, even if I didn't find this particular book worth sticking with. ( )

Spies and freelance adventurers caught in an Interstellar war between a rationalist culture and an alien warrior race
The title is derived from the epigram at the beginning, quoting T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland: "Gentile or Jew / O you who turn the wheel and look to windward / Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you"
This novel is mostly the story of Bora Horza Gorbuchul. He is a Changer, a race of genetically modified humans with the ability to alter their faces and bodies to masquerade as anyone. We meet him chained in a sewer cell for a slow death by drowning after his role as a spy for the Idiran race is revealed by Perostek Balveda, an agent with the Culture. He is rescued by an Idiran ship blasting its way onto the world he had infiltrated. That ship is destroyed in turn by a culture ship, but not before Horza is ejected on a mission to find a Culture ship Mind that is on Schar's world, a forbidden planet guarded by the ancient Dra'azon. His rescue suit is picked up by the Clear Air Turbulence, a freelance pirate ship. He wins a fight for a place on board and accompanies the pirates on two botched attempts to raid worlds for profit, and eventually Horza imitates and replaces the captain. He aims the ship towards Schar's world and the Mind. The pirates are confronted by a raiding party of Idirans and there ensues a raging competition for possession of the mind inside ancient train tunnels on the frozen world. The Culture agent Balveda and the Mind survive, Horza and his shipboard lover do not.
There were many of the typical props for space travel and battle. The Changer has poison spit and fingernails. Warp drives and fusion engines are standard on the ships, and everyone is armed with laser guns, plasma cannons, and even "primitive" projectile guns. The Mind is a sentient computer that controls a starship, until its ship is blown up and the Mind manages to jump itself into hyperspace. 0ther sentient robots fly around on anti-gravity packs. The characters are made to seem vulnerable, with comflicted feelings and motives. The plot comes to a full circle by the end of the book, but there were several episodes that seemed like interesting ideas without a strong position in the story, more like diversions.
I had not heard of this title before the Folio Society edition, and I am not sure why it was chosen for the fine binding and printing treatment by Folio.

Notable quotes:
[When Horza is first on board the pirate ship and meets his eventual lover, Yaslon]: "It's considered very bad manners to ask anybody where they came from or what they've done in their lives before they joined. Maybe we've all got some secrets, or we just don't want to talk about or think about some of the things we've done, or some of the things we've had done to us. But either way, don't try to find out. Between your ears is the only place on this crate you'll ever get some privacy, so make the most of it."

[The isolated mind on Schar's World, after it had protected its memory during the battle]: "In fact, it could still access all that stored memory (though the process was complicated, and so slow), so all was not lost there ... But as for thinking, - as for being itself - another matter entirely. It wasn't its real self. It was a crude, abstracted copy of itself, the mere ground plan for the full labyrinthine complexity of its true personality. It was the truest possible copy its limited scale was theoretically capable of providing, and it was still sentient; conscious by the most rigorous of standards. Yet an index is not the text, a street plan was not the city, a map was not the land"

[Fal 'Ngeestra, a Culture "seer" reflecting on the war with Idirans]: "No wonder that they despise us. Poor sick mutations that we are, petty and obscene, servants of the machine-devils that we worship. Not even sure of our own identity: just who is Culture? Where does it begin and end? Who is and who isn't?" ( )

I thought the setting was intriguing, particularly the the rise of the faceless Culture, to be very interesting. In spite of this and one or two interesting characters (especially Balveda), the book feels a lot like the story of a sci-fi tabletop RPG campaign, a sequence of locations and fights that might have been interesting to take part in, but are not necessarily all that entertaining to hear about.

Perhaps there were more subtle narratives taking place ... I did "read" this book in audio form during my commute, so maybe I missed something that might have had a more meaningful impact with a more attentive read. Again, I thought the universe this story takes place in is definitely one worth exploring, so despite a mediocre experience with this, the earliest Culture book, I will be looking forward to reading more from the series. ( )

I thought the setting was intriguing, particularly the the rise of the faceless Culture, to be very interesting. In spite of this and one or two interesting characters (especially Balveda), the book feels a lot like the story of a sci-fi tabletop RPG campaign, a sequence of locations and fights that might have been interesting to take part in, but are not necessarily all that entertaining to hear about.

Perhaps there were more subtle narratives taking place ... I did "read" this book in audio form during my commute, so maybe I missed something that might have had a more meaningful impact with a more attentive read. Again, I thought the universe this story takes place in is definitely one worth exploring, so despite a mediocre experience with this, the earliest Culture book, I will be looking forward to reading more from the series. ( )