I’ve just finished reading Consider Phlebas

I’ve never been someone who can read series out of order, so this is the first Culture book I’ve read. I heard about the series from Hank Green video where he talked about them and compared the Culture to the Ekumen (from the novels of one of my fave authors, Ursula K LeGuin).

I really liked it! Come to find out later that I may be in the minority? Or at the very least, that it’s considered a rough start to a series that only gets better as it goes?

(Funnily enough, this isn’t the first time this has happened. When I started reading Discworld I was immediately enthralled by the first two books, found out later that they’re considered to be not great, and had consistently had my mind blown by each subsequent book.)

Rambling intro aside, I liked having my intro to the Culture be from the POV of someone who hates them, and then balancing it with the interlude chapters about Fal’Ngeestra and the parts where the POV character is an AI (Jase, the Mind, Unaha-Closp).

I liked how when Horza is picked up by the CAT, it seems like the story was going to be one thing (protagonist joins mercenary crew, further adventures as part of crew, crew goes on mission to obtain macguffin), and then very quickly it becomes clear that this is not what is happening. Turns out the captain is a dipshit, the crew aren’t a team so much as a random collection of mercs with varying degrees of antisocial personality and unclear or shifting loyalties (honestly probably more realistic than say, Firefly, as much as I love that show), and everything that happens to them, good or bad, comes down to luck rather than skill.

Particular bits that illustrate this or made me kind of laugh are: Yalson being like ‘why would you think we’d be mad [that you killed Kraiklyn]?’ to Horza, and honestly most scenes or info about Lamm. Like when Lamm’s pocket nuke gets set off and it turns out not to be all that radioactive, and Mipp’s like ‘well, he should get a refund’.

I found the climax in the tunnels to be exactly spot-on. The sort of creeping dread after the ‘THERE IS DEATH HERE’ message, then seeing the pieces all coming together while the individual characters don’t, the description of the trains crashing, the way Balveda’s role was foreshadowed but also felt like a surprise when it happened.

Other things I liked/wanted to note: the sense of mind-bogglingly huge scale, and how it’s used. From the Orbital and the GSV, the stats on the war’s casualties and ships involved/lost, the Megaship’s empty immensity and Horza and Lamm’s claustrophobic flight from its destruction, the vast tunnels of the Command System and everything in them built by a species that were taller than humans, so even the furniture dwarfs the characters, yet the tunnels still feel suffocatingly close, and the way Balveda gets out on the transit system in only half an hour is appropriately jarring after the days they spent traveling on foot/AG/drone.

Some things I didn’t like/had questions or comments about: Horza’s dislike of sentient machines seemed kind of unexplained, especially when we see him interacting with them (like the Culture shuttle that he straight up murders, and Unaha-Closp). I guess it’s just racism or whatever, and then there isn’t really time for an in-depth analysis of his inner thoughts about Unaha-Closp or much a chance for him to change his mind or behaviour. But to a reader who can plainly see that the sentient machines are indeed sentient, and a world full of characters who mostly seem to accept sentient machines as, broadly, people, I think Horza’s attitude, being exceptional, could’ve used a bit more, I don’t know, something.

Also, the cannibal cult part was unsettling and makes me kind of queasy, though my reaction is further proof that it’s well-written, at least. But the thing that really bothered me about that part is that we learn there’s all sorts of animals on the Orbital, and that they’re all just going to die? Like all the people are evacuated (or given the choice to), but there’s entire ecosystems full of animals that will be destroyed and no one mentions that? And the narration doesn’t even address it? I suppose there’s the possibility of a Noah’s Ark situation but I have no textual evidence for it.

Anyway, TL;DR I read Consider Phlebas, liked it and have some rambling thoughts about it, and I’m excited to see where this series takes me next!