Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks

Gentile or Jew 

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, 

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. 

T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” IV

I don’t think I’ve re-read this since it first came out, so when I saw it going cheap on Kindle I picked it up. It’s Banks first novel set in his Sci-Fi Culture universe - a utopian, post scarcity communist society run by hyper-intelligent AI minds usually embodied in starships with punning names.

This book takes the viewpoint of someone opposed to the Culture, fighting on the other side of an intergalactic war allied with some spectacularly warlike aliens called Idirans. Bora Horza Gobachul (Banks does like his expansive character names) is the protagonist - a ‘changer’ who can alter his appearance and is one of the few people with the permission to land on Scharr’s World, a dead planet guarded by a god-like entity.

Why would he want to go there? Well, his Idiran masters would like him to capture a Culture Mind who is believed to have crash landed there during a space battle and is hiding out in the underground defence tunnels of a long forgotten civilisation, wiped out in a nuclear apocalypse and now preserved as a memorial to the folly of war.

There follows an entertaining series of events as Horza teams up with an independent band of pirate mercenaries (straight out of a Traveller campaign) through jungles, vast orbital rings, high stakes gambling games on the eve of destruction and a spaceship chase through the insides of an impossibly huge transport ship. He is pursued by a Culture agent from the ‘Special Circumstances’ division who all have a licence to act with impunity and carry out any number of dirty tricks in the name of winning the war.

Shenanigans ensue, and the last third or so is set in the tunnels of the dead planet where nuclear powered trains once shuttled back and forth at random. The locations are all described with considerable sense of wonder at the scale of these sci-fi mega structures, and there are some memorable characters, including a sarcastic floating drone who tags along with the pirates against its will.

Banks himself was a fervent socialist and anti-war campaigner, so it’s interesting to see his approach to considering why a war against an expansionist religious entity might be justified from the viewpoints of characters who are of little significance in the grand scheme of things, but who are bearing witness to conflict on an almost unimaginable scale.

It’s not the best Culture novel (that would be Player of Games or Use of Weapons for me) but it’s a good introduction to the setting.

Dub Housing by Pere Ubu

Ok, it’s not dub and it doesn’t have much to do with housing of any description, but what it is is a quirky, post punk experimental album with some nice touches as well as some deeply irritating ones. On, the latter, a weird buzzing on the first track made me think my speakers were broken and odd pitch shifts on a later track sounded like a Walkman with dead batteries playing a cassette that had been left out in the sun.

However, as with similar albums from bands like The Residents, I tried to embrace the weird and started to enjoy the experience including a deeply bizarre riff on the sea shanty “Drunken Sailor”. I can see a route from this to other post punk bands that followed, making this an album that I’m glad I listened to, but probably not one that I will go back to.

Spodyody-tastic!

Catkins

We have always fought
Now we are on the same side
Catkin and Dogkin

Lightning, Windmill

The old mill still stands
Stones blackened by storm’s fury
Tattered sails turning

In A Silent Way by Miles Davis

My usual routine with these albums is to start listening with my morning coffee as I potter round the house and continue as I go out for a walk before work. Sometimes I’ll listen again as I’m jotting down my thoughts. Once in a (kind of) blue moon an album will go on repeat for the whole day. This is one of those.

This album marks the transition from modal jazz to the fusion sound that was to be fully realised in Bitches Brew a year later. The electric piano sounds of Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock dance around the funky electric guitar of John McLaughlin in as radical a departure from trad jazz as Dylan going electric a few years earlier.

The two sides of the album comprise two works, each made up of an introduction, a development of the theme and a reprise that returns to the start. I genuinely listened all day, finding new things each time and never tiring of them, sometimes zoning out and sometimes focusing on one instrument for a while.

A genuinely seminal album.

Post Orgasmic Chill by Skunk Anansie

It really shouldn’t be a matter of note to find a band fronted by a woman on this list, let alone a hard rock band fronted by a woman of colour, but well, here we are, with a sexist and patriarchal music biz that is stubbornly refusing to change at any rate faster than a concussed snail.

Front woman Skin has an arresting voice, and the music is equally good - mostly hard rock with overtones of drum and bass and some nice string arrangements for good measure. I really wish that the editors of this list would drop the endless parade of tired, old white men in favour of more bands like this.

Five stars, no question.

Maple, Misty

Ms Misty Maple
Solving murders with Barbie
Ken not included