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.