As the book opens, he is about to be killed indeed, tortured to death in an extremely grotesque fashion. Horza is a mercenery, a spy, an assassin in the employ of the Idirans, who have goaded The Culture into its first-ever war in its many millennia of history. Indeed it is only slowly and obliquely that we come to see The Culture as something less than the monstrous entity it is to Bora Horza Gobuchul. For the first 100 or so pages, we are introduced to The Culture as seen through the eyes of someone who hates it. To demonstrate just how audacious a book Phlebas is, consider this: It’s the first Culture book, but its protagonist is an enemy of The Culture. It’s been better than 20 years since he started writing sf books about what he calls The Culture, and Little, Brown has released a new set of trade paper editions of them on its Orbit imprint, starting with the first in the series, Consider Phlebas. Banks is one of the most creative in a field of highly creative contemporary British science fiction authors.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |