CONSIDER PHLEBAS was published in 1987.
It is a Culture novel
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions have died, billions more were doomed.
Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction - cold-blooded, brutal and – worse – random.
The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender.
Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep inside a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, to actually find it, and with it their own destruction.
Iain took two book titles from T. S. Eliot’s beautiful poem, The Waste Land. In Part IV, Death by Water, is this passage:
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
This extract from The Waste Land (c) T.S. Eliot is reprinted here by kind permission of the Estate of T.S. Eliot and Faber & Faber Ltd.
Phoenicia was an ancient maritime civilisation originating in the coastal strip of the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily located in modern Lebanon.
Iain said, “The entire second half [of Consider Phlebas] came from London, where Horza’s down in the underground tunnel system. I’ve stood on the platforms of tube stations and heard the rails sing and felt the draught of air as the train approaches.
“With Consider Phlebas you shouldn’t be able to pin it down. It looks like a very depressive American book or a very wide-screen British book, but it should simply be itself.
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“There’s a very dynamic central character – despite being rescued from the sewer-cell instead of fighting his way out – a very dynamic hero, and a very tragic one because he dies at the end. That’s not supposed to happen, dammit, supposed to be the first part of a trilogy!
“Partly Consider Phlebas is putting two fingers to American SF – one finger up at trilogies, for a start, and the other is when you meet a dynamic central character, he’s therefore the good guy. But Horza isn’t the good guy because the Culture is the side of good.
“I was actually at a presentation for Futura Books when they first did The Wasp Factory in UK paperback. And this guy got up to address booksellers and bookdealers about one of the Omen books, and with a little smile on his face he said, ‘this is the fifth book of the trilogy,’ so everyone laughs. But he was making the point that it’s an ongoing thing until people stop buying it, a publishing/marketing exercise where not the publisher, not the bookseller, not even the writer believes in it; it’s a commodity, a fucking product. And that’s one word I really object to in publishing – don’t call my fucking book ‘product’ you bastards, you fucking dare! I sweated blood over it and it’s not ‘product.’ So Consider Phlebas is not about deconstruction or anything as complicated and arty-farty as that. It’s just trying to react against what’s gone before, which is why although it’s a wide-screen book, there’s no princesses involved. No pneumatic voluptuous heroines, no derring-do heroes who win through. Horza dies at the end. Yalson, the female mercenary, who I hope is believable and makes sense, is quite admirable in a lot of ways. And it’s basically written from the grunt’s point of view. I couldn’t have written Consider Phlebas without books like Michael Herr’s Dispatches, or a wonderful book called Chickenhawk, about helicopter pilots in Vietnam. This is a poor daft gang of mercenaries who happen to get involved in a nasty bit of the war.”