This is not suspense it is merely postponement. We know that nothing will interfere with it. For page after page we follow the train that the dying Idiran has set in motion. Unfortunately, many of the 470 pages of Consider Phlebas are devoted to such things: the disastrous attack on the Temple, the landing on the Megaship on the Sea of Vavatch, the escape from the vast Culture ship that is evacuating the remaining population of Vavatch, and the clusterfuck that concludes the expedition into the Command Tunnels on Shar’s World. I am not one of those people who gets off on watching 4k slow-motion videos of car-crashes on Youtube. There is too much external action, and too little internal.

Endless, only vaguely explicable, carnage is not the answer.Ĭonsider Phlebas is the second of the highly recommended novels that I have read, and I found it just as much of a disappointment. Novels with mysteries at their hearts need to be based on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “What you can’t talk about, you have to be silent about.” The space at the centre may be so precisely delimited that you can measure its shape, or its dimensions, though perhaps not both at once… Or it may be like the Escher drawing, where the descent of one staircase towards the solution is suddenly revealed as being the ascent of another one away from it. However, I wearied of the squalor and the fucking and the drugs and the murders, regardless of which timeline I was in, and the eventual revelation that most of the characters under the Kefahuchi Tract were manifestations of Sandra Shen, designed to mess with Ed Chianese’s head, gave me a profound sense of WTF crossed with So what? It contained many very impressive scenes – the whatever-it-may-have-been escaping from the shattered fragments of the monitors’ screens will stay with me for a while, and I shall probably steal it for another context in my own writing. New Scientist had an article listing ten (or was it eleven) science fiction books that were really different. Urn:oclc:813566000 Scandate 20110308223848 Scanner Scanningcenter sanfrancisco Worldcat (source edition) OL15686800W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 93.88 Pages 490 Ppi 500 Related-external-id urn:isbn:1857231384 Urn:lcp:considerphlebas00bank:epub:8ff4460b-e321-4098-bfe6-a382ac656e93 Extramarc University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (PZ) Foldoutcount 0 Identifier considerphlebas00bank Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t56d6pj59 Isbn 0333441389ĩ780333441381 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary_edition

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Consider phlebas