June 6, 2013
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A boring story in a fascinating world
JDN 2456450 EDT 20:40
A review of Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
The bad: The characters are flat and uninteresting, and often die unceremoniously, sometimes before we even get to know them. The plot is linear and centers around a ‘mystery’ that was never that mysterious, and doesn’t even get resolved. The prose is needlessly flowery and often includes long digressions into quasi-poetic forms that are clearly meant to be confusing, often with no good reason to be confusing. The text often refuses to tell us things that the characters would obviously know already, at least until the right dramatic moment. The title makes no sense to me.
The good: The worldbuilding. My goodness, the worldbuilding. Basically the entire book is an excuse to take us through this rich, bizarre, and fascinating world. The Idirans would be a fascinating alien culture unto themselves, and they are unimportant next to the Culture, whose utopian galactic society is an endless source of marvel and wonder. Some of the worldbuilding doesn’t make a whole lot of sense logically—I can see no reason to make the Orbitals as big as they are; I don’t understand why one would build Megaships or why they’d take years to accelerate; and Damage sounds like a brutal gladiatorial game that no civilized society would tolerate—but this is easily forgiven when the world is so rich and fascinating. The most interesting characters are all AIs; they have far more unique and interesting personalities than any of the humans, and their moral conflicts are richer as well. Of course, nothing about their behavior would actually lead you to believe that they are (as alleged) superintelligent beings with more thinking capacity than our entire planet combined; but, to be fair, that’s really hard to write, without being yourself such a superintelligent being.
The weird: I had thought the stories took place in a post-Singularity future, because that would actually make sense. But when you read the appendices, you learn that in fact the stories take place in the past; the events of Consider Phlebas occur sometime around 1350 AD. And yes, it’s really AD; it specifically says “English language/Christian calendar”. So this galactic war which destroyed 53 planets, 14,000 planet-sized Orbitals, a Ring (which I assume is an AU-radius ringworld) three Spheres (which I assume are AU-radius Dyson Spheres) and six stars… happened sometime in the Late Middle Ages.
Now, you might be thinking: How would we know? Well, obviously people in the Late Middle Ages wouldn’t have known. But today, we would, actually. Our astronomy is developed to the point where we would be able to tell, if nothing else, that there are Dyson Spheres. (We might even be able to see Orbitals and Rings.) Our biology is developed to the point where we can say definitively that Homo sapiens evolved indigenously on Earth, meaning that we could not have been some sort of offshoot ‘seeded’ by the Culture. While the first prokaryotes on Earth might have arrived from outer space (some scientists think so; personally I’m dubious of even that), it is very clear that we and apes came from the same planet. Which means that these other ‘humans’ are either not really humans or they somehow came from Earth. (There is some textual support for the ‘not really humans’ hypothesis: There seem to be a number of different kinds of ‘humans’, including some covered in fur, some much taller, some with green skin, and so on. I had thought these were post-Singularity bodymods, but they could also be read as different species from different planets, with ‘human’ meaning something like ‘sapient biped’.)
Apparently we’re due to be Contacted in 2100 AD, though we’ve already been scouted covertly by a General Contact Unit in 1970. (I haven’t read that story, just read about it. 1970 seems a very interesting choice: Did they detect the Apollo missions? Or was that just coincidence?) So in about 90 years we’re due to meet this Culture; the General Contact Unit will reveal itself at last and make Contact. Which brings me to…
The problem: There has got to be something else worth doing in your utopian society besides Contact. The whole point of being a utopia is that it’s worth living there. Yet Iain Banks seems to struggle with this; he describes Contact as the raison d’être of the Culture, the unifying purpose that is the core of their existence. From the appendices: “The Culture’s sole justification for the relatively unworried, hedonistic life its population enjoyed was its good works; the secular evangelism of the Contact Section, not simply finding, cataloguing, investigating and analyzing other, less advanced civilizations but—where the circumstances appeared to Contact to justify so doing—actually interfering (overtly or covertly) in the historical processes of those other cultures. […] Contact could either disengage and admit defeat—so giving the lie not simply to its own reason for existence but to the only justificatory action which allowed the pampered, self-consciously fortunate people of the Culture to enjoy their lives with a clear conscience—or it could fight.”
Indeed, Banks could not seem to write a story about utopia; instead, he wrote a story about a war with utopia. The Culture is a backdrop for a massive war that involves hundreds of billions of deaths. Virtually none of the story actually occurs within the bounds of the Culture itself; in fact, what little does is from the point of view of Special Circumstances agents, that is, the Culture’s covert operations division. We are told that the universe is full of a quadrillion happy, fulfilled, virtually immortal lives; but the few dozen we actually meet are in a constant state of fear and suffering before their sudden and untimely demise.
I can’t really blame Banks for this; actually it’s one of the things I’ve struggled with the most as an author. How do you tell interesting stories about worlds you’d actually want to live in? Is the reason utopian fiction never succeeds that there just aren’t an interesting stories to tell about a happy world? But then, how good can the world be if there are no interesting stories to tell about it? Is it a defect in the human brain to thrive upon suffering, to define our reality based upon strife? Is it possible to have a happy story, and not just a happy ending?
