Welcome back to the Culture reread! Today in chapters 5 and 6 of Consider Phlebas, Kraiklyn continues to prove himself an absolutely terrible captain, another heist goes dreadfully wrong, and Horza is captured by a cult. This entire sequence is one of the most revolting things I’ve read in almost any book anywhere. Don’t read this section while you’re eating, and don’t count on having an appetite for a while after.
Chapter 5: Megaship
As the Clear Air Turbulence makes its way to Vavatch, Yalson offers her theory of why they’re headed that way to Horza: there’s going to be a game of Damage played there. To the reader at this point, the nature of this game is obscure, though both Horza and Yalson seem concerned. It seems that games are rare and played for very high stakes (supposedly Kraiklyn won the CAT in a Damage game), and Kraiklyn being deliberately omissive about it annoys Yalson—among other things, it suggests that he’s determined not to share any spoils of the game with the crew. If anything, this confirms Horza’s general antipathy toward Kraiklyn, and he continues to develop his plans to replace the captain of the ship. Though Horza, it should be noted, is keeping more secrets of his own. Part of the object of his Schar’s World mission—which of course he hasn’t disclosed to anyone—is the person he wants to have join him on his ticket out of the war after the mission is over—a Changer named Kierachell, a woman he liked, maybe loved, before leaving the base to join the Idirans in their war against the Culture. Which complicates his liaison with Yalson, just a bit. Not that he mentions it to her.
One of the chief features of Vavatch is its Megaships, enormous, city-sized vessels that continually traverse the Orbital’s seas. Almost all have now been stripped of their valuables, but the job was left unfinished on one ship, the Olmedreca, after some of the salvaging crews got into a dispute and, according to Kraiklyn, “some careless person let off a little nuke”. (More casual mega-destruction.) This has set the Olmedreca adrift at an angle off its usual course, and at any moment it’s likely to crash into the “Edgewall” that contains the Orbital’s seas. Kraiklyn claims it’s got some bow lasers that they can lift to replace the CAT’s weaponry. After the Temple of Light fiasco, the ship’s crew is increasingly distrustful of Kraiklyn’s favorite phrase, “easy in, easy out”, but as far as they can tell, he seems to be right about it this time. They’ll grab the lasers and then head to the Orbital’s port city of Evanauth, to use the local facilities to install them on the CAT. And, Yalson is pretty sure, there’s where the Damage game is happening.
Let’s pause for a moment to appreciate the scale that Banks is operating on here. We’ve all seen ring-shaped space vessels and stations in films, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Elysium, but one of those space stations would be a spot inside an Orbital like Vavatch. For a Megaship (which allegedly takes several years to get up to full speed), imagine Manhattan unmoored and set to sail forever, powered by unthinkably massive engines. And yet this vastness, this entire world is, in the scheme of the Culture-Idiran war, essentially a piece of collateral damage.
The Olmedreca raid gets off to a poor start. One of the crew, having missed the part of the briefing about anti-gravity gear not working on an Orbital, takes an overexcited flying leap off a high spot and promptly falls to his instant death. Sobered by this, the crew sets off to explore the ship.
And then everything goes to hell, and Banks hits his intensely cinematic stride.
The reason a Megaship has laser weaponry on it is that there are massive icebergs—bigger than the ships—in the Orbital’s waters, and the lasers were needed to blast such obstacles away. While Kraiklyn was sneeringly confident that they would be able to see the Edgewall looming and evacuate, what he hadn’t planned on was a “cloud bank” ahead of the Olmedreca that turns out to be an iceberg. As they attempt to flee the Megaship in a panic, Horza looks back to see “the Megaship was throwing itself to its destruction in a froth of debris and ice. It was like the biggest wave in the universe, rendered in scrap metal, sculpted in grinding junk, and beyond and about it, over and through, cascades of flashing, glittering ice and snow swept down in great slow veils from the cliff of frozen water beyond.”
Horza just barely manages to escape on a shuttle flown by the CAT’s pilot Mipp. Clinging by his fingertips, he nearly falls as the shuttle pulls away, but is thrown back into it by the shockwave of a nuclear device detonated as his crewmate Lamm is crushed to death in the wreckage of the ship.
Horza and Mipp limp away in the shuttle, but there’s no way the damaged vessel can make it to Kraiklyn’s suggested rendezvous point in Evanauth. They fly past an island, but an increasingly unhinged Mipp ignores Horza’s entreaties to land after the island’s inhabitants take a few potshots at the passing shuttle. Unable to keep flying, Mipp ditches into the ocean.
Chapter 6: The Eaters
My friend Susan refers to this part of the book as “the island of the barf people and that dude with the teeth.” It’s the part that both of us instantly thought of as being nearly unfilmable for sheer grotesquerie of content when we heard about the Consider Phlebas TV adaptation. You stand warned.
Mipp dies in the crash, but Horza manages to extricate himself from the wrecked shuttle. His only choice for survival is the island they passed earlier—he had spotted a shuttle of some kind there, and if he can get to it, he reckons that he can at least try and get to Evanauth, if not off the Orbital altogether.
Swimming to the island exhausts him, but he makes it…and it’s not long before this proves to be a mixed blessing. The islanders are, to a person, underfed and unwell-looking, with the exception being their leader: a horrifyingly obese human whose “head sat on its layers of neck, shoulder, and chest fat like a great golden bell on top of a many-decked temple”—Horza, seeing him from high in the air earlier, had mistaken him for a giant pyramid of golden sand. This is Fwi-Song, sometime freak-show inhabitant, former “palace pet for some alien satrap” on a Megaship, and now a self-proclaimed prophet who has somehow persuaded a group of followers to join him on this island to await “the End Of All Things,” i.e. the destruction of Vavatch. Fwi-Song’s followers, the Eaters, subsist on fish entrails and other horrifying leavings, and Fwi-Song himself, well…
He’s a cannibal, and he feasts on the flesh of those—like Horza—who wash up on the island’s shores, as well as that of any of his followers who step out of line. Horza is given a teaser of the fate that awaits him when the unfortunate disciple known as Twenty-Seventh is brought before the prophet for the crime of attempting to escape the island by way of the shuttle that Horza had spotted—or, in Fwi-Song’s words, “the seven-times-cursed vehicle of the Vacuum.” Fwi-Song takes out some knife-sharp steel dentures and proceeds to devour the unfortunate man, one extremity at a time, before—as best as one can tell; like Horza, one resists analyzing the revolting goings-on too closely—raping and crushing him to death.
Yeah. That’s a thing that happens.
I’ve written before of the optimism inherent in Banks’s construction of the Culture, but it’s salutary to recall that his imagination cooks up some truly hair-raising depravity from time to time. Is it gratuitous, shocking for shock’s sake? I’m disinclined to think so, though it’s certainly unsubtle, insofar as it relates to the novel’s recurring themes of what the Culture would consider the irrationality of religious faith—any religious faith. As Horza awaits his fate at the hands of the Eaters, he contemplates the Idirans’ “belief in order, place, and a kind of holy rationality.” They believe that they are agents of divine order, and therefore must impose that order throughout the galaxy, by conquest if necessary. Horza doesn’t particularly agree with those beliefs, but he doesn’t think that the Idirans pose a true long-term threat. He’s fairly certain that they will eventually rationalize themselves into a state of peace, whereas he’s convinced that the Culture, for all their apparent benignity, will continue to interfere and spread their ways throughout the galaxy like a cancer, unless they’re stopped. It’s easy enough for Horza to dismiss Fwi-Song’s derangement and tolerate Idiran fundamentalism, but he resists the Culture perspective that all religions are irrational in ways that differ only in matters of degree—that a monster who kills by torture and cannibalism according to its own ludicrous and inhumane rules is no more or less dangerous than Idiran fundamentalists attempting by force to impose their will via warfare and the occasional weapon of mass destruction. What matters to Horza is that the Culture and their machines are stopped.
But Horza’s thoughts aren’t going to add up to much if he can’t escape. He tries a pathetically transparent wheeze by telling Fwi-Song that he’ll happily deliver the Eaters from the temptation of the Culture shuttle, and is gagged for his trouble. He tries sweating acid to weaken or break the bonds tying his wrists, but gets nowhere. He has his poison teeth back and is able to secrete poison in his nails again, but he’s not sure if he’s going to have the chance to use them. That does give him the option of committing suicide, “but while there was still any chance, he could not bring himself to think of it seriously.” He allows himself a moment of contempt for the “soft, peace-pampered souls” of the Culture, who he imagines auto-euthanizing themselves at the first sign of genuine pain. (Of course, he hasn’t met Fal ’Ngeestra. It’s possible, just possible, that Horza doesn’t have the measure of the Culture that he thinks he does.)
At the last minute his luck finally turns. With his poisoned nails, he takes a swipe at Fwi-Song’s high priest Mr. First and misses. Fwi-Song proceeds to use his steel teeth to deglove one of Horza’s fingers—taking the poison with it. As Fwi-Song dies a painful death, Horza blinds Mr. First (who is then crushed by the falling body of his prophet), and in the confusion, he escapes onto the shuttle.
The shuttle is an artificial intelligence called Tsealsir, but it’s rather outmoded and slightly pathetic, “too old-fashioned and crude for the Culture,” it says, but rather pleased to have been tasked with assisting the Vavatch evacuation. Still, Culture is Culture, as far as Horza is concerned, and to get away without calling his enemies’ attention, Horza tricks it into giving away the location of its core processing “brain”—which he then blows to smithereens. With that, he takes off, leaving Fwi-Song’s remains to the tender mercies of insects.
Interlude in Darkness
Meanwhile, the Mind on Schar’s World is running on the barest minimum of functionality: “it had effectively frozen its primary memory and cognitive functions, wrapping them in fields which prevented both decay and use. It was working instead on back-up picocircuitry in real space, and using real-space light to think with (how humiliating).”
The Mind has used a drone to take the measure of Schar’s World and now sits in darkness, contemplating its situation. It’s pleased to have made its daring escape, but unsure of how it’s going to get out. Perhaps, it thinks, it should have gone down with its ship—it would have been easier—but the chance to escape had been too good and “it would have been…wasteful to throw away such a great chance even if it had been perfectly sanguine about its own survival or destruction.”
It knows that the Idirans have a former Schar’s World Changer working for them, and that this Changer could be coming for it…but maybe the Culture will get there first, it thinks. Or the Dra’Azon will help it somehow. The Mind is no less driven to survive than Horza was in the cell in Sorpen or amongst the Eaters, but there is nothing for it to do but wait.
Next up: Damage, and the destruction of Vavatch.
Karin Kross lives and writes in Austin, TX. She can be found elsewhere online at hangingfire.net, on Tumblr, and on Twitter.
I am not wholly certain that Vavatch is officially part of the Culture. I seem to remember the initial discussion about the Vavatch orbital being somewhat neutral. It wasn’t going to be part of the Culture/Idiran conflict, until the Idirans said they wanted that system and the Culture said (in effect) “then no one can have the system” and setup their humanitarian evacuation and destruction of the orbital. Even the General Systems Vehicle (GSV) used for the evacuation in a later chapter wasn’t strictly Culture, but independent in some fashion. Anyway, I’ll check on this when I get a chance tonight.
This is my least-favorite part of the book, and not just because of the unpleasantness. On a recent re-read, the Megaship episode struck me as longer than necessary and kind of redundant (except for the plot-driven need to separate Horza from the CAT and its crew). While it makes sense that it would take quite a long time for a crash on that scale to play out, the action in that chapter kind of drags, for me.
Oddly enough, the Eaters chapter struck me as being somewhat less graphic on the page than I had remembered. But I suppose that’s mostly an indication of the impact it had made on my first read.
I read The Player of Games before Consider Phlebas, so I have always wondered what the Vavatch hub was up to during these events. (But “A Few Notes on the Culture” implies that hub AIs aren’t necessarily Mind-level entities, and perhaps, if there had been a Mind at Vavatch, it had already been evacuated as part of the abortive attempt to have the orbital recognized as neutral.)
Ultimately, I guess I accept the thematic value of giving Horza reason to reflect on forces of order and chaos. But this sequence is mostly just ratcheting up Horza’s investment in the quest, along with the incidental body count.
I think in his later works Banks uses gratuity more sparingly, and with reason, but in early works like this I think he is trying to shock just to make an impression. After all, he’d finally got noticed with Wasp Factory which is definitely a shocking book, so you can see why he might think it’s a handy tool to wheel out.
The scale of the orbital and the megaships were among the things that drew me into Iain’s universe.
@1 Neutral has always been such a variable term though. Take WW2, Ireland and Spain both had official policies of neutrality. Ireland was neutral but biased towards the allies and Spain was neutral but biased towards the Axis. There would have been no doubt that if the Axis had won then Ireland’s neutrality would have been forgotten as soon as the Luftwaffe got within range (or take Madagascar, which was supposed to be neutral after the fall of France but the Commonwealth Forces needed its strategic position). I think that is the situation with this Orbital. It was neutral, possibly neutral but Culture biased, right up until that neutrality got in the way. Then it wasn’t, whether it wanted to be or not.
@6 A better WW2 example might be Denmark or Iceland which were neutral right until one side or the other overran them.
Or better still, Napoleonic-era Denmark. That was neutral until it became apparent that Napoleon wanted to occupy it and seize its fleet. So the British attacked to seize its fleet first. Vavatch might want to be neutral, but it cannot stop the Idirans occupying it to use it as a base. And the Culture cannot stop them, so it destroys Vavatch first. Or maybe the destruction of Vavatch is just easier than its defense.
I tend to get the impression than the universe of the Culture contains the following groups of people:
a) The people of the Culture, who are universally nice and want to make the whole universe a better place.
b) The people outside the Culture, who are universally, but to differing extents and in different and sometime interesting and exotic ways, evil.
I’m sure there are exceptions, but for the time being they escape me.
@1 & 2: If I remember correctly, the Vavatch orbital WAS part of the Culture, but has been evacuated prior to its demolition (by a Culture warship) to avoid it falling into Idiran control as a staging area for further attacks into Culture space. So during the events of the novel, any official Culture control and enforcement have been removed along with all of the citizens who wanted to leave, making the entire Orbital effectively abandoned territory and therefore more or less “neutral” for its final few days, with only stragglers, scavengers, thrill-seekers, and of course cannibalistic religious fanatics remaining.
The orbital’s Hub Mind has been evacuated as well and therefore plays no role in the novel. Likewise, the ship that the CAT leaves on is a decommissioned Culture GSV that has also had its governing Mind removed; it’s there to transport scavenged loot (such as an entire Megaship) for wealthy collectors and transport the attendees of the Damage game who can afford passage. The port facilities (such as traffic control) at Evanauth are still operating, but only for due to the high-profile Damage game, and probably by staff brought in just for the game and for the final evacuation. As soon as the game is over, everyone packs up and leaves.
Typos are my own due to having some trouble with the tablet. Anyway I think it’s a mistake to observe Vavatch and claim it says much about the Culture based on the people living there (i.e the Eaters). I think it is more demonstrative of the level of collateral damage that the Culture is willing to commit to. Of course it’s showing off too, since they are going to evacuate the orbital which is still a pretty astonishing thing based on Horza’s reaction following this passage.
@7 I think that conclusion can’t be backed up by reference to the books, or by Banks’ expository “A Few Notes on the Culture”. The population of the Culture are blessed with living in a stable society free from hunger, want, disease and the fear of natural disaster and attack, but they are by no means Universally Good. Similarly, those who are not in the Culture are in no way a homogenous lump of evil.
There’s probably a distinction to be drawn between those living in other Involved Civs and those living on or in unContacted ones, where the presence of aforementioned hunger, want, disease changes the equation. The Gzilt (Hydrogen Sonata) are in no way evil as a people. There are certain members of that Race whose actions may be viewed as evil, but this is by no means a universal trait. The same applies conversely in the Culture: The drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw (Use of Weapons) is, in my mind, quite considerably evil, probably the most evil character in that book, with none of the apparent effort at redemption of the other apparently evil character.
I guess what I’m saying is that in the Culture and in the non-Culture, most everyone just gets on with their lives. They work, play, drink, fornicate, take drugs, construct artificial universes as a pastime, and wait for the next pay day or the next interesting thing to happen. There’s (in most cases) no apparent evil in their lives, nor is there apparent good. They just live their lives and pass stuff on to the next generation. There are exceptions, such as the Affront (Excession) and the ruling class of the Empire of Azad (Player of Games), but I’ve always considered Iain’s intention was to show the corrupting effects of such evil on society, not to paint a broadstroke pastiche of evil society.
I tend to get the impression than the universe of the Culture contains the following groups of people:
a) The people of the Culture, who are universally nice and want to make the whole universe a better place.
b) The people outside the Culture, who are universally, but to differing extents and in different and sometime interesting and exotic ways, evil.
That is not an impression that will survive reading a few more Culture novels. I mean, honestly. Gurgeh (Player of Games) is maybe not actually evil, but he’s pretty unpleasant. Byr (Excession) is not a great person; Dajeil (same book) is horrifically abusive to her partner.
And, similarly, there are huge numbers of non-Culture people who aren’t evil in any way.
The society in the Hydrogen Sonata (Gzilt) is certainly not evil, a bit twisted at the government level, but not evil. You could almost say human.
Parts of the Culture are pretty ‘evil’ in Excession.
I think this argument has been comprehensively shot down!
@8, 9: Affiliation with the Culture is (or can be) a somewhat loose concept. It is clear that Vavatch was at least sufficiently connected with the Culture that the Culture cared enough both to destroy it and to evacuate it (at least in part). But my sense is that it was a very different place from (e.g.) Chiark, even before the war.
Exactly who is in charge of Vavatch during the evacuation is not entirely clear – although this makes sense, structurally, because Horza wouldn’t know or care. Tsealsir seems to be acting on the Culture’s instructions, though it has been seconded or assigned to the ex-culture GSV The Ends of Invention for the purposes of the evacuation, and it seems to feel that it has been abandoned (although, as noted in the synopsis, it is happy to have the opportunity to help with the evacuation). (How to reconcile this with the Culture’s normal attitude toward the autonomy of even limited sentience is left unexplored. Have the Eaters been given a choice that Tsealsir doesn’t get and, if so, why?)
One certainly gets the sense that the evacuation of Vavatch is unprecedented and probably somewhat improvised. We will see in the next chapter that there is some degree of local administration (at least enough to keep the port running, as you note). But it is entirely plausible to think it was a skeleton operation by that point.
I don’t recall any specific reference to a hub Mind in the novel, either way; but I agree it makes sense that, if one had been present previously, it would have been evacuated. Although, given that the whole McGuffin of the book is that it is difficult to relocate a Mind, that might have attracted some comment.
Perhaps that’s part of the overall question in this novel. What IS the Culture? The more we try to pin it down, the more nebulous it becomes. We know that the observation that “it’s more fun in the Culture” grates on Horza. It seems to affect him as a shallow affirmation of a philosophy that he at least notionally disagrees with. However, what does “more fun” even mean when faced with post-scarcity space-faring civilizations? Vavatch is neutral from the Culture, however it does seem that there’s more than enough debauchery (for lack of a better word) available to the regular sentient being. It would be hard to argue that at least when it was not under threat of dismantling, that one could find any manner of gland or drug enhanced titillation on Vavatch that one might desire and still not nominally be in the Culture. If Horza is concerned that the Culture is going to spread itself insidiously throughout the galaxy, meddling through Contact and Special Circumstances — what are they actually achieving?
I don’t know that I have any answers for these things, I just find it interesting to try to pin it down. Horza, to me, feels very much like the sort of acquaintance that one might have on Facebook who is very much against some political topic, however when questioned exactly why they feel this way, find it difficult to articulate specifics — they just know they don’t like it! However in this case, Horza is living a very dangerous life as an active participant in a war based on some fairly nebulous notions.
Unrelated, but Tsealsir reminds me greatly of Eddie the Shipboard Computer for the Heart of Gold in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Not all artificial intelligentsia are created equal, clearly!
If you poke at it, I think Horza’s complaint really boils down to: machines should be subservient to biological life forms because, otherwise, biological life forms are doomed to be irrelevant. Everything else is fluff and prevarication.
This parallels the Culture’s core preoccupation with giving all life forms opportunities to find whatever meaning they can. The tragic irony that drives the story is that Horza’s values and the Culture’s aren’t really all that different, at the bottom of the well. But Horza is trapped in a zero-sum world view that denies the possibility that AIs and biologicals can actually help each other achieve this, rather than being in competition. (Why he believes this so strongly isn’t entirely obvious. Perhaps this attitude has been inculcated into him. Another of the ironies of the story is that the Changers seem to be treated more or less as Horza believes machines should be: as chattel, or at least tools.)
In fairness to Horza, the “true” relationship between the Minds and biologicals is ultimately the Big Question underlying the whole sequence (or at least one of them), and I’m not sure it has an unequivocal answer. Lots of readers have reached the same conclusion as Horza: that the biologicals are closer to valued (and spoiled?) pets than to peers.
At least for this book, we don’t really get much indication of what the Minds think. (And, personally, I think Banks is right to shy away from that; Excession is a fun book but, to me, it reveals the difficulty of trying to imagine, let alone convey, non- and super-human intelligence.) Fal ’Ngeestra is supposed to be the counter-argument, among other things to demonstrate why the Minds find humans valuable, but she herself wonders whether she is really just a useful asset to them.
@7,
It’s not that the Culture is good and everyone else is evil; Banks certainly doesn’t portray many of the cultures as evil, just the ones that come into violent conflict with the Culture*. From the point of view of the members of Culture and Special Circumstances those that threaten the lives of billions of Culture citizens are most certainly evil. For the average citizen of the Culture, they probably think that they live in relative comfort, and don’t have to worry about debt slavery (practiced by the Sichultian Enablement), eons of virtual torture (Pavul), execution by torture (Sorpen), or forced starvation by their leader (the Eaters).
—————-
* Of course, he does tend to concentrate on them. There wouldn’t be much of a story for a Culture tourist visiting someplace peaceful.
The tribe of cannibals didn’t bother me because I found that particular 30+ pages of subplot so boring I ended up skimming through most of Chapter 6.
I found Chapter 5 and the action on the Megaship much more compelling. Perhaps because I am a structural engineer and architecture fan, so the concept of a giant city-ship I find particularly appealing.
Anyone know if this series is going to continue? I’m a little concerned that we haven’t seen anything in several weeks. I hope we can continue our discussion.
Another one hoping this hasn’t died partway through the first book.
Vavatch from Consider Phlebas
Lenipobra is alive!
The crew member, Lenipobra, could not die by “vaulting over the parapet”, and falling to the surface of Vavatch. There is no gravity hence there is no accelerating force (such as gravity) to ‘pull’ him toward the surface. No gravity and only a perceived weight due to the centripetal force of the rotation of the orbital. An object, shuttle or person, has a perceived weight because they are made to move in the direction of motion by the friction/contact with the surface, which is the definition of centripetal force. The curved surface of the orbital pushes people and things toward its center of rotation.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/centripetal-force
Lenipobra has jumped ‘up’ and over the railing into open air/space away from any friction or structure that would have rotated him along a curved path. He would lose his perceived weight. He is free of physical contact, so he would float away from the surface, although very very slowly since his jump away from the surface would be only slightly more than his perceived weight; say a 99 kg force of the jump for a 90 kg perceived weight. And while floating the very slightly curved surface would slowly move ‘upward’ toward him until he came into contact with it.
OK, I may be wrong, but no gravity hence no death. Lenipobra would have to be done away with some other way.
Perhaps there are also anomalies in the way the shuttle ‘flies’ after escaping from from the crashing ship.
That is not at all how centrifugal gravity works.
Hi foamy. My understanding of centrifugal (false or pseudo) force is that it is experienced by someone because a centripetal force is acting on them to restrain them to move around a central point. Please see the wikipedia entry for centripetal force for their explanations and diagrams; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centripetal_force :and perhaps look at more of my thoughts at https://ldh3790.wixsite.com/vavatch
regards, henry
hmmm. my website url got confused. it should be
https://ldh3790.wixsite.com/vavatch
but for some reason an extra character was appended