He escapes after poisoning the cult leader and makes his way to Evanauth, the main city of Vavatch, where he finds Kraiklyn, who is playing 'Damage'-a high-stakes card game. After the second raid Horza is taken prisoner by a cult living on an island on the orbital Vavatch. The captain, Kraiklyn, leads them on two disastrous pirate raids in which several of the crew perish.

He is forced to fight and kill one of the crew to earn a place. He is picked up by a pirate ship, the Clear Air Turbulence ( CAT).

However, the Idiran starship on which he is travelling is soon attacked by a Culture vessel, and Horza is ejected. They instruct him to retrieve the Mind.ĭuring Horza's extraction, the Idirans also capture a Special Circumstances agent, Perosteck Balveda. Horza, a shape-changing mercenary, is rescued from execution by the Idirans who believe the Dra'Azon guardian may let him onto the planet as in the past he was part of a small group of Changers who acted as stewards. The Dra'Azon, godlike incorporeal beings, maintain Schar's World as a monument to the world's extinct civilisation and the dangers of nuclear proliferation, forbidding access to both the Culture and the Idirans. A Culture Mind, fleeing the destruction of its ship in an Idiran ambush, takes refuge on Schar's World. The Culture and the Idiran Empire are at war in a galaxy-spanning conflict. A subsequent Culture novel, Look to Windward (2000), whose title comes from the previous line of the same poem, can be considered a loose follow-up. Its protagonist Bora Horza Gobuchul is an enemy of the Culture.Ĭonsider Phlebas is Banks's first published science fiction novel, and takes its title from a line in T. The novel revolves around the Idiran–Culture War, and Banks plays on that theme by presenting various microcosms of that conflict.

It is the first in a series of novels about an interstellar post-scarcity society called the Culture. Consider Phlebas, first published in 1987, is a space opera novel by Scottish writer Iain M.

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