Lots of people dislike Consider Phlebas but I think it's significantly better than most of the others; I like Excession better but it's also hammier.
Banks had great vision but he's not that great of a writer; he relies on the few tricks over and over again - hyper-sadistic villains, revenge reveals (take a one-dimensional but clearly driven character, tease the readers with a slow reveal of the moral outrage they're seeking revenge for), very cringey sex scenes, Good Guys either set up the Bad Guys all along (triumphal outcome) and/or Good Guys kamikaze Bad Guys and enjoy moral satisfaction (defiant outcome). The same few plot devices are recombined to the point of tedium and/or disgust and after >20 years of reading his stuff I get the impression that Banks was rather aggressive and unpleasant at the personal level; his more sympathetic characters are thinly sketched whereas his obnoxious ones are rendered in gratuitous detail.
Consider Phlebas is more interesting and different from his other books in that almost all the characters are confused and heavily conflicted, and unhappily wrestling with the outcome of prior bad decisions. It's more hard work because it's (mostly) written from a single point of view that gives it an episodic pearls-on-a-string structure that sometimes feels like one set piece after another; in later books he eschewed this approach and went for a multiple-converging-plotline approach (CP adopts this for the last part of the story). The fact that almost everyone in the book is spiraling downwards as the result of prior bad decisions is a real downer, but the characters are much more complex and involving as a result.
I remember reading Use of Weapons and then Player of Games and noticing that the two books have exactly the same ending. Although by this point I've forgotten what that ending was.
> I get the impression that Banks was rather aggressive and unpleasant at the personal level; his more sympathetic characters are thinly sketched whereas his obnoxious ones are rendered in gratuitous detail.
Which Earth culture is that relative to? British people are just like that compared to Californians. (Well, not aggressive so much as not passive-aggressive.) Nothing compared to Finns or the French though.
Ah, I was basing that impression on the combination of the things int he previous sentence - the intense sadism, revenge drive, and so on. Of course, these are legitimate plot devices but Banks' writing often seems to wallow in cruelty to the point of establishing an antagonistic relationship with his readers.
His non-sci-fi literary work is kidna off-topic (and imho much less interesting) but I would definitely recommend people read his first book, The Wasp Factory. It's a short but excellent psychological horror story whose structural framework is unusually clear, and often repeats in his sci-fi work.
I definitely agree the book felt like a series of set pieces strung together. I don't really find space opera action scenes very interesting in writing, so it was a bit of a chore to get through it all. The tactical setup of the finale on Schar's World was novel but otherwise it was tedious.
As has been said elsewhere in the larger thread, it was interesting how ultimately inconsequential the plot was - possibly only changing the end date of the war by a couple months or so. I appreciated this, but it isn't enough to hang an entire plot on!
Banks had great vision but he's not that great of a writer; he relies on the few tricks over and over again - hyper-sadistic villains, revenge reveals (take a one-dimensional but clearly driven character, tease the readers with a slow reveal of the moral outrage they're seeking revenge for), very cringey sex scenes, Good Guys either set up the Bad Guys all along (triumphal outcome) and/or Good Guys kamikaze Bad Guys and enjoy moral satisfaction (defiant outcome). The same few plot devices are recombined to the point of tedium and/or disgust and after >20 years of reading his stuff I get the impression that Banks was rather aggressive and unpleasant at the personal level; his more sympathetic characters are thinly sketched whereas his obnoxious ones are rendered in gratuitous detail.
Consider Phlebas is more interesting and different from his other books in that almost all the characters are confused and heavily conflicted, and unhappily wrestling with the outcome of prior bad decisions. It's more hard work because it's (mostly) written from a single point of view that gives it an episodic pearls-on-a-string structure that sometimes feels like one set piece after another; in later books he eschewed this approach and went for a multiple-converging-plotline approach (CP adopts this for the last part of the story). The fact that almost everyone in the book is spiraling downwards as the result of prior bad decisions is a real downer, but the characters are much more complex and involving as a result.