Consider Phlebas

Content Warning: This section references depictions of cannibalism, sexual harassment, sexual assault, torture, body horror, suicide, and mental health crises. In addition, the source text uses outdated and offensive terms for mental health conditions, which are replicated in this guide only in direct quotes.

“That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off…and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.”

When combatants are physically removed from each other, The Morality of War and Conflict becomes more complicated. This quote reflects the sentiments shared by soldiers in World War I, many of whom felt disillusioned by the shift to trench warfare and mechanized mass death. In Consider Phlebas, attackers are even further removed from each other, allowing combatants to disregard the lives of others more easily. This detachment magnifies the existential crisis of war, questioning the reasons behind the conflicts.

“He could not believe the ordinary people in the Culture really wanted the war, no matter how they had voted. They had their communist Utopia. They were soft and pampered and indulged, and the Contact section’s evangelical materialism provided their conscience salving good works. What more could they want? The war had to be the Minds’ idea; it was part of their clinical drive to clean up the galaxy, make it run on nice, efficient lines, without waste, injustice or suffering. The fools in the Culture couldn’t see that one day the Minds would start thinking how wasteful and inefficient the humans in the Culture themselves were.”

Horza is skeptical of the Culture’s populace and their true desires regarding the war. He perceives the Culture’s utopian society as naive, and too trustworthy of the Minds’ agenda of galactic efficiency. Horza believes the war is not genuinely supported by the people but orchestrated by the Minds, driven by a clinical and impersonal desire for order. This perspective highlights the tension between human values and artificial intelligence’s cold, logical directives, questioning the true nature of autonomy and control within the Culture.

“He had been told rather coldly that it was the gesture that mattered. For what the Idirans regarded as essentially an animal (their word for humanoids was best translated as ‘biotomaton’), only the behavior of devotion was required; his heart and mind were of no consequence. When Horza had asked, what about his immortal soul? Xoralundra had laughed. It was the first and only time Horza had experienced such a thing from the old warrior. Whoever heard of a mortal body having an immortal soul?”

Horza examines the hypocrisy of the Idirans’ religious war. The Idirans conquer species to enlighten them, yet they do not respect these other species or believe their religion can save them.