Mort by Terry Pratchett

1. This post marks my 100th post about literature. It's fitting that this 100th post is about Mort, which may be the first Discworld novel I can fully get behind as a novel. This is a fantastic place to start in on his books. But these notes help me explore and catalogue my thoughts on books, and as I think through one idea, another comes up until I reach the end. So, let me see what comes up here.

“Albert grunted. "Do you know what happens to lads who ask too many questions?"
Mort thought for a moment.
"No," he said eventually, "what?"
There was silence.
Then Albert straightened up and said, "Damned if I know. Probably they get answers, and serve 'em right.”

2. Mort is the first in this series that doesn’t put the jokes in charge. The plot and characters clearly drive this novel because they are consistent throughout, because the characters go through interesting changes that realistically result from the worldbuilding and plot, and because the themes are portrayed and explained through the plot and characters. The first two books were collections of loosely related short stories, the third was driven by its theme. This is an actual novel, with a story to tell and everything—and it reads better because of it.
—Partly because it’s what we expect from a novel, sure. But we expect that from a novel because it works. In other words, a contract with the reader is laid out in the opening pages, and the author lives up to that contract throughout the rest of the book, allowing the reader to really dig into the themes and characters without being distracted by switching gears between stories, or having to suspend more disbelief in the middle of the thing. This is one reason why novels are so effective and popular as a format.

Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.

3. Now, that’s not to say this novel isn’t funny. It’s to say that this novel has found the ordinate place for its humor: to satirise culture and discern situations. And this isn’t just my personal preference: the way Pratchett writes the succeeding novels seems to put humor in the same place, showing his preference or his realization about this strategy’s effectiveness. This was my observation and belief as a reader, and then I found this 2004 interview of Pratchett saying the same thing:

Discworld began as an antidote to fantasy. In fact, it was interesting to find out, at the first ever Discworld convention—which was about eight or ten years ago, I don’t know—ninety percent of the people who attended did not think of themselves as fantasy readers, although they read Discworld. In the early 1980s there was a lot of fantasy which in many respects was a copy of Tolkien. And I thought, ‘There were certainly cliches here: so much fun could be had.’ Discworld was, I suppose, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for fantasy. I take my life in my hands by saying that, but that’s probably as good a way as I could put it. Discworld is written by a better writer now. I’ve been doing it for twenty-one years and Mort is actually the first Discworld book that I’m quite pleased about. But if I wrote it now, I’d write it better.

So there you have it: one of his readers who is always thinking about writing thinks that the jokes here are properly placed in the construction of the novel, and Pratchett himself thinks the same thing. Jokes are fantastic, that’s a part of why I read Pratchett. But the best jokes reflect culture in order to impact it—to show us the ridiculous that we take for granted. They last longer when they are the catalyst to make us think about things. And by putting the plot first, then building the jokes off of it, building the jokes to support it, the plot gives a context to the jokes that helps their purpose. For instance:

“It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever," he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?”

I’m all for teachers and think they hold one of the most important positions in our society, but this is a solid joke. And without the context of the whole novel, the plot and characters and other jokes, it’s just a solid joke—little more effective and memorable than a knock-knock or chicken crossing the road. Within the context, this adds another wrinkle to his larger discussion of jobs and employment, the main theme of this novel. This joke shows one more way in which the world views professions and personal marketability. Yes, it’s played for laughs. But it also informs. And with the context of the plot, this informativeness surfaces more easily for the reader.

THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU, Death continued. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THIS WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES. FASCINATING.

4. The theme of this novel is clearly employment. Before you say, “ugh,” and wander off, hear me out. Pratchett takes a stab at explaining how jobs and humans interact. Namely, he posits that jobs change us as people, but we also influence them simultaneously. It’s funny and sad when Mort can’t find an employer, and all the advice he gets from his father keeps prospective employers away. We can relate to that. And by taking the only offer he gets, he bites off way more than he anticipates. We can relate to that too. And by having his own personality and ideas, he chafes with management. We can relate to that too. But by placing this whole theme in a fantasy context with a job that doesn’t relate to us at all—harvesting souls—the whole theme manages to miss what makes our day-to-day experience so mundane. This exemplifies why speculative fiction can be so useful. Tell me I’m to read a book about a man at a job, and unless the job is something crazy exciting I’m not going to read the book, even if it’s as satirical and funny as Pratchett is. But put it outside of our experience while still lampooning and rephrasing that experience, and this novel really works. This is why I read science fiction and fantasy—for the ideas and reflections of our cultural norms. Speculative fiction makes it easier to digest a theme this close to home.

YOU MUST LEARN THE COMPASSION PROPER TO YOUR TRADE"
"And what's that?"
A SHARP EDGE.

5. However, the pacing is a little odd in places. There are times when it feels like the novel moves too fast for the import of the moment, and times when moments drag on for unapparent reasons. The timing that feels most correct is the opening and the ending—Mort’s first experiences as Death’s apprentice, and their fight at the end. Otherwise, some of the middle portions seem to run long—like when Mort visits the tavern—or short—like when Albert returns to the Unseen University. At the tavern, the drink Mort quaffs doesn’t add much to the story, it reinforces his arc of assuming the aspect of death, but doesn't really add anything new to it. And Albert’s return is set up in the worldbuilding to be more important and influential than it turns out to be. The former feels like an idea where Pratchett ran out of steam; the latter like Pratchett was just getting going when he stopped—a whole Discworld novel could’ve been written about Albert’s return, instead we get a short vignette. That said, I fully admit that this is niggling. Nine times out of ten, the scene fits perfectly.

But at least the way was clear now. When you step off a cliff, your life takes a very definite direction.

6. So there we have it: the first Discworld book that fully embraces being a novel. Everything supports the plot and themes, with well developed characters, and interesting insight into an applicable theme. Of course, it’s still fantasy and funny, but that humor and satire is why I often suggest reading Pratchett to a wide variety of people. I would suggest you start here, in a book dealing with the familiar themes of death and love, but focused on the overarching theme of work. This is the highest placed Pratchett novel on The Big Read, and it’s easy to see that it should be highly placed in that particular popularity contest.

Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett

1. That pun at the end of his 1986 Novacon 15 speech about Equal Rites comes back here—really the whole speech does. The point of this novel is explicitly stated in that speech—and he was probably already at work on this novel, because The Light Fantastic was already on its way to the presses at the time. The premise is this:

"Women are regarded by men as the second sex, and their magic is therefore automatically inferior. There's also a lot of stuff about man's natural fear of a woman with power; witches were poor women seeking one of the few routes to power open to them, and men fought back with torture, fire and ridicule. I'd like to know that this is all it really is. But the fact is that the consensus fantasy universe has picked up the idea and maintains it.”

As this is only his third novel, he’s still fully entrenched in the Fantasy-Jokes-Drive-the-Novel mode of writing, so this book isn’t as explicitly about equal rights as it is about equal rites. But Sandman has me thinking that dreams are just as much a part of reality as physics, so equal rites are equal rights, sideways. This shows Pratchett clearly and directly rebuilding the fantasy that he has been tearing apart for jokes. It’s clear that this is the main theme of this novel, but he’s got a couple of sub-themes that deserve exhuming as well.
—First among these is the fantasy-clichés horse he’s still riding. He introduces witchcraft and witches, but as much as he argues for equal rites, he doesn’t give them a pass free pass: witches get lampooned as effectively as wizards and barbarian heroes have been in the last two novels.
—Second is the rural-urban interchange: this idea that the rural people don’t fit in urbanity, and vice-versa. He mostly just explores this theme for jokes, but at the same time, the jokes are discerning and point out the basic similarities of humans everywhere. For instance, Granny Weatherwax is as confused in the million-inhabitant Ankh-Morporkh as the Arch-Chancellor would be in the Ramtop Mountains—and both are equally awkward when attempting to flirt with each other.
—The last theme he really digs into is the Ivory Tower, the intellectual mindset. Simon has these arguments that people can’t seem to remember, but they make sense when he’s making them. In other words, he’s pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and thinking about academic subjects in ways that are new and interesting. But he’s up against the traditional thought patterns of the university’s tenured lecturers. This is also played up for jokes by Pratchett. Having spent eight years in colleges and universities, this theme provided some of my favorite jokes throughout the novel.

“I look at it all like this,” he said. “Before I heard him talk, I was like everyone else. You know what I mean? I was confused and uncertain about all the little details of life. But now,” he brightened up, “while I’m still confused and uncertain it’s on a much higher plane, d’you see, and at least I know I’m bewildered about the really fundamental and important facts of the universe.”

Treatle nodded. “I hadn’t looked at it like that,” he said, “but you’re absolutely right. He’s really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance. There’s so much about the universe we don’t know.” They both savored the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.”

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

2. Pratchett’s character creation here is strong enough that it resonates through later books. But he also tries something new here:
—First, the familiar done well. Like Twoflower, Granny Weatherwax personifies an extreme. Her confidence and ignorance match in a realistic way—I know many people just as ignorant and confident as she. But it’s also endearing because it allows Pratchett’s jokes about people who are like Granny:

For the first time in her life Granny wondered whether there might be something important in all these books people were setting store by these days, although she was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy. Among the many things in the infinitely varied universe with which Granny did not hold was talking to dead people, who by all accounts had enough troubles of their own.

Granny is pushed to extremes by Pratchett, but it’s for laughs, not because he doesn’t trust the reader—it isn’t ham-fisted. Since the reader gets insight into the mind of this person that they already know, the character is fascinating. It’s a familiar tactic from the first two novels, yet more confidently written here.

She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.

—Second, Pratchett tries something new with Esk. Her headstrong, clear thinking, and curious personality contrasts his typically ridiculous characters: both to provide a rich field for jokes, and to give the reader a character relatable to themselves in more than one or two aspects. It’s not that the earlier characters were unrelatable: Twoflower was curious and Rincewind was cynical. But Esk is relatable across most of her personality. The key to her relatability is that she personifies what people think of themselves, what they wish they were. I don’t mean that Esk wish-fulfills power-fantasies like Conan or Gandalf—which is the typical fantasy tactic. I merely mean that she is what people wish they were, in their day-to-day lives. And that’s Pratchett playing with the trope of wish-fulfilment in fantasy, again. In another new way.

“That's one form of magic, of course."

"What, just knowing things?"

"Knowing things that other people don't know.”

3. The plot here occupies the center of the book: Esk’s journey from the Ramtops to Unseen University in Ankh-Morporkh. However, the plot meanders all over the world and ends up being split between the journey and the University. The first fifty-one percent of the book deals with the journey, then the last forty-nine percent bases itself around the university. Like Star Wars Episodes V and VI, the book splits between these two stories and it works alright, but it’s also two stories, not one. It exists as two stories, with two continuous characters, but the second part adds in new secondary characters and is an awkward continuation of the former story in the way it separates itself through a new plot, some new characters, and new topics.
—Also, instead of letting the plot drive the novel, he crafts the story and jokes by throwing widely diverse characters together and sticking with them until they come to an understanding. The two witches—Granny Weatherwax as the bumpkin rural witch, and the more cosmopolitan Hilta Goatfounder—come at witchcraft in different ways. Their relationship allows a rich set of jokes that he uses to drive the plot for that portion of the novel. But these parts drag a little bit.
—So, this novel gets closer to great in the way it circles a single plotline—Esk getting admitted to the University. But Pratchett allows himself these moments and scenes to really revel in the situations that he’s set up between characters. It’s two plotlines awkwardly shoved together with similar themes and the loose, overarching thread of Esk trying to be the first female wizard.

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

4. This is Pratchett’s strongest Discworld novel yet, as a novel: he’s dealing with themes in an informative way, he’s rebuilding the fantasy he pulls apart, and he has an overarching plot line that informs all of the parts. This is a good novel. But it’s not great: the jokes are still in the driver’s seat, distracting the plot into inconsistent pacing. In the whole though, this novel works well. It’s written similarly to the last two novels, but this is a good book to start reading the series on, especially if you’re interested in the main theme. There may be better ones coming, but you have to start somewhere, and starting with something you're already interested in is a great tactic.

The Uplift War by David Brin

1. Brin’s writing improved! I’m excited about this. Here he pays attention at times to the sounds of words and weaves in some consonance and assonance to up his writing game. On reflection, in Startide Rising he paid some attention to sound when writing the English approximation of Trinary, but that was it, and by being separate from the prose of the novel it didn’t really endear his writing to me. This works though. I like it. Here’s an example from the start:

“Garth. So many times the victim.

The outlines of brown continents and shallow blue seas lay partly smeared under pinwheel stormclouds, as deceptively white and soft to the eye as a Gubru’s plumage. Along just one chain of islands—and at a single point at the edge of the largest continent—shone the lights of a few small cities. Everywhere else the world appeared untouched, perturbed only by occasional flickering strokes of stormbrewed lightning.

Strings of code symbols told a darker truth. Garth was a poor place, a bad risk. Why else had the wolfling humans and their clients been granted a colony leasehold there? The place had been written off by the Galactic Institutes long ago.

And now, unhappy little world, you have been chosen as a site for war.”

One more sentence to drive my point home:

“Nervous, anticipatory shivers flowed down the bureaucrat’s head-crest all the way to its vestigial flight feathers, bringing forth chirps of complaint from the two Kwackoo aides.”

The above two quotes are from the prelude. He has some nice sounds here and a nice collection of words. It doesn’t continue throughout enough of the rest of the novel to transform this whole novel to great writing, but there is enough in there that I enjoyed the writing here much more than in the last novel.

2. Brin also paces this book well. It’s a more traditional narrative arc with important actions occurring throughout the novel, slowly building the tension and the stakes. The novel is paced appropriately for this structure. But it also has that overarching plot point of the Gubru invasion of Garth and the Earthling struggles to get rid of them. (There are no dolphins: Here the Earthlings are humans and neo-chimpanzees and gorillas.) This overarching arc was what the last novel relied too much on. Here, by beginning with important actions and keeping them coming throughout the novel, the pacing is much better at grabbing me and keeping me moving and interested. For example, the book starts with the invasion, then builds into the resistance movement quickly instead of waiting for a third of the book to pass before the resistance gets going, like the last novel would have. This pacing is successful.

3. Brin remains good at character creation and progression. Specifically, Robert changes significantly throughout the novel: to the point that his portions of the book consists of a coming of age story. Like Toshio in the last book, Robert’s change is fundamental, but it’s not a major shift—say, from an antagonist to a protagonist. Rather, it’s a fulfillment of Robert himself. He begins as a boy version of Robert with some ignorance and talents, he ends up more of an adult, still with some ignorance, but his talents progress to skills as his mastery grows throughout the novel. There is a Robert-ness that stays from start to end, keeping him established as a consistent character that changes. And other characters similarly change throughout the novel. This is really good character creation and change.

4. The overt theme here is prioritizing ecological health. It’s something the humans value and it’s a way for this new galactic race to gain a place in the galaxy. It’s also something that the other races value, at least in word. This references Jane Goodall often in this respect, partly because her memory functions as some sort of patron saint to the neo-chimpanzees in the novel. But there is another, more interesting and unusual theme threaded throughout the novel: finding good times within the bad times. The invasion of Garth disrupts the ecological restoration of the planet and the lives of the inhabitants. But despite the desperate struggle they go through in resisting and subverting the invasion, they all find moments of happiness and peace during the war. Robert and Fiben find love, Athaclena finds balance, Mary finds a way to attain a personal connection to her son, and the other protagonist characters all find their own little slices of happiness too. In essence, this is the theme of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, where Ivan is successful in so far as he is able to make his plight slightly better for another day—he is satisfied with survival, a little extra bread, and a job well done. Here Robert is satisfied by testing himself against the invader and discovering his talents and doing a good job at this new task.

5. As a sequel, this novel has remarkably little to do with Startide Rising. It’s another story set within the same world as that earlier book, around the same time, but it’s in no way a continuation of the story. This novel is its own thing and you don’t have to read the other one to get this one. It’s well done and doesn’t fall into the same traps most sequels tend to. I like that about it.

6. The opening is great. It allows just enough of the pre-invasion to take place for the invasion to have import, without dragging the opening on too long like the last novel did with the landing on the new world. Again, there’s no initial murder, and that’s a big positive for me. In the fifth chapter, the invasion occurs, allowing Brin to introduce the main characters and define them in relative peace before the war is begun. This pacing is perfect for the length of the novel.

7. In all, this is a better book than the last in most respects. The overtness of the ecological theme made it feel slightly forced at times, which means the ending was a bit incongruous as the characters don't really change through it, they just coast through the last section. But other than that, this novel was more enjoyable to read, better written, and paced better than the last novel. I look forward to reading more Brin in the future.

Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks

1. The pacing in the story is inconsistent to me. There are portions that seem to drag, portions that seem to speed by, and a few portions that feel just right for the amount of action, ideas, and characterization involved. Specifically, he drew out the build-up to the ending too far. I understand drawing that buildup out somewhat helped him increase tension, but he drew it out too much: at the start, I was wondering where he was going because he started so far back; and by the end I grew a bit bored and had to reread a couple of paragraphs here and there because my mind started wandering. He even includes a few wry phrases as a wink to the readers that he knows what he’s doing—Horza is sitting in the control room surrounded by a lot of controls and data screens, his back turned to an alarm that starts flashing, while Horza contemplates:

So far we've done it, despite the mistakes, but it's so easy to miss something, to fail to spot some tiny detail in the mass of data which later when you've forgotten all about it, when your back is turned creeps up and clobbers you. The secret was to think of everything...

Banks also ends rather abruptly, though he effectively then fills the ending in with appendices and an epilogue. However, the long-buildup to the climax and the quick ending are not what annoyed me most with the pacing. Instead, I’m most annoyed he set up this conflict so effectively early on, then seemingly drops it for half the book while Horza is working to get to a place where he can be working towards his mission objective. Banks spends way too much time on the middle portion of the book, Horza being thrown into situation after situation after situation that doesn’t directly deal with the conflict as set up in the start. By the time Banks got to the end, the main conflict and Horza’s mission were almost forgotten. This was off-putting throughout.

2. These pacing problems allow Banks to world-build wonderfully: it's like he's focused on building the world instead of telling a story. But he uses each plot arc to offer variations within the world and build it out in the reader’s mind. Some of the scenes and characters are simply there to build the world and nothing else. This makes portions seem unimportant to the plot and let's the whole come off like a world-building exercise, not a novel. These scenes should be doing more than one thing. Though the pacing inconsistencies are odd, there are no wasted words in here: every phrase and action is focused on world-building, wrinkling the characters, or progressing the plot. And by the end, Banks is starting to use sentences and situations to do all three at once, and that’s where his best work exists. So he paces it poorly, but through his desire to build the world out fully—which he successfully accomplishes.

3. And these previous two points set the stage for this realization: Banks experiments throughout this work. It is mostly all first person, straight narrative, but within that broader tactic, he varies his techniques widely. Some portions monologue heavily as Horza struggles with his central question, some show his actions. Some isolate Horza, and some put him in complex contexts. Some deal with the wider conflict directly, some do not—though most mix the war and the not-war. Some chapters are split between two major subchapters that each take a different first person character that do not know each other or ever directly interact—though one character affects Horza, he’s got no idea how or who. Some, like during the long buildup to the climax, jump between characters’ perspectives rapidly—including a couple of single lines. I’m probably forgetting a couple of Banks’ main narrative tactics in the above list, but the point is that he varies the storytelling methods widely throughout the work. Yet the novel remains legible. He's a new writer experimenting. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But mostly it does.

4. Banks’ writing communicates effectively, and his descriptions are above average. But other than one portion, I never really marveled as the writing. That one portion starts with a beautiful description, then mixes description and action wonderfully:

... A sky like chipped ice, a wind to cut you to the body core. Too cold for snow, for most of the journey, but once for eleven days and nights it came, a blizzard over the field of ice we walked on, howling like an animal, with a bite like steel. The crystals of ice flowed like a single torrent over the hard and frozen land. You could not look into it or breathe; even trying to stand was near impossible. We made a hole, shallow and cold, and lay in it until the skies cleared.

We were the walking wounded, straggled band. Some we lost when their blood froze in them. One just disappeared, at night in a storm of snow. Some died from their wounds. One by one we lost them, our comrades and our servants. Every one begged us make what use we could of their corpse once they were gone. We had so little food; we all knew what it meant, we were all prepared; name a sacrifice more total, or more noble.

In that air, when you cried, the tears froze on your face with a cracking sound, like a heart breaking.

Mountains. The high passes we climbed to, famished in that thin and bitter air. The snow was white powder, dry as dust. To breathe it was to freeze from inside; flurries from the jagged slopes, dislodged by feet in front, stung in the throat like acid spray. I saw rainbows in the crystal veils of ice and snow which were the product of our passing, and grew to hate those colours, that freezing dryness, the starved high air and dark blue skies.

Three glaciers we traversed, losing two of our comrades in crevasses, beyond sight or sound, falling further than an echo's reach.

Deep in a mountain ring we came to a marsh; it lay in that scoop like a cess for hope. We were too slow, too stupefied, to save our Querl when he walked out into it and floundered there. We thought it could not be, with air so cold around us, even in that wan sunlight; we thought it must be frozen and we saw what only seemed to be, and our eyes would clear and he come walking back to us, not slip beneath that dark ooze, out of reach.

It was an oil marsh, we realised too late, after the tarry depths had claimed their toll from us. The next day, while we were still looking for a way across, the chill came harder still, and even that sludge locked itself to stillness, and we walked quickly to the other side.

In the midst of frozen water we began to die of thirst. We had little to heat the snow with save our own bodies, and eating that white dust until it numbed us made us groggy with the cold of it, slowing our speech and step. But we kept on, though the cold sucked at us whether awake or trying to sleep, and the harsh sun blinded us in fields of glittering white and filled our eyes with pain. The wind cut us, snow tried to swallow us, mountains like cut black glass blocked us, and the stars on clear nights taunted us, but on we came.

Near two thousand kilometres, little one, with only the small amount of food we could carry from the wreck, what little equipment had not been turned to junk by the barrier beast, and our own determination. We were forty-four when we left the battle cruiser, twenty-seven when we began our trek across the snows: eight of my kind, nineteen of the medjel folk. Two of us completed the journey, and six of our servants.

Do you wonder that we fell upon the first place we found with light and heat? Does it surprise you that we just took, and did not ask? We had seen brave warriors and faithful servants die of cold, watched each other wear away, as though the ice blasts had abraded us; we had looked into the cloudless, pitiless skies of a dead and alien place, and wondered who might be eating who when the dawnlight came. We made a joke of it at first, but later, when we had marched a thirty-day, and most of us were dead, in ice gullies, mountain ravines or raw in our own bellies, we did not think it so funny. Some of the last, perhaps not believing our course was true, I think died of despair.

We killed your human friends, these other Changers. I killed one with my own hands; another, the first, fell to a medjel, while he still slept. The one in the control room fought bravely, and when he knew he was lost, destroyed many of the controls. I salute him. There was another who put up a fight in the place where they stored things; he, too, died well. You should not grieve too much for them. I shall face my superiors with the truth in my eyes and heart. They will not discipline me, they will reward me, should I ever stand before them.

Other than this beautiful section, and a few others like it, It seems like Banks spent his energy mostly in thinking through the storytelling tactics and world building, rather than the writing. It’s a 471 page long book and these portions are too few and too far apart to really make me interested for just the writing. It’s like he turns his writing on in spurts, and typically stays with an economical, clear voice. That said, his writing rarely bored me, and I look forward to seeing if he becomes a better and more consistent writer in later works.

5. The theme is apparent enough, I think. At one point a character points it out fairly obviously:

That is the way with all of your kind. It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you are permitted in the universe, breeding when you can, so that the strongest strains survive and the weakest die. I would no more blame you for that than I would try to convert some non-sentient carnivore to vegetarianism. You are all on your own side.

It’s anti-war, but even more than that, it’s anti-conflict. The future-game Damage is described in a slightly silly way. And I can’t help but feel like he intentionally let the reader down with the quick ending, forcing them to contemplate what Horza’s quest and struggle was really for, ultimately realizing—through the appendices—that it might not have been for much. I mean, Horza himself gets pretty confused about the war: he’s initially anti-Culture before he ends up conflicted about them and the whole war. I think Banks skillfully points out that war is a gray area: it’s always some bad and some good. [Poking around the internet I found this by Banks himself, so my guess was pretty close:

“I've read so many SF books where the action is terribly, terribly important to the fate of everyone and everything. That fate of a whole planet can hang on the outcome of a protagonist's actions. Sometimes, the fate of the entire universe! Well, if you look at history, this is very unusual indeed. What usually happens is that people suffer and die and get involved in all sorts of mayhem and catastrophe and it doesn't make that much difference in the end. That was one of the ideas behind Consider Phlebas. There's a big war going on in that novel, and various individuals and groups manage to influence its outcome. But even being able to do that doesn't ultimately change things very much. At the book's end, I have a section pointing this out by telling what happened after the war, which was an attempt to pose the question, 'What was it all for?' I guess this approach has to do with my reacting to the cliché of SF's 'lone protagonist.' You know, this idea that a single individual can determine the direction of entire civilizations. It's very, very hard for a lone person to do that. And it sets you thinking what difference, if any, it would have made if Jesus Christ, or Karl Marx or Charles Darwin had never been. We just don't know.”]