Consider Phlebas

Consider Phlebas, first published in 1987, is a space opera novel by the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks and the first in a series of novels about an interstellar post-scarcity society called the Culture. The novel is deliberately not a tour of the Culture: its guide despises the society, and much of the book takes place among people who are outside it or at war with it.

The novel revolves around the Idiran-Culture War and plays on that theme by showing microcosms of it rather than the whole. The protagonist, Bora Horza Gobuchul, is an enemy of the Culture, so the reader's guide through the setting is someone who rejects it, which is how the book establishes a utopia without making it the point of view.

It was Banks's first published science fiction novel, though he had already published mainstream fiction, and its title comes from a line in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. A later Culture novel, Look to Windward, published in 2000, takes its title from the preceding line of the same poem and can be read as a loose follow-up, which is typical of how loosely the series is connected.