The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and - worse - random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender.
Within the cosmic confliict, an individual crusade. Deep inside a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed by mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, to actually find it, and with it their own destruction.
Consider Phlebas - a space opera of stunning power and awesome imagination.
PRAISE OF IAIN M. BANKS
"Banks is a phenomenon: the wildly successful, fearlessly creative author of brilliant and disturbing non-genre novels, he's equally at home writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance." - William Gibson
"Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth." - New York Review of Science Fiction
"Poetic, humorous, baffling, terrifying, sexy - the books of Iain M. Banks are all these things and more." - NME
"There is now no British SF writer to whose work I look forward with greater keenness." - The Times (London)