Consider Phlebas

Consider Phlebas
First edition
AuthorIain M. Banks
Audio read byPeter Kenny
Cover artistRichard Hopkinson[1]
LanguageEnglish
SeriesThe Culture
GenreScience fiction
PublisherMacmillan
Publication date
23 April 1987
Publication placeScotland
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Pages471
ISBN0-333-45430-8
OCLC15197422
Followed byThe Player of Games 

Consider Phlebas, first published in 1987, is a space opera novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks. It is the first in a series of novels about an interstellar post-scarcity society called the Culture.

The novel revolves around the Idiran–Culture War, and Banks plays on that theme by presenting various microcosms of that conflict. Its protagonist Bora Horza Gobuchul is an enemy of the Culture.

Consider Phlebas is Banks's first published science fiction novel, and takes its title from a line in T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. A subsequent Culture novel, Look to Windward (2000), whose title comes from the previous line of the same poem, can be considered a loose follow-up.