Consider Phlebas
Chapters - Iain M. Banks
Prologue
Chapter 2: The Hand of God 137
Horza, a Changer working for the Idirans, is rescued from execution by a Damage game being played aboard the warship. The rescue establishes who he is and why he is fighting against the Culture: not from ideology but from a specific revulsion at what the Culture represents.
Chapter 3: Clear Air Turbulence
Horza escapes the Clear Air Turbulence wreck with the mercenary crew who will form the novel's ensemble. The ship's ragged democracy and its mix of species and motivations is established as a counterpoint to the Culture's managed perfection.
Source: Conside Phlebas
Chapter 4: Temple of Light
Source: Conside Phlebas
Section: One
Source: Conside Phlebas
Chapter 5: Megaship
Source: Conside Phlebas
Chapter 6: The Eaters
The crew stops at a cannibal cult's island platform. One of the novel's most deliberate provocations: a sequence of extended grotesquerie that Banks uses to ask what the universe actually looks like without the Culture's civilising influence.
Source: Conside Phlebas
Section: Interlude: Interlude in darkness
An interlude chapter from the perspective of the war itself, showing the Culture's orbital and strategic overview. The gap between the intimacy of Horza's story and the scale of what surrounds it is the novel's central structural tension.
Source: Conside Phlebas
Chapter 7: A Game of Damage
Horza plays Damage, a game where the loser dies, against the cult leader. A set piece that crystallises the novel's interest in games, chance, and the arbitrary nature of survival in a universe that does not care who wins.
Chapter 8: The Ends of Invention
Section: Two
Chapter 9: Schar's World
Horza infiltrates Schar's World, the dead planet where the Idiran-sought Mind is hiding. The planet's nature as a place outside the war's jurisdiction, maintained by the Dra'azon, gives the mission its peculiar legal and moral texture.
Chapter 10: The Command System: Batholith
The crew descends into the Command System beneath Schar's World: a vast abandoned transit network that has become its own sealed world. The claustrophobic final act begins here.
Section: Three
Chapter 11: The Command System: Stations
The Command System's stations, each a different abandoned civilisation's waypoint. The archaeology of the tunnel system is doing what all the novel's set pieces do: showing the universe as a place where things end.
Chapter 12: The Command System: Engines
The engines of the Command System, and the approach to the Mind's location. Horza's mission is almost complete and almost everyone is dead.
Chapter 13: The Command System: Terminus
The terminus. The Mind is found and the final confrontation resolves everything - badly, for almost everyone involved. The novel's argument about the futility of opposing the Culture is made in full.
Chapter 14: Consider Phlebas
The chapter that gives the novel its title, named after a line from The Waste Land. The aftermath is described with deliberate flatness, and the epilogue establishes that the war was won by the Culture and that Horza's side of it meant nothing.
Epilogue
An epilogue of historical footnotes: what happened to the minor characters, what the war's outcome meant, and the ironic postscript that the Mind Horza died trying to prevent the Culture from recovering is now a valued member of Culture society.