Started reading with Consider Phlebas and got to "The Eaters" and stopped reading. This series is too disturbing, horrifying, and gross for me.
Started reading with Consider Phlebas and got to "The Eaters" and stopped reading. This series is too disturbing, horrifying, and gross for me.
Banks does have an unfortunate tendency to wade into straight up torture porn to make a point of how awesome Culture is compared to everything else. The stuff in Phlebas is actually fairly mild in comparison to some of the other things in the series. E.g. in "The Player of Games", the entire story is about an explicitly sadistic culture where torture is normalized as entertainment. In "Surface Detail", we're introduced to the notion of virtual Hells - simulated environments into which mind-states of the deceased (or sometimes living) people is placed specifically to torment them for as long as the simulation continues.
I think that Phlebas scene is probably the most viscerally unpleasant in any of the Culture books, except possibly some of the hell stuff. Far, far worse things are depicted elsewhere, but not with the same level of horrifying detail.
Do any of his works not have this stuff? I've heard so many good things about the series, but I'm really not interested in torture porn.
Honestly, except for that one scene in Phlebas, and some of the stuff in Surface Detail, there's not _that_ much of it in his Culture books.
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