I listened to Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks on Audible. It is the first book in the Culture series. I picked up the book on Audible soon after listening to this podcast episode of People by WTF between Nikhil Kamath and Elon Musk (Episode 16).
I had heard about the Culture series from this blog post by Vitalik Buterin after first reading the book as a college-goer. He was looking for AI futures in which we would want to live in. Vitalik describes the book as follows:
The Culture series features a far-future interstellar civilization primarily occupied by two kinds of actors: regular humans, and superintelligent AIs called Minds.
This description of the series did not get me to read the book, though. This was in 2023.
Musk talks about how energy will replace money as the ultimate currency. He says:
Energy is the real, is the true currency. This is why I said Bitcoin is based on energy. You can’t legislate energy. You can’t just pass a law and suddenly have a lot of energy.
He then pointed to Iain Bank’s Culture series as a good example of a depiction of a society that operates without money. I would discount the timeline he provides in the podcast but perhaps, not the direction. If the world were being built by engineers, this is the direction it would take.
After I picked up the book on Audible, I listened to it on my drives to work.
The title of the book is taken from a poem by T S Eliot, called The Waste Land (in Section 4), which is a brief description of a drowned merchant. The Waste Land, written in 1922, is a poem said to be about spiritual emptiness, disillusionment, and the breakdown of society after the First World War.
The end of the story reminded me of the Malayalam movies of the 1980s, where heroes died at the end. Since, this book was written in 1987, I wasn’t surprised.
I really liked the names of spaceships being longer than just a single or a couple of words. I liked how I guess the author struggled in the bribing scenarios in the book because of a lack of meaningful money. I found the clash between a religious humanity and an AI interesting. I look forward to reading the rest of the series. I may not read the next book in the series, though.
I finished the book a few days into the New Year and I am happy to score this as the first book I completed in 2026. I need to make notes the next time when I hear something interesting.
Parallel Spirals 