Editing Consider Phlebas (section)

==History and theme==
''Consider Phlebas'', like most of Banks's early SF output, was a rewritten version of an earlier book, as he explained in a 1994 interview:

{{Blockquote|''Phlebas'' was an old one too; it was written just after ''The Wasp Factory'', in 1984. I've found that rewriting an old book took much more effort than writing one from scratch, but I had to go back to do right by these things. Now I can go on and start completely new stuff.<ref name="archive1">[https://web.archive.org/web/20071223184232/http://homepages.compuserve.de/Mostral/interviews/starlog94.htm Iain Banks - Interviews]. Web.archive.org (2007-12-23). Retrieved on 2014-05-25.</ref>}}On the theme of the novel, he said:{{bquote|There's a big war going on in that novel, and various individuals and groups manage to influence its outcome. But even being able to do that doesn't ultimately change things very much. At the book's end, I have a section pointing this out by telling what happened after the war, which was an attempt to pose the question, 'What was it all for?' I guess this approach has to do with my reacting to the cliché of SF's 'lone protagonist.' You know, this idea that a [[Great Man Theory|single individual]] can determine the direction of entire civilizations. It's very, very hard for a lone person to do that. And it sets you thinking what difference, if any, it would have made if [[Jesus Christ]], or [[Karl Marx]] or [[Charles Darwin]] had never been. We just don't know.<ref name="archive1"/>}}