With a middle initial, like Iain M. Banks, the famous author of “The Wasp Factory”, “Crow Road”, “Business”, “Streets of Despair” and other novels beloved by the domestic reader, not for the faint of heart, publishes his science fiction. “Remember the Phlebe" is the first book of the famous cycle about Culture, a standard of intellectual space opera of a new type, a SF debut comparable in power only to Dan Simmons' "Hyperion". We bring to your attention one episode of the war between the anarcho-hedonistic Culture with its artificial intelligences and the Idiran Empire with its continuous jihad. A war that lasted half a century, claimed almost a trillion lives, almost a hundred million ships and more than fifty planets. In this episode, the focus of the confrontation was the forbidden Planet of the Dead, called the World of Shkar, and the mutator Bora Horza Gobuchul...