Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

by Iain M. Banks

The ship didn’t even have a name. It had no human crew because the factory craft which constructed it had been evacuated long ago. It had no life-support or accommodation units for the same reason. It had no class number or fleet designation because it was a mongrel made from bits and pieces of different types of warcraft; and it didn’t have a name because the factory craft had no time left for such niceties.

This is how you should always do exposition

He shook his head as best he could and roared back, “Frolk, you’re an idiot!” The old man shrank away as though hit. The Changer went on, “Can’t you see you’re going to be taken over anyway? Probably by the Idirans, but if not by them then by the Culture. You don’t control your own destinies anymore; the war’s stopped all that. Soon this whole sector will be part of the front, unless you make it part of the Idiran sphere. I was only sent in to tell you what you should have known anyway—not to cheat you into something you’d regret later. For God’s sake, man, the Idirans won’t eat you—” “Ha! They look as though they could! Monsters with three feet; invaders, killers, infidels… You want us to link with them? With three-strides-tall-monsters? To be ground under their hooves? To have to worship their false gods?” “At least they have a God, Frolk. The Culture doesn’t.” The ache in his arms was coming back as he concentrated on talking. He shifted as best he could and looked down at the minister. “They at least think the same way you do. The Culture doesn’t.”

This reads like a fantasy culture war with a Sci-Fi setting. I'm gonna love this.

“I really don’t understand you, Horza. You must know how many species, how many civilizations, how many systems, how many individuals have been either destroyed or… throttled by the Idirans and their crazy goddamned religion. What the hell has the Culture ever done compared to that?” One hand was on her knee, the other was displayed in front of Horza, clawed into a strangling grip. He watched her and smiled. “On a straight head count the Idirans no doubt do come out in front, Perosteck, and I’ve told them I never did care for some of their methods, or their zeal. I’m all for people being allowed to live their own lives. But now they’re up against you lot, and that’s what makes the difference to me. Because I’m against you, rather than for them, I’m prepared—” Horza broke off for a moment, laughing lightly, self-consciously. “… Well, it sounds a bit melodramatic, but sure—I’m prepared to die for them.” He shrugged. “Simple as that.”

The airlock didn’t open conventionally; it turned inside out and threw him into space, tumbling away from the flat disc of the cruiser in a tiny galaxy of ice particles. He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometers away. That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off… and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.

For what the Idirans regarded as essentially an animal (their word for humanoids was best translated as “biotomaton”), only the behavior of devotion was required; his heart and mind were of no consequence.

Whoever heard of a mortal body having an immortal soul?

He could not believe the ordinary people in the Culture really wanted the war, no matter how they had voted. They had their communist Utopia. They were soft and pampered and indulged, and the Contact section’s evangelical materialism provided their conscience salving good works. What more could they want? The war had to be the Minds’ idea; it was part of their clinical drive to clean up the galaxy, make it run on nice, efficient lines, without waste, injustice or suffering. The fools in the Culture couldn’t see that one day the Minds would start thinking how wasteful and inefficient the humans in the Culture themselves were.

There ought to have been a way of getting a head-up display on the inside of the helmet visor to show him what direction the signals were coming from, but he hadn’t enough time to familiarize himself completely with the suit, and he couldn’t find the right button. Then he realized he could probably just ask. “Suit! Give me a head-up on the transmission source!”

Oh, we're working with the fun Sci-Fi tech here

Zallin had finally risen from the deck and gone back to the others. Somebody sprayed anesthetic on his genitals. Thank goodness for non-retractables,

A Changer was a threat to anybody who ruled by force, either of will or of arms. Amahain-Frolk had known that, and so would Kraiklyn. There was also a degree of human-basic revulsion reserved for Horza’s species. Not only were they much altered from their original genetic stock, they were a threat to identity, a challenge to the individualism even of those they were never likely to impersonate. It had nothing to do with souls or physical or spiritual possession; it was, as the Idirans well understood, the behavioristic copying of another which revolted. Individuality, the thing which most humans held more precious than anything else about themselves, was somehow cheapened by the ease with which a Changer could ignore it as a limitation and use it as a disguise.

Yalson opened the deck and the tube hatch beneath, then Horza dropped Zallin’s gear into the cylinder and Yalson closed it again. The Changer liked the way Yalson smelled when he caught the scent of her warm, perspiring body, but somehow there was nothing in her attitude toward him to make him think they would ever become more than friends. He’d settle for a friend on this ship, though. He certainly needed one.

What a strange thing to say before voluntarily friendzoning yourself

he never sleeps. He has a… ah…” Yalson frowned, obviously looking for the right words. “… an enhanced hemispherical task-division in his brain. One third of the time one half sleeps and he’s a bit dreamy and vague; the other third of the time the other half sleeps and he’s all logic and numbers and he doesn’t communicate too well. The other third of the time, like when he’s in action or whenever there’s an emergency, both sides are awake and functioning. Makes it pretty hard to sneak up on him in his bunk.”

Cool as fuck sci-fi tech that you would never want in your body #1

suzerainty.

That one is going in the D&D dictionary

“You bet,” Horza said, standing and smiling. Kraiklyn opened the door for him. And for my next trick, thought Horza as soon as he was out of the cabin and walking down to the mess, my impression of… Captain Kraiklyn!

If this is where this is going, this books is going to be interesting.

Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.

Fal thought it must be very strange to live on a planet and have to look over a curve; so that, for example, you would see the top of a seaship appear over the horizon before the rest of it.

“This Mind went underneath the planet in hyperspace?” she said. “Then warped inside?” “That was what it said it was trying to do when it sent the coded message in its destruct pattern. As the planet is still there it must have succeeded. Had it failed, at least half a percent of its mass would have reacted with the planet’s own material as though it was antimatter.” “I see.” Fal scratched at one cheek with a finger. “I thought that wasn’t supposed to be possible?” Her voice contained the question. She looked at Jase. “What?” it said. “Doing…” She scowled at not being immediately understood and waved one hand impatiently. “… Doing what it did. Going under something so big in hyperspace and then bouncing over. I was told even we couldn’t do that.” “So was the Mind in question, but it was desperate. The General War Council itself decided that we should try to duplicate the feat, using a similar Mind and a spare planet.”

Another absolutely terrifying sci-fi concept

She looked at the machine again. “So what happened? It’s a Planet of the Dead; did the natives eventually do it to themselves?” “With biological weapons, not nukes, to the last humanoid, eleven thousand years ago.”

I swear to the gods if this dead planet is Earth

“There is a small base on Schar’s World, as there is on almost all the Planets of the Dead. As usual it is staffed from a small, nominally neutral, nondynamic society of some galactic maturity—” “The Changer,” Fal broke in,

Guess not

“Just supposing it did happen, Jase,” Fal said, screwing up her eyes and leaning forward to look at the machine, “so what? Would it really make any difference? What would happen if the Idirans did get their hands on this admittedly resourceful kid Mind?” “Assuming that we are going to win the war…” Jase said thoughtfully, “… it could lengthen the proceedings by a handful of months.” “And how many’s that supposed to be?” Fal said. “Somewhere between three and seven, I suppose. It depends whose hand you’re using.”

Smart ass ship mind

“I remember…” Wubslin said slowly, staring at the band of brilliant blue and white on the screen, “when I was very young one of my teachers floated a little toy metal boat on the surface of a bucketful of water. Then she lifted the bucket by the handle and held me up against her chest with her other arm, so that I was facing the same way she was. She started to go round and round, faster and faster, letting the spin send the bucket out away from her, and eventually the bucket was straight out, the surface of the water in it at ninety degrees to the floor, and I was held there with this great big adult hand across my belly and everything spinning around me and I was watching this little toy boat, which was still floating on the water, even though the water was straight up and down in front of my face, and my teacher said, ‘You remember this if you’re ever lucky enough to see the Megaships of Vavatch.’ ” “Yeah?” Lamm said. “Well, they’re about to let the fucking handle go.”

What a weirdly apt analogy for blowing up an orbital ring.

I think Ghalssel’s the subject of Kraiklyn’s wet dreams. Thinks the guy’s a fucking hero. Shit.” “Yalson,” Horza said into the woman’s ear, her hair tickling his nose, “one: how does Kraiklyn have wet dreams if he doesn’t sleep? And two: what if he has these cabins bugged?”

The control of the ship depended on an audio-visual identity link; Kraiklyn’s face was recognized by the craft’s computer, as was his voice when he said, “This is Kraiklyn.” It was that simple. The ship had once had a retina recognition lock as well, but it had malfunctioned long before and been removed. Horza was pleased; copying somebody’s retina pattern was a delicate and tricky operation, requiring, among a lot of other things, the careful growth of lasing cells around the iris. It almost made more sense to go for a total genetic transcription, where the subject’s own DNA became the model for a virus which left only the Changer’s brain—and, optionally, gonads—unaltered. That wouldn’t be necessary to impersonate Captain Kraiklyn, however.

Oh, that’s one thing I shouldn’t really have to remind you about; don’t try to use your AG on the place, OK? Anti-gravity works against mass, not spin, so you’d end up taking an unexpected bath if you jumped over the side expecting to fly round to the bows.”

Nice little detail to call out

My God, he thought, looking at the scorch marks and the smoke, that maniac had a nuke after all. Then the shock wave hit.

Cool as fuck sci-fi tech that you would never want in your body #2

“Radiation…” He shook his head. “Nothing serious,” he said. “Low on neutrons…” He grimaced with pain. “Pretty clean bomb; probably not what that bastard wanted at all. He should take it back to the shop….” Mipp gave a small, strangled, despairing laugh.