Consider Phlebas (Culture, #1)

by Iain M. Banks

and an ambience of moral relativity

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.

Here we are, she thought, killing the immortal, only just stopping short of tangling with something most people would think of as a god, and here am I, eighty thousand light-years away if I’m a meter, supposed to think of a way out of this ridiculous situation.

The fat prophet’s cruel faith was little different from a million others; only the degree of its barbarity made it unusual in these supposedly civilized times.

there was ample common ground between insanity and religious belief,

Grow up. Behave. Prepare.

just one more species, which would grow and expand and then, finding the plateau phase all non-suicidal species eventually arrived at, settle down.

The Culture would treat the destruction of the craft’s consciousness as murder.

The woman in the mess room was Perosteck Balveda.

“Two?” the drone on the table said to nobody in particular. “I’m stuck in a leaky museum-piece with two paranoid lunatics?”

Unaha-Closp sat in a chair, strapped against its back, pointing straight up at the ceiling. “I trust,” it said, “we’re not going to have the same sort of flying-circus job we had to endure the last time you flew this heap of debris.”

With the exception of the seas—which still contained fish, but no longer any mammals—the

Another failure, she thought bitterly. But it was a young, unstable sort of bitterness, a kind of fake, something she assumed for a while, like a child trying on adult clothes.

The man was a speciesist!