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The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There... read more

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  • “Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn't it been clever? Yes, it had.”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • “Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot,”
    Highlighted by 75 Kindle customers
  • experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
    Highlighted by 57 Kindle customers
  • Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.
    Highlighted by 34 Kindle customers
  • Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth.
    Highlighted by 30 Kindle customers
  • Horza recalled that the Culture’s attitude to somebody who believed in an omnipotent God was to pity them, and to take no more notice of the substance of their faith than one would take of the ramblings of somebody claiming to be Emperor of the Universe. The nature of the belief wasn’t totally irrelevant—along with the person’s background and upbringing, it might tell you something about what had gone wrong with them—but you didn’t take their views seriously.
    Highlighted by 24 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 24 Kindle customers
  • The Culture was every single individual human and machine in it, not one thing. Just as it could not imprison itself with laws, impoverish itself with money or misguide itself with leaders, so it would not misrepresent itself with signs.
    Highlighted by 24 Kindle customers
  • it was still a triumphant testimony to the power of God, as God had made Man, and all other souled creatures. Horza had disagreed, genuinely annoyed that the woman could use even something so obviously a testament to the power of intelligence and hard work as an argument for her own system of irrational belief.
    Highlighted by 22 Kindle customers
  • Of the entire range of the electromagnetic spectrum, the unaided human eye could see little more than one percent: a single octave of radiation out of an immense long keyboard of tones.
    Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 10 Kindle customers
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First Sentence edit see section history

The ship didn't even have a name.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Prologue

1. Sorpen
2. The Hand of God 137
3. Clean Air Turbulence
4. Temple of Light
State of play: one
5. Megaship
6. The Eaters
Interlude in Darkness
7. A Game of Damage
8. The Ends of Invention
State of play: two
9. Schar's World
10. The Command System: Batholith
State of play: three
11. The Command System: Stations
12. The Command System: Engines
13. The Command System: Terminus
14. Consider Phlebas

Appendices: The Idiran-Culture War
Reasons: the Culture
Reasons: the Idirans
The war, briefly

Dramatis personae

Epilogue

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 1 of 10 in The Culture. (standard series)

Followed by The Player of Games.

This book is in Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. (authoritative list)
This is book 83 of 99 in National Public Radio's Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy. (authoritative list)
This is book 19 of 24 in io9 Science Fiction 101. (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Iain Banks (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Macmillan
Country: United Kingdom
Publication Date: 1987
ISBN: 0333441389
Page Count: 471

Classification edit see section history

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Reading Level: Adults

Moderate violence, strong language, implied / nondescriptive sexual activity

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Revelation Space
  • Redemption Ark
  • Absolution Gap

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