History Literature / ConsiderPhlebas

* BetterToDieThanBeKilled: Lamm claims that his space suit contains a small nuke that he intends to detonate rather than be killed or captured, with the added implication that he'd also do it if someone pissed him off enough. [[spoiler:When the Megaship job goes south, Lamm and several other crewmembers are left behind, and in a fit of rage he proves that he wasn't kidding.]]

* AlwaysABiggerFish: The Dra'Azon are a race of almost unfathomably powerful EnergyBeings that [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence care little for the physical galaxy]] besides preserving {{Ghost Planet}}s as monuments to futility and destruction, including Schar's World. Neither the Culture ''or'' the Idirans want to risk pissing them off.

* AMillionIsAStatistic: The appendix notes that approximately 851.4 ''billion'' sentient beings were killed in the war which lasted over 48 years, to say nothing of the various orbitals, planets, and ''stars'' that were annihilated. The appendix further notes that this was basically a minor scrap, considering the scale of the galaxy in volume and inhabitants.

* ShootTheShaggyDog: [[spoiler:Horza dies, and so does everyone on his ship, except for the drone and Balveda. Balveda rescues the damaged Mind that Horza was attempting to retrieve. A post-war report at the end of the novel then goes on to say that Balveda later offs herself, and that Horza's species (the Changers) ceased to exist as a species.]]

* ThisCannotBe: {{Discussed}}, by the narration anyway. It's noted that a lesser AI might have this sort of reaction to learning that a human [[SuperIntelligence Referer]] can outsmart it, while the [[DeusEstMachina Culture Minds]] instead [[WowingCthulhu find this rather amusing]].

* ThisWasHisTrueForm: [[spoiler:Balveda has a moment invoking this trope as she takes Horza's corpse with her off the planet at the end, reminiscing that for all their interactions, this is the first time she has seen his real face.]]

* WhatMeasureIsANonHuman

* WhereAreTheyNowEpilogue: The book ends with a [[AnyoneCanDie brief]] summary of what happened to the surviving characters.

* AntiVillain: Horza is a shape-changing spy and assassin whose entire reason for being is to oppose the Culture, a human-descended utopian civilization, because he can't stand its core values. He is relentless and ruthless in his quest to carry out his mission, and hurts a lot of people along the way.

* VillainProtagonist: Horza is vehemently opposed to the Culture, which is of course the "heroes" of the series and which comes across even in this book as a lot more sympathetic than the ScaryDogmaticAliens that Horza is trying to help fight them. However, aside from a few brief point-of-view chapters from Culture characters, the book is all about Horza's trials and tribulations as he tries to capture a Culture Mind for Idiran study. [[spoiler:He ultimately fails and dies, though he does get recognised as a WorthyOpponent by his victorious enemies.]]

* AntiHero / AntiVillain: Horza is the former in respect to the novel, but could be seen as the latter to the extent that the Culture itself is the protagonist of the series.
* AthensAndSparta: A galactic-scale version with the Culture versus the Idirans. The former are a pleasure-seeking [[TheSingularity post-Singularity]] {{Utopia}} who love [[EverythingIsAnIpodInTheFuture sleek shiny technology]] and [[DeusEstMachina are ruled by their machines]], while the latter are a ProudWarriorRace of ScaryDogmaticAliens who utilise BoringButPractical technology and are convinced AIIsACrapshoot. Given that the Culture are determined to 'enlighten' the less developed civilisations in the galaxy and bring them round to their way of thinking, while the Idirans are more concerned about converting everybody to their religion, war between the two was pretty much inevitable.
* BanOnAi: the Idirans are against AI for religious reasons and use limiting devices to ensure their computers don't become sentient.

* BrickJoke: The Megaships. The [[SpacePirates Free Company]] that Horza joins attempts to steal weapons from one of the kilometers-long ships while visiting the Vavatch [[RingWorldPlanet orbital]], and much of the action depends on the size of the ship and how it leads to disaster for the mission. Later, when Horza attempts to escape a GSV sent to evacuate Vavatch, he passes by another Megaship that had been moved from the orbital; against the "general bay" it was stored in, even the ship looks like a "small city sitting on a great slab of metal."
%%* ChaseFight
* ChekhovsGun: [[spoiler:Balveda spits out a tooth during the final battle, apparently from an injury. It isn't. That tooth is actually a "memoryform" containing a powerful laser gun that she uses to ''finally'' kill Xoxarle.]]

* CruelAndUnusualDeath: At the start of the book, Horza has been outed as a shapeshifter by Balveda while infiltrating a low-tech planet, and they arrange for him a truly ''disgusting'' execution: a great feast is held, while Horza is chained up in a chamber which ''slowly, slowly fills with urine, filth and food waste until he drowns''. Luckily, the Idirans show up to bust him out.
** Balveda promises Horza she'll try and cross her legs, and skip the mains.

** Horza himself, even though he could just walk away from the mission, as he freely acknowledges.
* DitzyGenius: Fal N'geestra is an adventurous young ThrillSeeker who enjoys climbing mountains without safety equipment -- and also happens to be a Referer, one of an infinitesimally small number of the Culture's citizens who hold some form of precognitive ability allowing them to occasionally '''''outsmart the Minds'''''. This can almost literally be compared to outwitting ''God'', making her an extreme case of SmarterThanTheyLook.

* FatBastard: The Prophet of the [[ImAHumanitarian Eaters]]. [[NauseaFuel Yuck.]]

* LaserGuidedKarma: The disgusting cult leader "Prophet" Fwi-Song takes pleasure in [[ImAHumanitarian eating]] people who have displeased him alive. This proves his undoing when he decides to snack on one of Horza's fingers -- unaware that the Changer has extremely potent venom glands underneath his fingernails.

* ShurFineGuns: One character dies when his projectile weapon has a barrelcrash, meaning the blast waves of the explosive shells he's firing explode a shell while it's still traveling down the barrel.

* TempleOfDoom: The Temple of Light; [[spoiler:it's constructed from crystal blocks that turn shots from laser weapons back on the shooter]], among other tricky defenses.
** Of course since it had long ago been grown over with moss none of the pirates knew this until their laser guns started to burn away the moss.

* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: Thanks to the FatBastard ImAHumanitarian Prophet, Horza loses a finger. In fact, he has to pull the bones, now completely stripped of flesh, off his hand himself. No mention of his missing digit is ever made again. Did he regrow it? (He was changing to a semblance of Kraiklyn at the time) Are his crew just that incurious? Who knows?
* WhatMeasureIsANonCute / WhatMeasureIsANonHuman

%%* ZeroGSpot

* BunnyEarsLawyer: Fal N'geestra is an adventurous young ThrillSeeker who enjoys climbing mountains without safety equipment -- and also happens to be a Referer, one of an infinitesimally small number of the Culture's citizens who hold some form of precognitive ability allowing them to occasionally '''''outsmart the Minds'''''. This can almost literally be compared to outwitting ''God'', making her an extreme case of SmarterThanTheyLook.

* DrivenToSuicide: In the "[[WhereAreTheyNow Dramatis Personae]]" epilogue. [[spoiler:Despite successfully saving the lost Mind from the Idirans, after the war ended the Culture agent Balveda asks to be placed into suspended animation until the Culture could "statistically prove" that more people would have been killed, directly or indirectly, by Idiran oppression than actually died in the war, if the war had not taken place. She is awakened only around 430 years later once the terms are met -- and kills herself only a few months later.]]

* DrivenToSuicide: In the "[[WhereAreTheyNow Dramatis Personae]]" epilogue. [[spoiler:Despite successfully saving the lost Mind from the Idirans, after the war ended the Culture agent Balveda asks to be placed into suspended animation until the Culture could "statistically prove" that more people would have been killed, directly or indirectly, by Idiran oppression than actually died in the war. She is awakened only around 430 years later once the terms are met -- and kills herself only a few months later.]]

* DrivenToSuicide: In the "[[WhereAreTheyNow Dramatis Personae]]" epilogue. [[spoiler:Despite successfully saving the lost Mind from the Idirans, after the war ended the Culture agent Balveda asks to be placed into suspended animation until the Culture could "statistically prove" that more people would have been killed by the Idirans than actually died in the war. She is awakened only around 430 years later once the terms are met -- and kills herself only a few months later.]]