Consider Phlebas: A Culture Novel (The Culture)

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That tooth is actually a "memoryform" containing a powerful laser gun that she uses to finally kill Xoxarle.

She works for the Special Circumstances branch of Contact, and despite being ambivalent about the methods they use, deeply believes in their objectives. Consider Phlebas is a “space opera,” which offers readers long action sequences filled with starships and laser guns, but there is also a sense of humor at work in Banks’s writing. Hugh Kenner, one of the great scholars of Modernism, explained this element well, arguing how the line evokes: “the manner in which Shakespeare, Homer, and the drawings of Michelangelo, Raphael, and the Magdalenian draughtsmen coexist in the contemporary cultivated consciousness: fragments, familiar quotations: poluphloisboio thalasse, to be or not to be, undo this button, one touch of nature, etc. All of it dust now, all of their precious humanoid civilization ground to junk under glaciers or weathered away by wind and spray and rain and frozen ice - all of it.A Culture Mind, fleeing the destruction of its ship in an Idiran ambush, takes refuge on Schar's World.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Peter Kenny, and most of Banks’ CULTURE books are narrated by him. Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Horza dies, and so does everyone on his ship, except for the drone and Balveda. Cities are built out of the ruins of previous cities, as The Waste Land is built out of the remains of older poems. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. It isn’t until Use of Weapons and Excession that Banks really starts to find form and make the Culture a focused as well as entertaining vehicle for his skills.She is awakened only around 430 years later once the terms are met — and kills herself only a few months later. After his friend’s edits, Eliot questioned whether he should keep Phlebas the Phoenician at all, but Pound was adamant he remain. The side stories may be fun from a space opera point of view, but they are simply digressive when evaluating the overall integrity of the book. It’s not a war of tribes or nations—it’s a war across planets, and it seems to be notably lacking in the glamor or heroics of certain other space operas about interplanetary war that one could name. Throughout the book there is a subplot about a Culture ethologist named Uagen Zlepe spending his time on a distant alien air sphere and discovering hints about the Chelgrian plot to destroy the Masaq' Orbital's Hub Mind.