Babylon's Ashes contains examples of:
- Analogy Backfire: Marco re: Fred Johnson:Marco: He is my white whale, and I will hunt him to the end of time.Rosenfeld: Didn't finish reading that book did you?
- Ascended Extra: Michio Pa is promoted to a POV character.
- Batman Gambit: During a dogfight between the Rocinante and the Pella, the Pella figures out how to dodge railgun fire. Bobbie manages to trick the Pella into dodging directly into a cloud of PDC fire.
- Doomed Moral Victor: Fred Johnson dies while en route to a conference to unify the OPA and end the faction fighting that has allowed Marco's Belter Free Navy to disrupt the entire system. Marco's forces attempted to intercept the Rocinante but lost the battle; however, Fred suffered a severe stroke while under high-g boost.
- Graceful Loser: Anderson Dawes. After Fred Johnson's death and being excluded from power, he secretly convinces the rest of the OPA cabal to join forces with Holden as his final act.
- Heel Realization: Filip belatedly realizes what he has done and who Marco is and goes AWOL on Callisto.
- Karma Houdini:
- Pa and her crew do not only escape any responsibility for their raiding innocent supply ships but she ends up the head of the Trade Union.
- Filip Inaros, who stole the stealth paint for the asteroids, also got away with aiding his father in the deadliest terrorist attack ever without punishment by going AWOL and changing his name.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Nico Sanjrani explains to Michio Pa that the Free Navy, in plunging Earth into an impact winter, has vastly overestimated the capabilities of non-Earth agriculture, and that without Earth to feed the rest of the system, there won't be enough supplies to last 4 years.
- Shout-Out:
- The Martian and Atlas Shrugged: Two of the ships in Michio Pa's fleet are named after these books' protagonists:In the middle column, the colony ships she and her fleet had taken: the Bedyadat Jadida, out of Luna. The John Galt and the Mark Watney, out of Mars.
- Another ship is named the Hornblower
- Two characters make literary references, one to Moby-Dick and another to the "How can man die better" passage from the Horatius poem of Lays of Ancient Rome.
- Holden wants to call the new Belter government the spacing guild
- The Martian and Atlas Shrugged: Two of the ships in Michio Pa's fleet are named after these books' protagonists:
- Pyrrhic Victory: Marco's victories over the combined Earth-Mars-OPA fleets cost him significantly, losing him ships, territory, supplies, and support from the remaining Free Navy captains. Marco, being Marco, is too wrapped up in himself to realize this.
- Summon Bigger Fish: Trapped in the slow zone and faced with Marco Inaros' superior fleet, Naomi reviews Medina Station's flight logs and devises a plan to overload the ring network. When Marco tries to cross, his entire fleet gets eaten by something dark and sinuous.
- We ARE Struggling Together: Marco's Belter Free Navy with respect to Fred Johnson's more moderate OPA, and Pa's fleet in relation to Marco's Belter Free Navy. The OPA itself is little more than a coalition of disparate factions with few unifying factors other than a hatred of Earth and Mars.
