YMMV / The Culture

• Complete Monster:
  • The Player of Games: Emperor-Regent Nicosar of Azad is a master player of the ruthless game of Azad that determines everything in the empire's society. A sadistic psychopath, Nicosar rules via torture, murder and brutality while broadcasting regular videos to the population with the "losers" facing mutilation, death or rape. Women are also seen as second-rate citizens, with abuse and violence towards them accepted, and any females who assault a male are summarily tortured to death. Despite his seemingly benevolent and passive façade, Nicosar rules over the Empire with an iron fist, regularly executing any who would try to rebel against him, and subjecting his own men to terrible torments should they cross him. When Nicosar plays the novel's hero Gurgeh, Nicosar is bested in Azad and orders his guards to massacre all the spectators, deciding if he has to go down, he'll simply kill every single one of his own subjects in the process.
  • Use of Weapons: Ethnarch Kerian, the decadent despot of Youricam who serves as the introductory Asshole Victim for mercenary protagonist Cheradenine Zakalwe, has kept himself alive and youthful for decades through "retro-ageing" technology, harvesting the organs of dissidents for himself. Kerian obtained this technology by brokering a deal with Zakalwe, promising to stop his genocidal killings—which he promptly started up again as soon as Zakalwe was off-world, having his undesirables rounded up into "death trains" and gassed, entire villages at a time.
  • Surface Detail: Joiler Veppers is a wealthy playboy who once ruined the life of a supposed friend of his to get rich and take the man's daughter Lededje as his own. Regularly raping Lededje, Veppers murders her when she tries to escape, unaware her mind survives thanks to a neural race. Veppers also gets richer by selling and running artificial hells where the minds of countless victims on multiple worlds are tortured in horrific simulations for eternity. Worried that the anti-hell factions will win, Veppers arranges for an alien race to raze his estates into ashes with most of the innocent staff still there, all to avoid a loss in profits.
• Friendly Fandoms: There is a lot of friendly overlap with fans of the Xeelee Sequence series, despite both books being the complete tonal opposite of one another. The friendliness is due to the fact that they are both space operas that deal with immense scale and power capabilities with a heavy theme on transhumanism and far-future societal changes. Likewise, both the Xeelee and the Culture are often popular benchmarks in versus forums for 'top-tier' Sci-Fi factions, with the Culture being agreed as the most powerful Sci-Fi civilization short of time-travel whereas the Xeelee being the most powerful Sci-Fi civilization short of comic book level omnipotence.
• Magnificent Bastard: Vateuil in Surface Detail is a ruthless soldier who starts out fighting for the Pro-Hell side in War on heaven, working to sabotage the Anti-Hell side. However, Vateuil opts to sabotage the Pro-Hell side, sabotaging them and helping the novel's heroes to ensure the death of the hell side. A genius strategist, Vatueil manipulates and uses everyone over the course of the novel with none the wiser, possibly even working for the mysterious culture. In the novel's final line, Vateuil's true identity is revealed to be a repentant Elethiomel Zakalwe, the Chairmaker, who has been seeking his redemption for centuries.

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