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Randallw said:
The appendicies to the book said the religious aliens lost. Maybe the other books are better, I'll never know. I gave it a chance, he failed to interest me adequately.
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Consider Phlebas is, in my view, the weakest Culture novel.. however if you didn't like it, I'm not going to try and recommend the rest of the series to you. If you
do ever come across them in the library, however, The Player of Games and Use of Weapons are generally considered the best.
Player of Games also gives you a solid insight into day to day life in the Culture.
EDIT: also this;
http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~stefan/culture.html
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Randallw said:
The Culture destroying the ring world merely so the enemy don't get it reminds me of Soviet scorched earth policy.
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This bothered you, but the "destruction of war irrelevent culture orbitals, occasionally producing billions of deaths at a time" (quoting the appendix from memory) by the Idirans (for that is the name of the religious aliens) didn't?
Or the destruction of two stars in the Twin Novae battle, neither of which shone on unpopulated systems, by the Idirans?
(BTW; if you still have the novel you can safely read the Appendix's without giving away the end, the story is not about the war it merely uses it as a backdrop. They're pretty interesting, best part of the book in my opinion)
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Normally I would never support aliens over humans but the humans in the book aren't human, they're slaves to machines
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That's Horza's view. Horza absolutely dispises the Culture, which is why he works for the Idirans, even though the Idirans aren't exactly saints. He is a text book example of an unreliable narrator.