They both stared at the dark network of threat and promise arrayed before them.

“There is still going to be some degree of blame involved in all this though, isn’t there?” Veppers asked quietly. “No matter how precisely targeted and quickly over it all is; some retribution will be required.”

“Good grief, yes!” Bettlescroy exclaimed. “That’s precisely why we intend to frame the Culture for everything!”

There are three main interlinked plots:

• Lededje an indentured servant to Veppers is murdered by him. She unexpectedly is resurrected on a Culture ship and begins her many day journey back to home planet Sichult in order to get revenge. She eventually finds her way back thanks to the Culture ship Demeisen. Demeisen gives Lededje a new, highly customizable tattoo as a “disguise” during the trip.

• Shortly thereafter, Yime Nsokyi a Quietus agent, is assigned to catch up with and contact Lededje because they suspect the Hell war will pop into “the real” and it will involve Veppers/Sichult. They think that Lededje will want to contact the ship, “Me I’m Counting” (because his avatar implanted Lededje’s neural lace and took a 4D picture of her)at the Vesperine Wisp on an unfallen Bulbitian. (but that doesn’t happen) Something catastrophic happens there and she is severely injured but, healed, eventually makes it to Sichult.

• Conveniently Veppers is running a scam concurrently: His business runs a significant part of Hell on computers located under Espersium his ancestral estate. But he knows that the business will eventually have to close so he decides to have it destroyed and blame it on the Culture. He agrees to preserve the hells for the NR and agrees to destroy the hells with the GFCF. So this is “intergalactic arson” (presumably he has tons of insurance.) and he is double crossing the NR as well as scam/slandering the Culture. Anyway this scheme also involves building a fleet of warships out at the Tsungarial Disk who are to impersonate Culture ships which will carry out the attack on Espersium.

• This all culminates with both Lededje and Yime Nsokyi receiving last minute evidence of Veppers malfeasance so they show up just in time to catch Veppers in the last half hour before fake fleet is to carry out Nuclear destruction at his estate removing some art/keepsakes. Yime appears and tells Veppers he’s in trouble; Veppers shoots at Yime so she takes off. But Lededje shows up and chases Veppers into the water maze and with the help of the tattoo which, is, in fact, alive they kill Veppers by straining / garroting him. And they lived happily ever after.

Note how nice it is that (originally intagliated) Lededje’s revenge on Veppers comes in the form of a tattoo.

I am skipping over the sub-plots, Chay in Hell, Prin testifying before a legislative subcommittee, Vatueil’s various fights, Auppi’s anti-smatter activities.

I have simplified the plot, but really its the revenge of resurrected Lededje on Veppers. All the other plot lines are pretty contrived and simply exist to entertain and support the revenge plot. Everything else that happens, all of Vepper’s schemes, the smatter outbreak, is eyecandy, beautifully, lushly described settings, characters and plot devices. And let’s not forget ship names.

Conflict

We’re losing, he thought again. There is a war in heaven and we are losing it.

The war was amongst the Heavens, between the Afterlives, if you wanted to be pedantic about it. And it was over the Hells.

The War in Heaven seems to be the “conflict” in this novel but while it serves as the background impetus for lots of action it is never a contest; the only justification for the Hells given is that they have always existed and this is “argued” in chapter 22, but not seriously. The War in Heaven is a plot device. The conflict is Lededje revenge on Veppers, but Veppers is a villain, a comical villain who has had his nose bitten off. There is no empathy for him:

"At least people who were natural winners knew how to carry themselves in their pomp, whether their ascendancy had come through the luck of being born rich and powerful or the luck of being born ambitious and capable. Losers who’d made it always let the side down. Veppers was all for arrogance – he possessed the quality in full measure himself, as he’d often been informed – but it had to be deserved, you had to have worked for it. Or at the very least, an ancestor had to have worked for it."

Characters

• Joiler Veppers (et al) The Villain owner of Veprine Corporation with a very “punchable face”
• Lededje Y’breq an intagliate (fancy tattooed) slave (indentured servant) murdered by Veppers
• Vatueil Mercenary for Anti-Hell
• Yime Nsokyi Culture Citizen, Quietus agent
• Prin male Pavluvian survivor of Hell
• Chay mate of Prin, Pavluvian, stuck in Hell
• Sensia avatar of “Sense amid madness, wit amidst folly”
• Himerance avatar of “Me I’m Counting”
• Demeisen avatar of “Falling outside Moral Constraints”
• Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III - Admiral in GFCF navy
• Auppi Unstril a culture operative (a Restoria grunt), independently fighting the “smatter” outbreak

Factions : Tech : Pro/Anti Hell

• Sichult Enablement : 4/5 : Pro
• Nauptre Reliquaria : 8 : Pro
• Geseptian Fardesile Cultural Federacy (GFCF) : 7 second class Culture clone more or less : pro
• Culture : 8 : Anti
• Jhlupe : 7/8? ???

Other factions

• “Special Circumstances” SC The umbrella “spy” organization of the Culture.
• “Contact” : the foreign service of the Culture
• “Quietus” : a department of SC dedicated to the dead/afterlives. nicknamed “probate”
• “Restoria” : the dept of SC dedicated to eradicating Smatter outbreaks. “Pest Control”

Settings

• Ubruater capital of Sichult
• Espersium Vepper’s estate complete with mansion, 90km from Ubruater

The great torus-shaped mansion of Espersium sat near the centre of the estate of the same name. Espersium was easily the largest private estate in the world. Had it been a country its land area would have ranked it as the fifty-fourth largest out of the sixty-five states that still had some administrative significance in the unified world that was Sichult.

• Semsarine Wisp - Unfallen Bulbitian : had been the losers in a great war long ago. The things that people now called Bulbitians – Fallen or otherwise – had been the species’ primary habitats: substantial space structures which looked like two great, dark, heavily decorated cakes joined base to base. They averaged about twenty-five kilometres measured either across their diameter or from pinnacle to pinnacle, so were relatively small by habitat standards, though of respectable size compared to the spacecraft of most other civilisations." “The Bodhisattva entered the six-thousand-kilometre-wide bubble of cloudy air surrounding the Bulbitian very slowly, like a thick needle somehow persuading the balloon it was penetrating not to pop, out of sheer politeness.”
• interior of SAMWAF ship
• Cavern City Vebezua - “They sat in a paper boat floating on a lake of mercury, lit by a single distant ceiling hole producing a searchlight shaft of luminescence. Veppers had brought an ingot of pure gold specially. He took his mask off for a moment. “Plop it in,” he told Jasken.”
• Tsungarial Disk: “Lots of abandoned alien factories no one’s allowed to use … mostly,” the avatar said, nodding. “Anyway, the smatter got into the Disk sometime in the dim and distant and one of our infuriatingly well-meaning Can-we-help? teams has been in there sitting on top of it for probably longer than’s really been necessary – you know; one of those jobs you make sure you never quite finish because you like being where you are?"
• the water maze on the grounds of Espersium where mock naval battles are conducted.

Races/Species

• Pavluvean : “metre-and-half-long quadrupeds with large, round heads from which issued small twin trunks, highly prehensile probosces with little lobes at the tip resembling stubby fingers.”
• GFCF : “Pan-human, smaller and more delicate than the average but generally reckoned to be quite beautiful, with large heads and large eyes,”

Plot Devices

• “Smatter” : “Runaway nanotech. Swarmata. Remains of an MHE: a Monopathic Hegemonising Event. Sometimes known as a hegswarm. Your eyes have gone glazed. Anyway, some of that stuff got into the Disk … you do know what the Disk is?”

• “Neural Lace” : an implanted device which records and backs up human memory to be transmitted upon near death (so that the wearer is effectively resurrected) This is how Lededje is resurrected.

• “Confliction” : Virtual war run entirely in computers to resolve conflicts without “real war”.

• Murderer Class Culture General Offensive Unit (GOU) the oldest model

• Torturer Class GOU the next model

• Abominator Class GOU the ultimate model (Falling outside Moral Constraints)