Consider Phlebas: A Culture Novel (The Culture)

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Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Played straight with the Idirans, at least until the appendices reveals this as an inversion. The Culture is willing to fight to the last against a civilization that is no physical threat to them based on ideology alone, while the Idirans went to war thanks to a runaway military-industrial complex, and want to cut the war short with a political settlement. So who are the real dogmatics?

Small Name, Big Ego: Kraiklyn, for the most part, comes off as a desperate wannabe badass-mercenary-leader, who, while a reasonably competent fighter, is terrible at planning heists and fails to portray his crew as anything more than the bunch of interstellar thugs they are. It was the Culture’s fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The” It’s not clear if Banks actually anticipated that his CULTURE series would eventually extend to 10 volumes, and mark him as a very literary and subversive practitioner of the SF genre, one who could be popular with a certain devoted fan base while at the same time thumbing his nose at the more low-brow wish-fulfillment aspects of space opera. Mostly likely he didn’t.What Happened to the Mouse?: Thanks to the Fat Bastard I'm a Humanitarian Prophet, Horza loses a finger. In fact, he has to pull the bones, now completely stripped of flesh, off his hand himself. No mention of his missing digit is ever made again. Did he regrow it? (He was changing to a semblance of Kraiklyn at the time) Are his crew just that incurious? Who knows? Failure Hero: Horza is a Failure Anti-Hero— barring his miraculous escape from The Ends Of Invention, almost everything he sets out to do goes horribly wrong... And it usually isn't even his fault, either.

Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The book ends with a brief summary of what happened to the surviving characters.Xoxarle, who — after Horza and company capture him following a Ray Gun fight — spews insults at the Changer in a futile attempt to get himself killed and reunite with his fallen comrades, rather than face the shame of being taken prisoner.