Alastair Reynolds/YMMV

• Magnificent Bastard: If there's a main character who isn't an everyman or a Badass, they tend to fit this. Clavain alone has pretty much been the Julius Beethoven Da Vinci of Magnificent Bastardry, due to living over four hundred years. John Armstrong Brannigan, however, has him beat; Complete Monster though he may have been, his past actions (see The Atoner, lower on this page) definitely qualify in a huge way, and he claims to have been old before Clavain was born.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The Amarantin, who use sentient races as bait to see if the Inhibitors are still extant.
  • Sky Haussman in Chasm City jettisoning more than half of the cryogenic sleep units from the generation ship he's controlling, so that he can engage the anti-matter rockets later, and beat the other colonization ships to the surface.
• The Stoic: One of the main criticisms of Reynold's early novels like the first Revelation Space book is that most of the characters act like this. Later novels has less of this.
• Mohs Scale of Sci Fi Hardness: Are we sure this is hard science fiction? More than that, harder than hard, like we often say of this writer? Because his books have centaurs and other fantasy beasts in them, described as such.