IMO it’s the weakest of the series. The next two books, The Player of Games or Use of Weapons are much better, at least to me. Use of Weapons is great, but has a somewhat challenging narrative structure of two intermixed timelines, so if that’s not your thing The Player of Games would probably be a good one to try.

Nice! It’s been a while since I’ve read any of his stuff. I should be done with my current book soon, what are a few of your favorites from him?

Have you read the other Culture books, or is this your first one? I just found out now that there’s !theculture@lemm.ee that could use some posts if you have anything you want to share about it. If you haven’t read it yet (or if anybody else is curious for a quick taste of the series), here’s the author writing a few notes on it:

http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

I thought this was also a good read, though it does have a few spoilers across the first few books:

https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2017/11/12/why-the-culture-wins-an-appreciation-of-iain-m-banks/

Listening to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy audiobook. I read it once ages ago, and am enjoying getting to all the good parts I only vaguely remember. It holds up pretty well, there’s a reason people are still quoting it. I use the term “excitingly chunky” to describe the “developer chic” style of buildings that are getting slung up around me.

The biggest issue so far is that Trillian is the most fleshed-out woman in the series, and she’s basically a cardboard cutout that has “girlfriend” hastily written on it. It might get better later on (I’m almost done with the 3rd book), but I don’t recall it happening. I know it’s not really the point of the series, but as someone that doesn’t tend to notice this sort of thing, it was very noticeable.