Stands up well on rereading, 30 years after the late Blessed Iain M. first delighted up with his canny, rich and witty snapshots of life in the Culture, his post-scarcity, post-irony and post-Singularity society. The humanoids are just as angst-ridden, the planets just as bizarre and the AIs just as snarky as I remembered.
If I have one quibble, it's that there is some serious padding: there are one-and-a-half unnecessary chapters, and the final showdown in the abandoned tunnels beneath the ice-bound Planet of the Dead is ground out almost beyond endurance. But I don't blame Banks: the fashion in the 80s for SF novels was for doorstop length.
If I have one quibble, it's that there is some serious padding: there are one-and-a-half unnecessary chapters, and the final showdown in the abandoned tunnels beneath the ice-bound Planet of the Dead is ground out almost beyond endurance. But I don't blame Banks: the fashion in the 80s for SF novels was for doorstop length.
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