Matter by Iain M. Banks

This was a very enjoyable book. Instead of focusing entirely on the primitive areas or the Culture, it explores the intersection of the two and reminds the readers that the Culture is still a newcomer in this universe. This one was far better than the previous couple I read.

Pages: 624

Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks

These Culture books are due back rather soon (perhaps even yesterday), so I'm not reading other things between. This book was okay, certainly more interesting than the last one. I have a difficult time telling whether I'm less interested as the stories continue because I've read lots of stories or because they are actually getting lamer. The Culture idea is really nifty, but is most interesting when I'm learning something new about the universe, not when I'm just following around a couple characters and when it is generic sci-fi/space opera.

Pages: 357

Inversions by Iain M. Banks

Another Culture novel that doesn't directly show any of the Culture. There are two characters that are from the Culture, but they are pretending to be from faraway places on a plant that doesn't yet have reliable gunpowder-based weapons. The story here was kind of interesting, but only okay. This was a fast read. The next book is more interesting.

Pages: 343

Excession by Iain M. Banks

Another Culture book. I interrupted my reading of Palimpsest because at least the Culture books aren't completely depressing/desperate stories, but more on Palimpsest later.

The main thing that struck me about Excession is how the Culture novels tend to use the story premise that a ship (fully sentient) decides that it will only talk to one person. The rest of the Culture always needs information or some action from that particular ship for some reason, so everything comes down to one person agreeing to go do some random thing, usually just for about a week. It seems a bit much that this giant society depends on specific individuals for anything, particularly given that it is a decentralized society. But the book was still fairly enjoyable.

Pages: 499

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks

The third Culture novel. I didn't care for this one nearly as much for a few reasons. First, the novel dealt mostly with non-Culture people, so it wasn't about the differences between how people normally think and how people in Culture think. Second, I didn't enjoy the split way the story was told, jumping between things that happened in the past (where generally bad things were happening) and things that happen now in a way that didn't explain anything until the end of the book. Then, when I got to the end of the book, I found that I actually didn't want to know anything about the scenes from the past. Third, I did not like the main character, a feeling that was strongly amplified by the ending of the book. I am glad that I read this book because I expect some of the later books to reference Use of Weapons, but this was not a particularly enjoyable read itself.

Pages: 512

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

Second book in the Culture series. Two things particularly interested me in this story. The first was an interesting ecosystem of one of the worlds. Jupiter has the storms that never end, the great red eye; this plant has a single band of land around the equator and there is a fire that moves around the plant on a yearly basis. I enjoyed that Banks wrote out some of the ecosystem instead of leaving all the background just in his head. The second interesting part was the plot itself. Banks told the old story of  "outsider comes in, beats everyone at some game, and wins the kingdom/empire" from the perspective of the gamer. He made the empire a horrible place, but didn't try to lecture me about it. The story was a story, with only enough didactic overtones to build a better understanding of the culture the outsider came from for the rest of the books in the series.

Pages: 416