Similar reading experience to The Expanse with a bit more levity, and less corny dialogue IMO. Similar depth of character / plot (or lack thereof). Enjoyable because of the genre more so than the quality of writing. Some highlights to wet the potential reader's whistle:

• Idiran ships (with serious, droll names), including: Hand of God 137 (which exists alongside over 100 other ships with the same name)

• The Culture doesn't take warfare seriously and tries to prevent themselves from having to engage with the realities of slaughtering Idirans by naming their ships goofy shit like: What are the Civilian Applications, Value Judgement, Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints, Xenophobe, etc.

• “Promoting stars into novae from light years away without really understanding why you’re fighting” is a badass description of space warfare

The intro to chapter 7 is very reminiscent of of a grim-dark version of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:

Complaints / Critiques:

• The explanation of how computer memory works in multiple dimensions, and how binary decays is just wrong – but this section of the book presents a fascinating idea of the minimum spanning representation of consciousness.

• Lotta stuff going on in this book that I just don’t care about at all since it wasn’t motivated. It’s not lacking descriptions per se, but there’s not a lot of spacial transition when protag moves from one location to another. I’m reminded of that other Gene Wolfe novel The Book of the New Sun: The Shadow of the Torturer x The Expanse. It’s serial sci-fi that I struggle to care about and can't imagine sinking my teeth into for a 9-part series. I don't get what's so good about this series, but it's praised by the likes of Elon Musk – maybe just cult classic, slightly darker take on sci-fi than e.g. Star Wars?¿

Overstays its welcome too, and after catching whiffs of the direction that this book was heading, I looked into the wiki one page summaries of the rest of the series and they're all mostly-unrelated sagas that take place in the same universe, but probably not the same characters or even the same millennia. That's not a bad thing by itself, but I'm not captivated enough by the world building, and this book itself overstays its welcome by about 150-250 pages, so I don't think I care to read 8 more one shot sagas

SPOILERS:

+0.25 bonus points for a haunting ending where everyone dies. I love that shit
Maybe + some more bonus points for the appendices which do provide ample world building context that makes me maybe interested enough to read another book in the series... @ [redacted], you in particular might enjoy reading just the appendices! See the link I included in my first comment to an online version of the book.

Sidenote – downside of audiobooks is that I listened to the whole book thinking "meh, no worlbuilding" when it was probably referenced via footnote a few times in the text :upsidedown_face:

related