So I read CONSIDER PHLEBAS or whatever that first Culture book is. Pretty good for the first like 75%. It's action packed, it has some neat-o ideas and then it totally fucking stalls out in the caverns or whatever. They spend like 200 pages fucking around and like 80 pages about how that Idrian is escaping his bonds.
There's like that whole section with Fal N'geestra, the Culture woman, that's about fucking nothing. There's some cool stuff that attempts to characterize the Mind for no reason at al because it doesn't get mentioned for the last 50% of the book. And then in the last 10% you can almost see Banks just checking characters off (Okay, Jimmy is dead. Next, kill Todd. Okay, here we go, on to Susan...).
It was interesting enough but the end was terrible and the whole thing is jammed with silly posturing.
