My first Culture novel, and what a ball it is!

Drags.

Most series' suffer from bloat where, as the author gets more famous, and the editor has less control the latter books become unnecessarily verbose, withut the impact of the earlier works. It is therefore a shame that the culture series starts with an unnecessarily verbose and longwinded story that is badly in need of trimming before it finally reaches a very sudden and pointlessly bloody conclusion.

Quite an interesting premise though. Mankind has spread throughot the galaxy splintering and evolving (sometimes through deliberate choice) into various factiions and species. Our hero Horza is a Changer, deliberatey bred species as soldiers of limited numbers with the ability to alter his physical apperance, impersonate others, , emit and resist venom and acid and countless other adaptions. We first meet him in a particularly unplesant death row, where he has been sentanced following his discovery as a spy. His deception was unmasked by an agent of the Culture, also human but dedicated to AI and the sentenance of artifical brains. The Culture are in a war with an alien species the Iridians (fundamental religionists) who recruited the Changers.

What follows could have been an exciting and fascinating series of excerpts from the two agents personal battles in various arenas as part of the wider war, exploring the fascinating universe Banks' developed. Instead we suffer through Horza's tortuous fantasy quest style journey through a few pointless encounters with a mercinary company until we reach the planet foreshadowed in the introduction as being the pinacle of this phase of the war. This is at least half the book, snd i's all spent thinking. Horza just get on with it!

The remaining half of the book is equally tedious aided by confusing descriptions of what's happening to whom where, some contrived excuses for not imagining futuristic technology properly and some more of the frankly unbelivable aliens. Horza explores a world with the previously mentioned culture agent as his prisoner for no good reason. Running out of ways to end the story Banks goes for the last man standing at the OK coral style fight. To preserve what limited suspense there is I won't say who it is. But you can guess. All the remaining plot points (lots) are supposedly tied up in a series of excerpts from 'history' and an epilogue as well for good measure.

The extremely graphic violence doesn't work as a writing style to make up for the deficiencies in the plot or the rest of the prose. Not on my list for re-reading, and I can't see why the series has the aclaim that it is normally granted.

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Exciting and imaginative. ( )

While it seems like a universe that has potential, I found that the only characters in the book I really liked were the artificial intelligences. ( )

It took me a while to finish this book because it dragged on for a bit longer than it needed to. It felt as though extra events were thrown in just to make the story go on longer. On the other hand a lot of what happened made sense given the situation the characters were in. They were basically working against a universe that was out to get them so naturally it took a while to get where they were headed. ( )