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I'm an outlier on this one, but I thought Consider Phlebas was bad and disappointing.

The Culture was cool and interesting, and the world had some interesting detail but everything else was pretty weak. I generally agree with this review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/48178154?book_show_act...

While we're on the topic I also really didn't like the three body problem.

I loved Permutation City and most of Ted Chiang (particularly Liking What You See: A Documentary, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects).

I love True Names by Vernor Vinge.

I loved this: https://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/

Hopefully someone finds this helpful, sometimes an anti-recommendation can be just as useful for calibration as a recommendation. Here's some of both.

If anyone reading this agrees - I'd love a suggestion from you.

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I didn’t mind Consider Phlebas, but I found Excession, Player of Games, The Algebraist and Surface Detail to be more interesting. Against a Dark Background was also good although strictly not a Culture book.

Other sci-fi I have enjoyed which has a very different feel: Dune (amazing), The Diamond Age (also amazing), Ancillary Justice (pretty good).

Thanks for other recommendations!

Incidentally, that goodreads review you posted is self-indulgent prattling at its worst.

The Algebraist, while a great sci-fi novel, isn’t a Culture novel. I’d still highly recommend it though as it’s very enjoyable.

I know that banks says they're set in different universes, but the Affront/Issorilians are clearly the juvenile version of the Dweller species described in the Algebraist. (Thank you Culture Fandom wiki for this moment of utter nerdery :)

Been a while since I read both books, but other than a vaguely similar shape, what makes the Affront clearly a juvenile version of the dwellers? I read the wiki you mentioned and there is a story suggesting an early version of contact rescued them from dweller hunts, but no mention of where this idea came from. I'm a huge fan and believe I have read everything Banks has written and do not recall the story.

This is probably right and very saddening. Oh well, I guess we can still assume that Against a Dark Background is set in the Culture universe, just very far away.

Or it's a simulated world! After all it has things like the Lazy Gun.

Just checked out the wiki myself. That reads like fanfiction.

Ah yes, good point, it has been 12 years.

Excession was by far my favourite. I think the concepts were the most interesting to me, and it wove the smaller more personal plots well into the grander opera.

Consider Phlebas is generally considered weak but good as an author first sci-fi book. The plot is not particularly strong but the prose remains enjoyable (which is notable in a genre plagued with authors who basically can't write). The fact that it is amongst Banks worst book is a testament to his quality as an author.

I have never seen it actually recommended. The Player of Game is the first really good novel set in the Culture universe and most of them are good from there on.

IMHO Consider Phlebas and Use Of Weapons are the worst of the Culture series, neither of them are particularly good. The former sets a trend early on and doesn't deviate from it (it's like reading a slow motion train wreck), the latter fails to make the characters relatable and the end revelation is lame.

If you haven't, I recommend picking up some of the later books in the series. They can be read in any order. It's unfortunate mr. Banks isn't around to write any more, because it seemed that his work was showing considerable improvement towards the end.

Consider Phlebas was one of the few books I’ve given up on. Everything was just so damn corny. I had been lookig forward to it for a while so it was very disappointing.

Thanks for the other recommendations. My only gripe with The Three Body Problem was that the characters spoke in incredibly stilted exposition.

It’s considered by most to be the weakest Culture novel. Player of Games is the usual recommendation

I actually loved Consider Phlebas.

Sure, it has some rough parts, and it's not perfect, and Banks certainly wrote better novels. But it's the book that (together with Look to Windward, which is a spiritual sequel referencing the events in Phlebas) most clearly and beautifully articulates Banks' anti-war sentiment.

In this novel, nothing is gained. Almost everyone dies. There are no heroes, though there's some nobility in the fighting. In the grand scheme of things, the events of the novel end up not mattering one iota. All that remains is the trauma of the survivors. Ultimately, war is meaningless and leaves everyone scarred.

It's also the one novel that shows the Culture from an outsider's perspective, painting Special Circumstances in a less flattering light than other Culture novels.

By the way, I wrote those dissenting comments in that Goodreads thread. The reviewer is notorious on Goodreads for giving almost everything written before 1950 single-star ratings (one commenter called him a "time-traveling Victorian"). I'm not sure what his purpose was in even reading Iain M. Banks. About the only recent thing he's liked is Watchmen and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Consider Phlebas is probably one of worst culture novels. Same with three-body problem. I personally like Dark Forest the most, though overall I can understand the idea of not liking a sci-fi story if the characters or plot isn’t at a certain level. They are both series that could be improved in an adaptation. I’ll check out your other reccomendations.

I love Ted Chiang's works. With Baxter and Robert Chales Wilson he's in my top 5 (SF or not I think) author.

But Ken Liu ? I can't stand. It feels like grandiloquent teen SF to me.

I haven't read enough from Ted Chiang yet (or he hasn't published enough) but Baxter and Wilson seem stuck in their themes of predilection now.

I'm assuming you've read The Man Who Ended History by Ken Liu? If not I found it really good, if disturbing. (pdf: https://kenliu.name/binary/liu_the_man_who_ended_history.pdf)

No, I got my hands on a short stories book.

I'll give it another try, thanks.

> I also really didn't like the three body problem.

Did you read the whole trilogy or just the first one? Because I didn't like the 3 body problem, but the dark forest is my favorite sci-fi novel ever and death's end was great as well.

Not the GP, but I read the whole trilogy and also didn't like it.

One aspect was just too much space commissars for me (a former Soviet citizen). The science behind it is also bad; the view on social dynamics is simplistic. Some of the characters are, uh, not even cardboard.

I had it recommended as hard SF so maybe it set my expectations wrong.

The whole point of the three body problem series being a Chinese sci-fi is that it is the future envisioned by Chinese intellectuals. They really think that in case of an alien invasion United Nations will direct a centralized commission based human response. Disliking three body problem for the reasons you mentioned is like disliking 1984 because it had too much of totalitarianism for your taste.

Reasons like? Bad science? It's objectively bad there, in the sense of making shit up without even remote plausibility.

Simpleton depiction of social dynamics? It has nothing to do with Chinese intellectuals; Strugatsky brothers and Stanislaw Lem did nuanced social commentary while living in similar regimes.

And seriously am a bit at unease with the implication that it have to be flawed because it's from China. There are great, eloquent Chinese authors. Do read Folding Beijing (also not a hard-SF), it's simply in a different class.

The three body problem is sort of inverted magical realism. Everything that’s usually fake in magical realism (like the physics) is rendered with care and respect- and everything that’s usually real (the people and their interactions) is fake and dreamlike.

And I mean the physics is also questionable, with stretched out protons and everything. More a Princess of Mars than Mars Trilogy.

There's also the prose itself. I don't know if it's the translation or it's how the original is written, but I found Liu Cixin's simplistic elementary-school-level language highly unengaging. It really reads like juvenile fiction.

I've read that this style is typical of Chinese novels, but I can't confirm it.

The Dark Forest is my favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox

For space opera stuff, I really liked Ann Leckie's Ancillary Sword https://annleckie.com/novel/ancillary-justice/ series and Corey's The Expanse stuff (I read the books after watching the series).

For transhuman stuff, Brin's Kiln People, Morgan's Altered Carbon, and Scalzi's Old Man's War were fun.

Along the lines of epics like Asimov's Foundation and Banks' Culture, nothing springs to mind. Sadness. That's probably my favorite genre.

Uh, if you like transhumanist space opera and haven't yet given a go to Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series ... I have to warn you it'll be very addictive.

Also Greg Egan's Diaspora is very large scale space opera.

Solid recs. Got them. Thank you!

I really loved Player of Games!

The bizarre but shocking Azad society was super interesting and also the narration of the main character and his whole development was truly captivating.

It's been forever since I read this, but IIRC Consider Phlebas was more of just some alien action novel that didn't get much into the Culture. I see a lot of people recommending to start with Player of Games instead of Consider Phlebas to get more of a feel of what the series is like.

> I loved Permutation City

Who doesn't? ;) If you want the freebase, rock-smokeable version, try _Axiomatic_ by the same author. Only fiction book I've found that detours into a (set-theoretically correct!) discussion of transfinite cardinalities.

> and most of Ted Chiang

I'm about to start _Stories of Your Life and Others_, haven't read any other Chiang yet.

For a post-scarcity world you might find more interesting, try MOPI -- if you can look past (or enjoy) the weird sex in the first chapter. Kind of amazing that he wrote it in 1994; in retrospect so much of singularity-AI/transhumanist sci-fi was just aping what he did first:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Int...

I rated MOPI at "800 milli-Egans".

And, of course, there's always the Sci-Fi masterwork from which I stole my HN username.

I don't get the reference to your username, who is it?

Because I have read the other of your recommendations (you and the gp), and I agree with them, I want to add my two cents (in not special order):

"Recursion" by Tony Ballantine, "Counting Heads" by David Marusek, "In the mouth of the whale" by Paul McAuley, "House of Suns" by Alistair Reynolds, "Diaspora" by Greg Egan,"The Collapsium" by Will McCarthy, "Signal to noise" by Eric S. Nylund, "Stations of the tide" by Michael Swanwick, "Schismatrix" by Bruce Sterling

Kirill is a character in Vadim Panov's Enclaves.

To the greater conversation, my relationship with sci-fi is on-and-off but I really enjoyed A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. This one got me back into it. I recently finished the Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space trilogy which was amazing except for the third novel which was a little tiresome and ultimately unsatisfying.

>>"Kirill is a character in Vadim Panov's Enclaves."

Thanks, I will check that.

If you like Vinge, there is a little gem that it's, I think, not very known: "Marooned in Realtime" (1). It's the second in a series but it can be read alone without problem.

Also the short story by Vinge, "The cookie monster" is very good (recommended going blind for this one, not spoilers)

By Reynolds, my favorite, it's "House of Suns", I get a 50's Science Fiction vibe from it, and, at the same time, it's modern Science Fiction.

(1) - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167847.Marooned_in_Realt...

Thank you. I will check these out.

I intended to read House of Suns because it both comes highly recommended, and it is only a single novel (this is very important). A trilogy is pushing the limits against my priorities at the moment. But I accidentally started reading Revelation Space - easy to do on an eReader, especially when otherwise completely unfamiliar with the author - and before I realised my mistake I had already read half the book. And down the rabbit hole I went.

It's not a trilogy though :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelation_Space_universe#Book...

I particularly recommend his short fiction books if you don't want to get into Dune-lenght series.

Mm, I recently read Revelation Space after years of being slightly put off by the various covers I'd seen it clad in (I know, I know) and was elated to find a 'stand-in' for my beloved late IMB. So similar in many ways - I was quite annoyed at myself for not having taken the plunge prior.

No, Kirill Panov is a character in _Roadside Picnic_.

Thanks - I'll check those out :).

For Stories of Your Life and Others the first short story (while entertaining) is not really representative so don't let it discourage you if you don't like it.

My favorite in the collection was the last story, but a lot of them are interesting.

I think Permutation City was also 1994 - I was impressed how correct he got AWS.

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