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I love the culture series.

The worlds that Alastair Reynolds builds in the Revelation Space series grips me the most though.

The conjoiners with their augmented, self healing, interstellar travelling yet still a little human characteristics is both believable but beyond the familiar all at the same time. Highly recommended

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I think Revelation Space does a great job creating a universe that squeezes out novel human cultures through the crushing vice of selection pressure. It’s every bit as daring as The Culture, just a different vibe!

It's decent. I just find Alastair Reynolds a bad observer of humans though... He paints jarringly bad portaits of humans, e.g., in one of his books he has the mercenaries hand wringing about how they can't be morally shady despite the whole fate of the human race depending on them acting decisively. It's is a really naive depiction of how humans actually act under pressure.

I have similar issues with the Three Body problem.

That was always my issue with Foundation. I couldn't suspend my disbelief sufficiently that characters were acting as they were written.

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