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johnayliff 's review for:
Surface Detail
by Iain M. Banks
I love Iain M. Banks books but they're so long.
This one has a brilliant central idea, and the Culture and the wider universe are as compelling and surprising-but-convincing as ever. It suffers, though, from an overabundance of point-of-view characters, whose multiple plot-threads don't fit together until the very end, when they fit together in a confusingly complicated way. The character who's set up as the main protagonist ends up playing a mostly passive role in the story--in fact the same goes for many of the characters, since the Culture's intelligent ships are the active players in the story and the humans are often only along for the ride, but it is the humans whose points of view we see. The pacing also feels slow, with multi-page scenes that advance the plot only by small steps or not at all. A lot of those multi-page scenes are beautiful set-pieces, though.
This one has a brilliant central idea, and the Culture and the wider universe are as compelling and surprising-but-convincing as ever. It suffers, though, from an overabundance of point-of-view characters, whose multiple plot-threads don't fit together until the very end, when they fit together in a confusingly complicated way. The character who's set up as the main protagonist ends up playing a mostly passive role in the story--in fact the same goes for many of the characters, since the Culture's intelligent ships are the active players in the story and the humans are often only along for the ride, but it is the humans whose points of view we see. The pacing also feels slow, with multi-page scenes that advance the plot only by small steps or not at all. A lot of those multi-page scenes are beautiful set-pieces, though.