I’ve spoken of my feelings for Iain Banks. Due to his being Officially Very Poorly, I’m going through the Culture books again – in forward, not reverse order.
It would be difficult to overstate the effect of this book when it came out in 1987: Space opera was dead, cyberpunk and dark futures were all the rage; who on earth wanted to read a book about a culture rather than a lone protagonist? This book has scale, breadth, depth, love, loss, and yet, it still has something to put it all into clear and present perspective in an unimaginably large universe