And her senses and other abilities are exquisite. Harrison, well, he's a darker author than Banks, but while Seria Mau Genlicher/ White Cat is tragic, she's still heroic. The Minds more or less run things, at least on a day-to-day basis, though, it's anarcho, so no one's really in charge. Anyhow, in the Culture, most people live on ships or stations, all run by Minds (AIs). Not that I'm an anarchist, but post-scarcity would be awfully nice. Banks mixed in quirky names ( No More Mr Nice Guy, So Much For Subtlety, The Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival) and made the ships full citizens of his left-anarcho-post-scarcity Culture, which made the whole thing that much more fun for me. So, with 2001 tucked out of sight under the sofa, Banks's books stand as my first in this subgenre. I'm guessing being a murderously psychopathic, slow spaceship is not attractive to most people. Of course, one might say Clarke did it first in 2001, but I don't count it because of the stately pace of space travel in the story and Hal 9000 being neither fully fleshed-out character nor heroic. Banks's Culture setting are among my favorites. John Harrison's Kefahuchi series and Iain M. How can imagining oneself living amongst the stars unbeholden to any planet not exhilarate? Fast and powerful, heroic, with space as your natural environment. I'm a sucker for good world-building - anyone who knows me can tell you that - but also for people-ships, be the person an AI, an integrated human, or something in between. These things rose to a higher level of annoyance than they might have otherwise, because the author made them a significant part of the story but did not seem to have researched them properly. This was punctuated by some annoyances though. Most of the time, Ancillary Justice delighted me.

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