I finally dived into The Culture series, and what, you ask, did i think of the first book?

Well, to be honest, it was rather a long, long winded affair that seemed to sprawl on and on while bringing nothing much to the story.

We also had a huge pacing issue.   Why, oh why, do writers suddenly get all descriptive and feel the need to waffle on about every nut and bolt holding doors on and stuff during fight/action/battle scenes?   This is the sort of thing an editor should pull up and throw the manuscript back at the writer for.   What should have been a great, final battle between our protagonists and the Idirans, flies by on the passages that would take ages in the real world while finding ourselves wading through pages of completely unnecessary waffle when all the action starts kicking off, taking ages to read through scenes that would last a minute or two, at most, in the real world.

Annoyingly, there does appear to be a very good story behind all the poor writing, and . . .

. . . so, having trudged through all that, i feel i’m losing myself to a sunk cost fallacy as i’ve started to read The Player of Games in the hope that it’ll somehow be much better written — we shall see.

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