One of my summer reading projects involved masticating upon all of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels (as well as a few books Banks authored without that middle em). The results of this crazy experiment can now be enjoyed as an essay now appearing at The Barnes & Noble Review. Here’s the first paragraph:

In an Iain M. Banks novel, you will find sour antiheroes sweet-talking corpulent cannibal kings, erratic robot drones so caught up in lending a helping hand that they overlook the telltale traces of emotional breakdown within those they serve, and a febrile zeal for blowing things up which suggests that Banks isn’t so much an author of bawdy and exciting adventures as he is a giddy eight-year-old with an elaborate train set scattered across a football field.

To read the rest, go here.