Although it's interesting to see the Culture through the eyes of the Minds that effectively run it, I was ultimately disappointed by this book.

It starts off strong and brings in some interesting elements and characters, but at the end the whole thing just sort of fizzles out.

It also broke a lot of mystique the Minds held for me. These are impossibly advanced intelligences, with capabilities that we can't ever imagine. Intelligences that have to cripple themselves mentally just to communicate with us. Yet they are portrayed here as a pack of immature anarchists.

Maybe my mental image of the Minds was wrong, but I liked the idea that something you could spend an hour having a stupid conversation about bunnies with was simultaneously running a ship, talking to 100,000 other people, and doing all sorts of esoteric multidimensional mathematics. It's not pretending to have an obsession with bunny ears, it's just a minutely small part of its totality.

As a human, getting a glimpse of the true nature of being like that, would be frightening.