Just finished reading it. Not read any of the “Culture” novels before so it was a heavy going to start with but really enjoyed it. Will be trying another of the earlier books on the back of it.
I can see the problem right there, as the background society, (the Culture), is already firmly established, along with some characters, and the major parts of the Culture, like the ship Minds, and their …idiosyncratic approach to names. There’s only one Banks Culture book I’ve only read once, and that’s Player Of Games, because the main character is such an unremittingly loathsome piece of shit, with not a single redeeming feature, that I can’t enjoy or read the book. All the others I’ve got as paperback, hardback, and the whole lot as ebooks as well.
I was looking at the BSFA Awards prize for Pyramids in 1989 – probably about the time I gave it a go.
But I’m all up for being corrected as it potentially opens up a whole bunch of potential reading I’d (stupidly) disregarded.
It was the ‘comic’ element of Pratchett that most put me off – it wasn’t (to me at any rate).
He’s had me standing in a bookshop, giggling like mad, but his humour you either get or not.
The thing with SF is that it’s as wide in what is classed as SF as anything just classed as ‘novels’, in fact, one bookshop in Bath won’t even classify it’s fiction section, just lists them by author, because they feel using genre classifications restricts what people will pick up and read, which is a good point.
Convert, as well as Banks, you might like to check out William Gibson. He invented the Term ‘cyberspace’ in one of his early short stories, possibly Johnny Mnemonic*, and his books have always had a gritty, noir-ish feel, with lots of futuristic, but recognisable technology. His books go in trilogies, but the latest three have dropped the futuristic bias, existing in a present day, but slightly shifted society, and involve cool-hunting, denim obsessives, military contract espionage, and are really very readable. Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History are those three.
Charles Stross writes in a wide variety of styles, and he’s very readable as well, some of his books being police procedural stories set in an independent Scotland, (Halting State), others are a strange, but humour out cross between 007 and Cthulu mythology. He writes lots of books.
*Good story, collected in Burning Chrome, crap film. Worth starting Gibson with this book, as it establishes style, and a number of characters who turn up in Neuromancer, his first, award-winning novel.
I rather envy you, not being familiar with a very large, literary genre, because you can be discovering books for the first time that I first read twenty, thirty, forty years ago, many of which I still read to this day.
Good luck, and enjoy! 😀