One more holiday trip, one more giant Banks novel read. There really is nothing better to distract oneself from the fact one is staying in a non-airconditioned room in 38 degree weather.

As good a science fiction book as any he's written. I'm beginning to form an opinion he actually writes better books when they're a mixture of low/high-tech as this one is, because a) he's forced to stick to human-scale events while b) still allowing him to put a larger context around the story with an awe-inspiring scale of things.