As you know, I've been a fan of Iain Banks since Karen at Uni lent me The Wasp Factory in maybe 1992. Looking in the library I saw a big fat book with a Culture style cover and so I borrowed it forthwith. I do like the Culture Minds and their dialogue, although I don't like the funny formatting of their exchanges. In fact, that's a general thing. I don't like it when authors deviate from normal prose and format things in a wacky way. For example, I dislike it when authors format an exchange of emails, as emails. Or tweets, letters or texts. Even Trollope does this with letters. I don't like having to parse a letter, noticing the date it was sent and the address etc. Maybe it's laziness, but I think actually it's that I like to know when I've ingested the requisite information. If it's conventional prose, then I know that I've got all the info because the information is digital. It's analogue information that I can't handle! This has turned into a big paragraph of rant, sorry about that.