These two prequel books could have easily been truncated I think. I haven’t read the original books though, so perhaps there’s some fun Easter egg reveals and what not I am missing, but from purely a pertinent events in the chronology and interesting plot beats perspective, I felt both books were incredibly slow, even when action was happening.

It’s got a really strange cadence that just feels “chill” all the time, which makes even assassinations low key events. I think the narrator does not help this at all either. He’s not completely monotone but he is also not making an effort to distinguish characters or shift his voice much based on what’s happening. So who knows, maybe if I’d read both books rather than listened, I’d have enjoyed them more.

But my feeling is mostly that there’s some interesting concepts and plot beats that have been padded significantly to make some pretty substantially longer novels, especially compared to the originals. Which makes me a bit hesitant to pick up the series again. I like it a lot more than the first couple Culture books, which I just ended up giving up on because they were hopelessly tropey despite having interesting concepts, so I will probably try at least the main “first” book and see what happens.