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Notes -
I recently read Player of Games and while to some degree I echo the "boring Utopia" criticism, a lot of what makes the Culture utopia is a literally incredible amount of technological wizardly.
I can buy warp drives and the like, but if you have robots with little force fields and humans that can take a retrovirus to change gender and do drugs by thinking about it, you arguably have moved past the point of being able to offer social commentary simply because your society is inhuman. Banks, it seems to me, does social commentary anyway and I wouldn't say it's entirely a miss - some of it is thought-provoking. But I sort of choke when I am expected to believe that humans were doing stuff like going to dinner parties instead of wireheading or something even thought the technology in the books is more than just "really really smart AI," it is the ability to manipulate the spacetime continuum to a degree that arguably surpassed Star Trek (while having just enough limitations to serve the purposes of this specific plot, much like, well, an old-fashioned Star Trek episode).
Not sure if I explained that well. But basically Banks is, from what I can tell, asking me to believe that the entire Culture has insane gigatech and lives in the way that it does (that way happening to be, basically, what a liberal arts student would hope a socialist utopia would be like) Just Because. I've been vastly preferring the Stephenson I've read recently; Stephenson really is interested in the intersection of technology and ideology and tries to show his work whereas the Culture, to be honest, seems if anything more naive than Star Trek about the ideology of the future (while sharing perhaps certain assumptions of Roddenberry about how The Future would eliminate certain barriers between older men and young and desirable women.) Obviously you can justify anything you want in the Culture by waving your hands and saying "aligned AI" but that doesn't necessarily make it satisfying.
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