It is very well written, and is much better than Matter just in terms of its character and plotting... But the Ghizt don't make any damn sense at all. They are like a Heinlein military kludged together with Culture tech, and they have all the street sense of a 1950s sitcom character. The Sublime is needlessly obfuscated and repeated as ineffable,but there's no logical reason for it to be quite the mystic experience that it is described as... And the Minds themselves can't quite work out why they are engaged in this exercise, and they don't change anything. The plot of the book is without purpose.

The nihilism in the book is something that shows up repeatedly in Banks novel, but there is not enough payoff for me to say this book is worth recommending.