High tech space civilizations from fiction
Authleft: The Affini Compact from Human Domestication Guide. They’ll enslave your species and keep you as a pet, but you’ll love it because of their mind control pheromones and gender affirming healthcare.
Authright: The Imperium of Man from Warhammer 40,000. “Suffer not the xenos, heretic, nor mutant to live”. Their god-emperor is a corpse, they lost all their best technology, and their empire is doomed.
Libleft: The Culture from The Culture. Their society is controlled by anarcho-communist AIs. They have no laws and great games, but sometimes they destabilize foreign empires as a treat.
Libright: FICSIT Inc from Satisfactory. They’ll sell you all the plundered natural resources from foreign worlds you can afford in their Awesome Shop, just don’t ask what happened to the native lifeforms.
Both the right wing high tech space civilizations are satire made by leftists, and the authleft one is porn. Only the libleft one is a serious attempt at writing a nice place to live. Maybe that means something.
Be that as it may, Consider Phlebas is boring and I couldn’t get through it on the first attempt. Player of Games is a page turner
I mean, I think that comes down to what kind of scifi is more your cup of tea. Player of Games is exciting to someone who wants intrigue and suspense. On the other hand, Consider Phlebas has some of the craziest action set pieces in the entire series. I love them both, but I could easily see someone finding Player of Games boring compared to Consider Phlebas. Part of Banks’ skill is that his books cover everything from explosive action at staggering scales to a pair of alien diplomats spending an entire novel talking about how weird humans are.
Have you read the Hydrogen Sonata? I always think about that one scene with the ship and that other, lesser “ship”.