About 15 years ago now I took a science fiction class at University. It was a 3rd year English course, not Science Fiction 101 or anything like that. It was a great class, but now I don't recall much of it. Two books stuck with me though- Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age, of which i have blogged about plenty since it's pretty much my favourite book ever, and the other one made less of an impact but I never forgot it, either. Iain M. Banks' Player of Games, a Culture novel.

I just finished reading Matter, also set in the Culture universe. Now I have a mission- to read all the Culture novels. If you like high concept sic-fi, and who doesn't, you should do the same. Did you ever read Ringworld? Or play Halo? In both of those the central environment is a huge artificial ring encircling a star. Pretty cool concept- never having played Halo I dunno if they do much with it, but Larry Niven does with his Ringworld novels (which I loved the first two when I was a kid, read the third a few years back and found it kind of terrible). Anyways, Matter is set on a similarly creative planet- a Shellworld, an artificially constructed hollow planet with layers in it. Cool.