I’m a veteran SF reader but I only read The Culture books for the first time recently, and I agree with you, albeit you have to acknowledge their massive influe

I’m a veteran SF reader but I only read The Culture books for the first time recently, and I agree with you, albeit you have to acknowledge their massive influence on contemporary SF. The Three Body Problem, though, I struggled to finish the first book at all, because I found the prose excruciatingly bad (or more properly I guess, the translation).