Some thoughts on Matter so far (about 200 pages in, which is about a third of the way through).

This may count as spoilerage for some people so I’ll put the rest behind a cut.

Mr. Banks is clearly having a lot of fun, and is trying hard to titillate our sense of wonder.

That doesn’t stop him being deadly serious on occasions:

She had realised that he was just another strong man, in one of those societies, at one of those stages, in which it was easier to be the strong man than it was to be truly courageous. Might, fury, decisive force, the willingness to smite; how her father had loved such terms and ideas, and how shallow they began to look when you saw them played out time and time again over the centuries and millennia by a thousand different species.

Banks is still working the old science fiction meme that in the future people will change gender on a whim and will cope easily with this. I guess people think this is a very liberal attitude, and obviously in a world like The Culture anything is possible, but it seems to me that this doesn’t really reflect how gender identity works, and it can lead to some badly transphobic attitudes.

Even though you can now buy robot sex toys in our world, I’m with Djan on this. There is no way I would trust a Special Circumstances drone disguised as a vibrator (except to do what SC drones do very well, which is kill people very quickly).