If you loved how Consider Phlebas rockets from the Vavatch Orbital fiasco to the desperate hunt for the lost Mind on Schar’s World, you’ll sink into the grand scale of Revelation Space. Reynolds layers colossal set-pieces—a haunted starship dig, a dead city with secrets—much like Banks’ temple descent and that brutal subterranean train run. You get the same sense of dangerous archaeology, ruthless factions, and momentum-heavy spacefaring adventure, but with a chilling mystery that keeps widening the canvas.

If Bora Horza Gobuchul’s shape-shifting pragmatism and cutthroat choices grabbed you—whether playing Damage on Vavatch or betraying and bargaining his way toward the stranded Mind—Bester’s Gully Foyle will hook you just as hard. Like Horza, Foyle is relentless, morally thorny, and terrifyingly adaptable, carving a scorched path through corporate empires and high-society salons with the same ferocity Horza brings to Culture–Idiran proxy battles.

If the clear objective in Consider Phlebas—track down the fugitive Culture Mind through shifting allegiances and deadly set-pieces—kept you turning pages, The Quantum Thief delivers that same propulsion. Jean le Flambeur’s mission unfolds through daring break-ins, identity puzzles, and tactical alliances that echo Horza falling in with the Clear Air Turbulence crew, infiltrating the Temple of Light, and angling for the Mind before his rivals do.

If the brutal edge of Consider Phlebas stuck with you—the messy firefights, torture, and the stark costs of the Culture–Idiran war—Altered Carbon channels that same hard-bitten energy. Takeshi Kovacs navigates a world where bodies are commodities and loyalties are transactional, mirroring Horza’s ruthless calculations aboard the Clear Air Turbulence and the blood-soaked compromises he makes on the way to Schar’s World.

If the epic sweep of Consider Phlebas—from the Culture’s godlike Minds to the Idirans’ zeal and the fallout across Orbitals and dead worlds—fascinated you, A Fire Upon the Deep takes that scale even bigger. Vinge pits civilizations and superintelligences against one another in a war with existential stakes, while ground-level threads (like the Tines’ world rescue) echo the way Horza’s desperate chase intersects with galaxy-shaping forces.