If the war over the Hells in Surface Detail—from Prin and Chay’s torment inside a manufactured afterlife to the galaxy-wide campaign to abolish it—hooked you, Permutation City drills even deeper into what digital consciousness means. Egan’s uploaded citizens argue over whether simulated minds are "real," whether copies deserve rights, and what responsibility creators have to their creations. You’ll find the same bracing, idea-dense ethical sparring that powered Lededje’s crusade and the Culture’s high-minded meddling—minus the Minds, but with equally mind-bending stakes.

Did you enjoy hopping from Lededje Y’breq’s pursuit of Joiler Veppers to Yime Nsokyi’s Special Circumstances maneuvers and the ship-centric action of the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints? Pandora’s Star delivers that same kaleidoscope: politicians, scientists, covert operatives, and criminals all collide as a distant star reawakens—and what comes out threatens human space. The shifting POVs build momentum until the disparate threads snap together with Culture-like scale and payoff.

If Veppers’s suave ruthlessness and the Culture’s back-channel maneuvering around the Anti-Hell coalition grabbed you, you’ll relish the knife-edged diplomacy of A Memory Called Empire. Ambassador Mahit Dzmare navigates court factions, corporate interests, and information control inside a dominant empire, much like how Contact and SC thread needles between morality and expedience in Surface Detail. The intrigue is intimate, the stakes imperial, and the compromises deliciously fraught.

If the Culture’s vast scope, godlike Minds, and horizon-wide set pieces—like the virtual war and system-shaking reprisals around Veppers—are your jam, House of Suns offers a sweeping odyssey across millions of years. Posthuman travelers, enigmatic machines, and secrets older than civilizations collide, evoking the same sense of wonder and scale as Banks’s ship-led interventions—complete with audacious rescues and breathtaking reveals.

If you liked how Surface Detail braided Lededje’s personal vendetta, the Hells abolition struggle, and SC’s shadow games into a single crescendo, Hyperion perfects that multi-thread build. Seven pilgrims tell intertwined histories—each laden with mystery, tech theology, and moral ambiguity—before their stories converge around the Shrike. The layered structure pays off like the Culture’s grand reveals, marrying intimate motives with galaxy-rattling consequences.