Status Updates From The Immeasurable Heaven

This is seriously like The Culture on steroids. The scale of this is hard to wrap my brain around.

This is absolutely bonkers so far and exactly what I was looking for.

Ok, I finally found a stride with this but... I'm not very impressed actually.

There is a lot in this, but also surprisingly very little: entire galaxies, infinite parallel universes and even simulated worlds, but it's an exercise in garnishing. A lot of it is redundant in what it brings and serves no purpose for the plot, whose main ideas could have been leveraged with a lot less. It's imaginative, but to a fault.

I don't know if that's because it's happening at unfamiliar scales (galaxies + parallel universes) or because of the particular way of interspersing descriptive elements (distilled slowly over several paragraphs, which means I often misimagined sth and feel compelled to backtrack) or just because I haven't read space opera with a lot of imagined nomenclature in a while and I'm rusty.... But this is taking me FOREVER