For me, a book should get one free pass on which they can build a plausible, self-consistent universe. If that one pass is &quot;awesome, friendly AI with near-perfect dominance over spacetime&quot; (The Culture), well, OK, fine. Just stick to it, then. (Spoiler: In Look to Windward, the Culture is blamed for some lesser culture&#x27;s war, as the Culture did it by accident. This seemed so implausible I thought it was going to be a plot twist.)  -- Yes I know the Culture isn&#x27;t hard sci-fi (unless you just assume Minds exist and can do all that stuff), but it&#x27;s the most uplifting stuff I&#x27;ve read. A perfect idea of how civilization should be. It literally affects my mood in a very positive way when I read them.<p>But if every other chapter there&#x27;s some new damn &quot;thing&quot; that doesn&#x27;t seem to make sense in-universe then I feel like I&#x27;m just being snowed. There was some book I was reading with new words every other page. Then, on some space ship, &quot;janitor rats&quot; appear, that are rats, but somehow cybernetically linked to the ship over time or some such nonsense. For no apparent reason other than to have cyber rats. Nope.<p>Greg Egan is the master of making it perfect, holy shit. His books can be a bit hard to get through. I know I didn&#x27;t fully understand them, then I found out he has said that you shouldn&#x27;t expect to read a book without a pencil and paper to take notes. Some of the books even have tutorial videos, explaining his [alternative] physics or such.