I’ve only read The Player of Games and am now in the early part of Surface Detail.

So far I consider them a more sober and thought-through take on the concept than trek. On the one hand, it makes parts of the story focusing on the Culture more comforting to readers who might frequent a website like this, since the author takes more care than Trek writers do to address the loopholes through which class society might revive itself among the people of the Culture, and to show the qualitative differences that emerge when people come from stateless, classless, moneyless life. But, it also means the author doesn’t sugarcoat the thinly-veiled Epsteinian and Leopoldian nature of the capitalist societies the characters are forced by their adventures to interact with.

A Trek fan will enjoy displays of competence, strategic patience paying off, contempt for fascists, and at least one large powerful social formation being consistently on the right side of history. But the catharsis doesn’t come quite as easy or total as in Trek. The somewhat more true-to-life depictions of communism and capitalism also reduce the escapist value and raise the emotional stakes for the reader. Whether it’s comfortable depends.