I prefer the smug Ships of the Culture to these brooding ones. The book throws a flood of esoteric concepts, proper names, and entities at you from the outset (an "Ancillary" is one of thousands of zombie cyborg avatars of a sentient troop-transport starship, a "Justice," and that doesn't even get into the ten different types of Ancillaries and the crazy-ass larger human society they inhabit). It seemed very clear to me that the far-future human society being depicted was some Imperial mishmash of East Asian traditions, but then I went and read the author interview in the back, where she claimed her inspiration was the Roman Empire! No. Way.