Gravity was ok, coulda been worse. The science error in the “hanging by a thread” was egregious enough to put me off a bit. I mean if you’re going that realistic, get it right! BTW, if you click the gear symbol on the right side of the write window there’s a tool to blank out spoilers. Polite thing to do.
I don’t recall that being the issue with time travel, for me it’s the fact that it’s irreconcilable, it can simply never make sense and is just a tool to make other points, often not worthwhile. In TEFL Lazarus Long goes back in time and fucks his mother! Are we enlightened by that? The best TT movie was the comedy Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, which mocked the tropes.
I disagree with your depiction of space war stories, that’s just the bad ones. The good ones, like any good story, are balanced and thought provoking. Have you read Consider Phlebas? The war is between a post scarcity hedonistic society more or less ruled by AI’s and a self righteous society that resembles certain earth cultures. Banks wrote some of the smartest SF of recent times.
Https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiran–Culture_War
The conflict was one of principles; the Culture went to war because the Idirans’ fanatical imperial expansion, justified on religious grounds, threatened the Culture’s “moral right to exist”. As the Culture saw it, the Idirans’ extending sphere of influence would prevent them from improving the lives of those in less-advanced societies, and thus would greatly curtail the Culture’s sense of purpose. As is the case with all major decisions, the decision on the part of the Culture to go to war was through direct vote of the entire population. Academics who have analysed Bank’s universe in comparison with real-world political thought have remarked that the decision of the Culture to go to war was a moral choice, rather than one of necessity, as the Culture could have easily avoided war.
