LoneGunman

The writing is impeccable.

Simon Vance is superb. One of my favorite readers.

This is an exceptional performance of an exceptional book. You will not be disappointed.

I would make me care about the characters.

Something that isn't a part of the Culture series.

An accent.

Probably. The scope is epic.

Wish it were better.

The central conceit of Beggars In Spain is "The elite will be persecuted jealously by proles but shall triumph in the end." No attempt is made, however, to explore *why.* There's a lot of talking *about* things happening and very few things actually happening... and one must accept beyond a reasonable doubt that the ability to work an extra eight hours a day will lead to utter and total world domination in the space of a generation.

Listen as Andy Dufresne... I mean, Yev Yeremin... battles the evil forces of Boris and Natascha... I mean, The Evil Empire... on his way to - who cares?
Seriously. Rocky and Bullwinkle had more flattering caricatures of the Soviet Union. And Dan Brown has less purple prose. The narrator does his level best with the material, affecting more accents than an episode of Scooby Doo, but this only serves to push the dialogue from sad over to parody.
Still interested? Skip the first twenty minutes then - a gratuitously titillating romp through child sodomy.
Seriously. The Cold War ended nearly twenty years ago. How can Jed Mercurio write Soviets with less care, attention and insight than Craig Thomas mustered for "Firefox" more than thirty years earlier?