Enjoying USE OF WEAPONS; been thinking a bit more about the role of character development in SF

I started reading the next book in the Culture series and I am liking it a lot. You know what I've noticed about a lot of hard SF books? They can actually be very light on the plot. In many cases, they're little more than travelogues. This was particularly the case with the two Stross books I read recently: Neptune's Children and Saturn's Brood. In both…