Iain M Banks

Just got hold of his new book, "The Algebraist". Great cover art (the first bite is with the eye, and all that....) and I'm enjoying the imagination and story so far. But. I am pedantic enough to have found 2 aspects of his writing style that are niggling me:

1) He has repeatedly used "and/or" in free-flowing text. Now, I'm no traditionalist, but that's an abbreviation born out of email, surely. I'm surprised and a little irritated to see it in a book written by such a highly reputed author.
2) He also keeps on using "-" to denote subclauses in sentences. I'm pretty sure that he should be using "," for that. I find that I use a lot of hyphens for similar purpose, but only in email.

In past books he has played around with language very inventively to succesfully put the reader in an altered state of mind while they're submerged in his imagined worlds, but these 2 grammatical changes don't seem to be aimed at doing anything like that. I'm quite sensitive to this kind of thing (although I do know people who are a *lot* more sensitive!) and it's annoying me. He's also using some *very* long sentences, some of which with subclauses denoted with "-" as well, none of which is lightening the load of reading the book.

Ho hum - plenty of the book left to go, and it's giving me that feeling of almost looking forward to the tube ride home just so that I can get my nose back into it :)