A European nation not unlike Bosnia: armed forces roam the lawless land where dark columns of smoke rise up from the surrounding farms and houses. The war is ending, perhaps ended. But for the castle and its occupants, a young lord and lady, the trouble is just beginning. Fearing an invasion of soldiers, the amorous couple takes to the road with the other refugees, disguised in...
Against a Dark Background is a science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, first published in 1993.
Lady Sharrow, a former pilot and antiquities thief, lives in exile on a planet called Golter, which, with its sun Thrial, lies a million light years from any other star. An eccentric cult, the Huhsz, believes that the messiah can not be born until the end of her...
Canal Dreams is a novel by Scottish writer Iain Banks, published in 1989.
Famous Japanese cellist Hisako Onoda boards a supertanker en route to her concert in Rotterdam, as she is afraid to fly. The ship is trapped in the Panama Canal as a result of an international crisis and anchors in Gatun Lake.
The plot is fairly simple. In the first half, when the ship is stranded...
Hisako Onoda, world famous cellist, refuses to fly. And so she travels through the Panama Canal as a passenger on a tanker bound for Europe. But Panama is a country whose politics are as volatile as the local freedom fighters. When Hisako's ship is captured, it is not long before the atmosphere is as flammable as an oxy-acetylene torch, and the tension as sharp as the spike on her...
Complicity is a novel published in 1993. Its two main characters are Cameron Colley, a journalist on a Scottish newspaper called The Caledonian, which resembles The Scotsman, and a serial murderer whose identity is a mystery. The passages dealing with the journalist are written in the first person, and those dealing with the murderer in the second person, so the novel presents,...
Consider Phlebas , first published in 1987, is a space opera novel. Written after a 1984 draft, it is the first to feature the Culture.
The novel revolves around the Idiran-Culture War, and Banks plays on that theme by presenting various microcosms of that conflict. Its protagonist Bora Horza Gobuchul is actually an enemy of the Culture.
The Culture and the Idiran Empire...
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction; coldblooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist.
Principals were at stake. There could be no surrender.
Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a...
The book tells the (fictional) story of the rise to fame of Dan Weir ('Weird'), a bass guitar player in a rock and roll band called Frozen Gold, and of his struggles to be happy now that he is rich and famous. "Two days ago I decided to kill myself. I would walk and hitch and sail away from this dark city to the bright spaces of the wet west coast, and there throw myself into...
Excession , first published in 1996, is Iain M. Banks's fourth science fiction novel to feature the Culture. It concerns the response of the Culture and other interstellar societies to an unprecedented alien artifact, the Excession of the title.
The book is largely about the response of the Culture's Minds (AIs with enormous intellectual and physical capabilities and...
Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.
Silent, motionless, and resisting all efforts to make contact, the artifact waits. The Culture ships, however, cannot. For the artifact is...
Count Sessine is about to die for the very last time...Chief Scientist Gadfium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been waiting for from the Plain of Sliding Stones...And Bascule the Teller, in search of an ant, is about to enter the chaos of the crypt...And everything is about to change...For this is the time of the encroachment and, although the dimming sun...
Feersum Endjinn is a science fiction novel by Iain M. Banks, first published in 1994. It won a British Science Fiction Association Award in 1994.
The book is set on a far future Earth where the uploading of mindstates into a world-spanning computer network (known as "the data corpus", "cryptosphere" or simply "crypt") is commonplace, allowing the dead to be easily...
Inversions is a science fiction novel, first published in 1998. Banks has said "Inversions was an attempt to write a Culture novel that wasn't."
The book takes place on a fictional planet based on late-Middle Ages Europe. It alternates chapter-by-chapter between two concurrent storylines.
The first storyline is presented as a written account from Oelph, publicly a doctor's...
Some years ago, rocks and fire fell from the sky and the old Empire fell with them. In the lands released from that crushing hegemony, a new world order is about to emerge. Two people in particular can see all this in a wider context.
In the winter palace, the King’s new physician has more enemies than she at first realises. But then she also has more remedies to hand than those...
It was one of the less glorious incidents of the Idiran wars that led to the destruction of two suns and the billions of lives they supported. Now, 800 years later, the light from the first of those deaths has reached the Culture’s Masaq’ Orbital. A Chelgrian emissary is dispatched to the Culture.
Look to Windward is a science fiction novel, first published in 2000. It is Banks' sixth published novel to feature the Culture. The book's dedication reads: "For the Gulf War Veterans".
Despite the passage of time, Major Quilan still suffers grief and bereavement from the death of his wife, killed during the Chelgrian civil war that resulted from the Culture's interference....
The Culture is a far-future society of seemingly limitless resources and infinite technological possibilities. Yet the Culture is far from perfect, and it is still subject to brutal wars, political upheaval and intrusions from beyond the edges of known space. With extraordinary imaginative scope and storytelling prowess, Iain M. Banks’ new Culture novel will be one of the most...
It begins in the realm of the Real, where matter still matters.
It begins with a murder.
And it will not end until the Culture has gone to war with death itself.
Lededje Y'breq is one of the Intagliated, her marked body bearing witness to a family shame, her life belonging to a man whose lust for power is without limit. Prepared to risk everything for her freedom, her release,...
It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year.
The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilisation. In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a...
The Bridge is a novel published in 1986. The book switches between three protagonists, John Orr, Alex, and the Barbarian. It is an unconventional love story. The three main characters represent different elements of the protagonist. Alex (full name hinted to be Alexander Lennox, but never explicitly named), John Orr and The Barbarian are one. Alex is a real person, born in...
The Business is a novel published in 1999.
Kate Telman is a 'level 3' executive in the Business, a vast business empire. During her sabbatical year, she comes to suspect that some of her colleagues are stealing from the organisation, and investigates.
The Business is a powerful (yet democratic) multinational commercial organisation, secretive (but not too sinisterly so),...
Abacus, 1992. — 256 p.
The Crow Road is a novel published in 1992.
A pivotal period in Prentice McHoan's life is described, seen through his preoccupations with death, sex, his relationship with his father, unrequited love, sibling rivalry, a missing uncle, relationships, drink (and other intoxicants) and God, with the background a celebration of the Scottish landscape....
The Scavenger species are circling. It is, truly, the End Days for the Gzilt civilization.
An ancient people, organized on military principles and yet almost perversely peaceful, the Gzilt helped set up the Culture ten thousand years earlier and were very nearly one of its founding societies, deciding not to join only at the last moment. Now they've made the collective decision...
The Culture — a human/machine symbiotic society — has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer and strategy.
Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game … a game so complex, so like life itself, that the...
The first ever collection of Iain Banks's short fiction, this volume includes the acclaimed novella, The State of the Art. This is a striking addition to the growing body of Culture lore, and adds definition and scale to the previous works by using the Earth of 1977 as contrast. The other stories in the collection range from science fiction to horror, dark-coated fantasy to...
The State of the Art is a short story collection first published in 1991. The collection includes some stories originally published under his other byline, Iain Banks as well as the title novella and others set in Banks' Culture fictional universe.
The stories are:
Road of Skulls.
A Gift from the Culture.
Odd Attachment.
Descendant.
Cleaning Up.
Piece.
The State of the...
A novel. — Abacus, 1987. — 143 p. — ISBN: 0349102145. Enter - if you can bear it - the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least. 'Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin...
It is written from a first person perspective, told by sixteen-year-old eunuch Frank Cauldhame, describing his childhood and all that remains of it. Frank observes many shamanistic rituals of his own invention, and it is soon revealed that Frank was the perpetrator of three deaths within his family - all other children and all before he reached the age of ten. As the novel...
Frank - no ordinary sixteen-year-old - lives with his father outside a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; and his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned to strange acts of violence to vent his...
Cheradenine is an ex-“special circumstance” agent who had been raised to eminence by a woman named Diziet. Skaffen-Amtskaw, the drone, had saved her life and it believes Cheradenine to be a burnt-out case. But not even its machine intelligence can see the horrors in his past.
Use of Weapons is a science fiction novel first published in 1990 as the third novel in the Culture series. The narrative takes the form of a fractured biography of a man called Cheradenine Zakalwe, who was born outside of the Culture but was recruited into it by Special Circumstances agent Diziet Sma to work as an operative intervening in less advanced civilizations. The novel...
Walking on Glass is the second novel by Iain Banks. It was published in 1985.
It has three storylines that do not appear to be linked, but eventually come together, to an extent that depends upon how much the reader wishes to read into the book.
Each part of Walking on Glass, apart from the last, is divided into three sections, which appear at first sight to be independent...
Whit , or, Isis amongst the unsaved is a novel published in 1995. Isis Whit, a young but important member of a small, quirky cult in Scotland, narrates. The community suspects that Isis' cousin Morag is in danger, and sends Isis out to help.
Isis, otherwise The Blessed Very Reverend Gaia-Marie Isis Saraswati Minerva Mirza Whit of Luskentyre, Beloved Elect of God III, is the...
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