Scottish scifi author Iain M. Banks has managed to carve out his own realpolitik-laced subgenre in the world of space opera. Although he writes literary novels under the “pseudonym” Iain Banks, his science fiction is literary in its own right, full of artful surprises and sentient starships with motives far more complex than anything Ian…
Iain M. Banks is the master of narrative zoom and pan: one minute he’ll bring you in very close to a tiny moment in one person’s life as she mourns the death of a brother, and the next you’ll be spinning in deep space staring at a supermassive artificial world created by liquid-breathing aliens, millions…
We’ve put together this handy primer for you on the Culture, the pan-galactic civilization whose members and ex-members are the subjects of so many Banks novels. Not only do we have a rundown of every single Culture novel, but we’ve also got some important excerpts from an obscure essay Banks wrote in 1994 about the…
Orbit Books just announced that iTunes UK is making an unabridged audio book of Iain M. Banks’ new novel Matter available a few days before its official release on Feb. 7. If you need something to listen to on your commute, this is it. Action-packed and strange, it’s Iain M. Banks at his world-building and…