Iain Banks

The polarizing literary debut by Scottish author Ian Banks, The Wasp Factory is the bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath.Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least: Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for …

Consider Phlebas, first published in 1987, is a space opera novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks. 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 …

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 …

Use of Weapons is a science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, first published in 1990 as the third novel in the Culture series.

Excession, first published in 1996, is Scottish writer Iain M. Banks's fourth science fiction novel to feature the Culture, a fictional interstellar society. 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 …

The Algebraist, a science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, first appeared in print in 2004. It was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2005. It was his third science fiction novel not to be based or set in The Culture, and the first not to be potentially in the same universe.

Look to Windward is a science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, first published in 2000. It is Banks' sixth published novel to feature the Culture. The book's dedication reads: "For the Gulf War Veterans".

From its bravura opening onwards, THE CROW ROAD is justly regarded as an outstanding contemporary novel. 'It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me …

Matter is a science fiction novel from Iain M. Banks set in his Culture universe. It was published on 25 January 2008. Matter was a finalist for the 2009 Prometheus Award.

Inversions is a science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, first published in 1998. Banks has said "Inversions was an attempt to write a Culture novel that wasn't."