#iainbanks — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #iainbanks, aggregated by home.social.
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"Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot."
~ Iain Banks
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"Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so."
~ Iain Banks
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I finally finished Iain M. Banks' series of "Culture" SF novels and thoroughly enjoyed it. There's an overview of the series on my blog at:
https://leejrussell.com/2026/03/22/iain-m-banks-culture-seriesutopia-power-and-moral-complexity/
Highly recommended reading!
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I was introduced to Iain M. Banks when I picked up "Look to Windward" at a grocery store in 2002. Remember when grocery stores had a sci-fi rack? sigh.
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I'm Getting a Whiff of Iain Banks' Culture
https://probablydance.com/2026/03/07/im-getting-a-whiff-of-iain-banks-culture/
#HackerNews #IainBanks #Culture #ScienceFiction #Literature #BookReview #HackerNews
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Currently on BBC Sounds: THE STATE OF THE ART by Iain M. Banks
In 1977, the Culture starship GCU ARBITRARY discovers Earth: a primitive society on the edge of self-destruction.
When Contact agent Dervley Linter decides to go native, can Diziet Sma change his mind?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hv1dz
#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #scifi #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #audiobook
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Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory is NOT the kind of book I like to read, but the man can't half tell a story. The denouement waits for the final pages, and is jaw-dropping; the only doubt left in the reader's mind is the plausibility, as the story is so strange.
WARNING: this review in particular has big spoilers; don't read it if you think you will one day read the book yourself, as it WILL spoil your reading pleasure.
https://khleedril.org/dale-mellor/bookblog/?review=the-wasp-factory
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Born this Day:
Iain Menzies Banks (16 February 1954 – 9 June 2013) was a Scottish author celebrated for his "Culture" series, a benchmark in modern space opera. His novels, including Consider Phlebas blend high-concept technology with dark humor and moral complexity. He received multiple Hugo and Locus nominations.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks
#Literature
#SciFi
#ScienceFiction
#books
#bookstodon
#coverart
#IainBanks -
“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop…”
—Iain M. Banks, EXCESSION (1996)
#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #videogames #Civ #Civilization #SidMeier
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“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop…”
—Iain M. Banks, EXCESSION (1996)
#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #videogames #Civ #Civilization #SidMeier
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“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop…”
—Iain M. Banks, EXCESSION (1996)
#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #videogames #Civ #Civilization #SidMeier
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“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop…”
—Iain M. Banks, EXCESSION (1996)
#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #videogames #Civ #Civilization #SidMeier
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“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop…”
—Iain M. Banks, EXCESSION (1996)
#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #videogames #Civ #Civilization #SidMeier
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“Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION was one of the most addicting games of my life… I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Iain M. Banks shared the addiction and that his Culture novel EXCESSION was in part inspired by it.”
—Peter Tieryas on how Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION helped inspire Iain M. Banks’s 1996 Culture novel EXCESSION
#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #videogames #Civ #Civilization #SidMeier
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“Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION was one of the most addicting games of my life… I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Iain M. Banks shared the addiction and that his Culture novel EXCESSION was in part inspired by it.”
—Peter Tieryas on how Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION helped inspire Iain M. Banks’s 1996 Culture novel EXCESSION
#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #videogames #Civ #Civilization #SidMeier
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“Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION was one of the most addicting games of my life… I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Iain M. Banks shared the addiction and that his Culture novel EXCESSION was in part inspired by it.”
—Peter Tieryas on how Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION helped inspire Iain M. Banks’s 1996 Culture novel EXCESSION
#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #videogames #Civ #Civilization #SidMeier
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“Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION was one of the most addicting games of my life… I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Iain M. Banks shared the addiction and that his Culture novel EXCESSION was in part inspired by it.”
—Peter Tieryas on how Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION helped inspire Iain M. Banks’s 1996 Culture novel EXCESSION
#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #videogames #Civ #Civilization #SidMeier
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“Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION was one of the most addicting games of my life… I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Iain M. Banks shared the addiction and that his Culture novel EXCESSION was in part inspired by it.”
—Peter Tieryas on how Sid Meier’s CIVILIZATION helped inspire Iain M. Banks’s 1996 Culture novel EXCESSION
#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #videogames #Civ #Civilization #SidMeier
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“I mean, your society’s broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let’s blame the people with no power & no money & these immigrants who don’t even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault.”
—Iain Banks, the final interview
13/13
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-the-final-interview
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture
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“Pay attention to the moments of contradiction & uncertainty threaded through character dialogue & self-reflection…Watch his tone. Watch his humour. For me, that’s where the sharpest lessons are”
—Dr Bethany Jacobs for the New Scientist
12/13
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture
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The New Scientist Book Club read the science-fiction masterpiece THE PLAYER OF GAMES by Iain M. Banks. In this video, Iain’s friend & fellow author Ken MacLeod discusses Iain’s schooldays, his literary influences, & his idea for a final Culture novel
11/13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7OW6A8XCgg
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture
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Why has Iain Banks’s Culture series – “a world where your Bezoses & your Musks are not just irrelevant, but actively sought out & disempowered” – garnered a billionaire fanbase? Kurt Schiller examines ultra-rich misreadings & delusions for Blood Knife
10/13
https://bloodknife.com/culture-war-iain-m-banks-jeff-bezos/
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #billionaires
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“Our strange wee country is as complex as any alien civilization, & getting it as right as Banks did in The Crow Road required every bit as much world-building skill as his Culture”
—Simon Stephenson travels THE CROW ROAD for Reactor Magazine
9/13
https://reactormag.com/the-difference-is-entirely-one-of-setting-iain-banks-the-crow-road/
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture
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“Banks… envisions the overcoming of scarcity as the signal achievement of the civilization made by the Minds, & yet he focuses time and again on objects of unfulfilled desire”
—Alan Jacobs on the Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M Banks, for The New Atlantis
8/13
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-ambiguous-utopia-of-iain-m-banks
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #utopia
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“As a humanist, atheist, and socialist, he preferred to place his trust in techno-scientific development, rather than his faith in gods, or his capital in the market”
Joseph S. Norman on the legacy & utopianism of Iain M. Banks’s #scifi Culture series
7/13
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture #utopia
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HIPPY COMMIES WITH HYPER-WEAPONS
“I think space opera in general celebrates a certain manic wildness and vivacity of vision, a refusal to be constrained”
A Few Questions About the Culture – an interview with Iain M. Banks, on Strange Horizons
6/13
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture
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“THE BRIDGE bends reality, breaks the rules of physics, invents technologies & plays around with impossible inventions”
—Sam Jordison explores the link between Iain Banks’s “mainstream” & science-fiction novels
5/13
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture
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“I love plot, I love stories. I hate these novels that just stop… I don't think it’s good enough. I want closure. I don't want any of this existentialist post-modern shite, pal. I want a story, with an ending”
—an in-depth profile of Iain Banks, from 1999
4/13
https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/aug/07/fiction.iainbanks
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture
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Also on BBC Sounds: Inside THE WASP FACTORY
Iain Banks’s 1984 debut THE WASP FACTORY was described in the media as “a work of unparalleled depravity” & also “a masterpiece” – both reviews ended up on the cover. Simon Pegg discusses his favourite novel
3/13
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001w71d
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture
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Iain’s debut novel THE WASP FACTORY was published 42 years ago today…
Available on BBC Sounds – Iain Banks discusses THE WASP FACTORY with James Naughtie & readers at the National Library of Scotland
🚨CONTAINS SPOILERS🚨 – read the book before listening!2/13
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016w0nf
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture
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Iain M. Banks (1954–2013) was born #OTD, 16 Feb: a 🎂 🧵
1/13“Iain Banks… is a novelist who has his own ‘double’, an author for whom the idea of a split writing persona is emphatically not out of place”
—“Reading Double, Writing Double: The Fiction of Iain (M) Banks” – a 2010 article on Banks’s genre-busting career
https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2010/11/reading-double-writing-double-the-fiction-of-iain-m-banks/
#Scottish #literature #fiction #sciencefiction #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture
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"One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics."
~ Iain Banks, born today, 1954.
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@selfawarepatterns.com
It may be that I came to it via The State of the Art, a novella published with some assorted short stories, but I think that story of the examination of an Uncontacted world in which I had lived is a good entry point.For younger people, perhaps it would feel no more real than an Orbital.
#SciFi #IainBanks #TheCulture #StartingPoint -
@Maker_of_Things @quixoticgeek
You may care to consider that in the 1940s and 50s there were no credit/debit cards or payment by RFID near field linkage on phones.I'm not offering a solution, except that there are some things you might usefully have a stock of.
India, a few years ago, suddenly withdrew a commonly used denomination of note from circulation and validity.
In #SciFi opposite #IainBanks ' economy of abundance, #WilliamGibson 's #Sprawl runs on old new yen notes. Who knows.
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The NEW SCIENTIST Book Club is reading the science-fiction masterpiece THE PLAYER OF GAMES by Iain M. Banks. In this video, Iain’s friend & fellow author Ken MacLeod discusses everything from how the pair met as teenagers at school to Banks’s literary influences, & even his idea for a final novel set in the universe of the Culture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7OW6A8XCgg
#Scottish #literature #sciencefiction #scifi #IainBanks #IainMBanks #TheCulture
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(Is the world’s richest man remembering all the times when #IainBanks wrote “Money is a sign of poverty”?)
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It seems that Elon is talking more about #IainBanks in interviews lately. Is he doing a reread? Is he getting to the parts where people with power do actually intervene to help people out instead of just talking?
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I return to my discussion of The Culture setting and explore the Culture’s economic systems. This leads to a discussion of our current day economics systems and government corruption. How do we move to our current corrupt systems to one like The Culture’s where there is true democracy and equality?
https://lexstarwalker.com/lol/100
#podcast #writing #AmWriting #WritingCommunity #SciFi #AmWritingSciFi #TheCulture #ScienceFiction #IainBanks #books #writers #authors
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The big idea: will sci-fi end up destroying the world? https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/14/the-big-idea-will-sci-fi-end-up-destroying-the-world #Sciencefictionbooks #MarkZuckerberg #Politicsbooks #Themetaverse #PhilipKDick #IsaacAsimov #IainBanks #ElonMusk #Culture #Fiction #SpaceX #Books #Tesla
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@mrgtwentythree I am reminded of this bit from Consider Phlebas which always makes me smile.
#Quote #IainBanks #ConsiderPhlebas -
@mrgtwentythree I am reminded of this bit from Consider Phlebas which always makes me smile.
#Quote #IainBanks #ConsiderPhlebas -
@mrgtwentythree I am reminded of this bit from Consider Phlebas which always makes me smile.
#Quote #IainBanks #ConsiderPhlebas -
@mrgtwentythree I am reminded of this bit from Consider Phlebas which always makes me smile.
#Quote #IainBanks #ConsiderPhlebas -
@mrgtwentythree I am reminded of this bit from Consider Phlebas which always makes me smile.
#Quote #IainBanks #ConsiderPhlebas -
@manuphoto.com It is one of his best! [You'll like Use of Weapons, too, though it might require a second reading to really get it.]
SPOILERS:
https://rdmp.org/dale-mellor/bookblog/?review=consider-phlebas -
@manuphoto.com It is one of his best! [You'll like Use of Weapons, too, though it might require a second reading to really get it.]
SPOILERS:
https://rdmp.org/dale-mellor/bookblog/?review=consider-phlebas -
@manuphoto.com It is one of his best! [You'll like Use of Weapons, too, though it might require a second reading to really get it.]
SPOILERS:
https://rdmp.org/dale-mellor/bookblog/?review=consider-phlebas -
'Once upon a time, over the gravity well and far away, there was a magical land where they had no kings, no laws, no money and no property, but where everybody lived like a prince, was very well-behaved and lacked for nothing.'
#iainmbanks #IainBanks #ScottishSFF #Glasgow2024 #worldcon2024 #RoadtoGlasgow24 #bookstodon
https://prospectiveculture.wordpress.com/2024/08/03/road-to-glasgow-2024-fairy-tale-narratives-in-iain-m-banks-science-fiction/ -
@peston "Elon Musk says his favourite books are the culture series by Scotland’s Iain Banks" - weird because Banks' views were pretty much the opposite of Musk's.
#elonmusk #IainBanks #cultureseries #sf
