Iain M. Banks wrote magnificent science fiction novels featuring The Culture, a post-scarcity transstellar AI-suffused quasi-utopia on whose fringes the action happens. Now comes a big beautiful book of Banks' drawings of it and its big beautiful things.
This extraordinary collection celebrates the dazzling worldbuilding of Iain M. Banks, one of the most important and influential writers in modern science fiction. Faithfully reproduced from sketchbooks kept in the 1970s and 80s, these annotated original illustrations depict the ships, habitats, geography, weapons and language of Banks' Culture series of novels in incredible detail.
Intrigued by how far this goes back; Banks wasn't publishing his SF until the late 1980s. $50, November 2023, just in time for a nanotechnologically-atomized Christmas.
The Culture: The Drawings [Orbit Books]
