Iain Banks
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender. Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to...
Author
Series
Culture novel volume 2
Language
English
Description
Overview: 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 winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts...
Author
Series
Culture novel volume 4
Language
English
Description
Cheradenine is an ex-special circumstance agent who had been raised to eminence by a woman named Diziet. Skaffen-Amtiskaw, 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.
4) Matter
Author
Series
Culture novel volume 8
Publisher
Orbit
Pub. Date
2009.
Language
English
Formats
Description
In a distant-future, highly advanced society of seemingly unlimited technological capability, a crime is committed within a war. For one brother it means a desperate flight, and a search for the one--maybe two--people who could clear his name. For his brother it means a life lived under constant threat of treachery and murder. And for their sister, it means returning to a place she'd thought abandoned forever. Only the sister is not what she once...
Author
Publisher
Pocket
Pub. Date
c2000.
Language
English
Description
Eight hundred years after the induced explosion of two suns during the Idiran War--a desperate act of aggression that destroyed worlds full of life--Chel emissary Major Quilan arrives on Masaq' to complete a mission with far-reaching consequences for which he has been programmed without his knowledge.
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Pub. Date
1999.
Language
English
Description
Kate is a senior executive officer in a powerful and massively discreet transglobal organization. The character of The Business seems, even to her, to be vague to the point of invisibility. Her job is to keep abreast of technological developments, but she must let go the assumptions of a lifetime.
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Pub. Date
1998.
Language
English
Description
Frank, no ordinary 16-year-old, lives with his father outside a remote Scottish village. His elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital. When news comes of Eric's escape, Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return.
9) Inversions
Author
Publisher
Pocket
Pub. Date
1998.
Language
English
Description
On a backward world with six moons, an alert spy reports on the doings of one Dr. Vosill, who has mysteriously become the personal physician to the king, despite being a foreigner and, even more unthinkably, a woman. Vosill has more enemies than she first realizes. But then she also has more remedies to hand than those who wish her ill can ever guess. Elsewhere, in another palace across the mountains, a man named DeWar serves as chief bodyguard to...
10) The Crow Road
Author
Publisher
MacAdam Cage
Pub. Date
c1992.
Language
English
Description
'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 back to Gallanach.' Prentice McHoan has returned to the bosom of his complex but enduring Scottish family. Full of questions about the McHoan past, present and future, he is also deeply preoccupied: mainly with death, sex, drink, God and...
11) Surface detail
Author
Series
Culture novel volume 9
Publisher
Orbit
Pub. Date
[2010]
Language
English
Description
When sex slave Lededje Y'breq is murdered by a politician on the planet Sichult, the artificial intelligence running one of the Culture's immense starships resurrects her so she can seek revenge. Meanwhile, the Culture is uneasily watching the conflict over whether to preserve virtual Hells for the souls of "sinners" or give them the release of death.