Science Fiction Aficionados discussion

Hello everyone and welcome to our next book in our series read of Iain M. Banks' Culture series.

The State of the Art is a short story collection published in 1991. from my vague understanding of the book, it mixes Culture stories with non-Culture stories. the title piece is a 100-page novella taking place within the Culture. I assume the short story "A Gift from the Culture" also takes place within the Culture. as far as the rest of the stories... well I guess I will just have to find that out on my own!

ALERT! CULTURE ALERT! CORRECTION! THIS IS A CORRECTION!

ok, so The State of the Art is actually not the series read book of the month. as Maggie has mentioned, this book is apparently not easy to find. I've checked on Amazon, and it doesn't look like it is on Kindle either. the book this month is #5 in the series: Excession. a thread will go up shortly.

we'll keep this thread up in case completists like myself still want to read this and comment about it.

Diziet Sma and Skaffen the Drone visit circa 1970 Earth....I loved that story!

I borrowed this book (my library had it!) before realized Excession was next (you are not alone in this confusion Mark). Will finish Excession first - but am very looking forward to reading these short stories, especially the title story.
And am curious to read the essay by Banks on the Culture - will be interesting to hear his perspective at that point of writing these volumes!

I'm looking forward to reading it too, just need to find a copy. Amazon has plenty of copies but that's my last resort.

heh - try library ILL; they should be able to get it. not that uncomon in US libraries...