“So that’s where you look for aliens. In the course of an eclipse totality track. When everybody else is looking awestruck at the sky, you need to be looking round for anybody who looks weird or overdressed, or who isn’t coming out of their RV or their moored yacht with the heavily smoked glass.”
Where to look for #alien tourists – from Iain (M) Banks’s 2009 novel TRANSITION
Never-before-seen writings & correspondence from author Iain Banks form part of an exhibit at the University of Stirling as it celebrates one of its most famous alumni.
Iain (M) Banks: Two Authors, One Man launches at a free event in the University of Stirling library on Thursday, April 4 from 4pm to 6pm, & will run until August 30.
Seeing the official form title “Special Circumstances" on my NYS taxes and sniggering in #IainMBanks’ #TheCulture
(and for all its warts, ah if only we lived in that fully automated gay luxury space communism!! instead of manual labor cishet "luxury apartments" terrestrial hypercapitalism. I guess.)
I get greedy with Audiobooks. At first, it's just a book a week, then it's a book a day, then you're downloading the entire year of audiobooks to listen to.. <sigh> but they are good books. I've still got 16 hours left on my current book, and I saw this mentioned.. So, I got it too.
@bookstodon
“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 Culture series
@bookstodon
“Banks… envisions the overcoming of scarcity as the signal achievement of the civilization made by the Minds, and yet he focuses time and again on objects of unfulfilled desire”
—The Ambiguous Utopia of Iain M Banks: Alan Jacobs on the price of bliss, in The New Atlantis Journal
@bookstodon
“Our strange wee country is as complex as any alien civilization, and getting it as right as Banks did in The Crow Road required every bit as much world-building skill as his Culture”
—“The Difference is Entirely One of Setting”: Simon Stephenson travels THE CROW ROAD
@bookstodon
Why has 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 writes in Blood Knife Magazine on what misreadings might attract Jeff Bezos & Elon Musk
@scotlit@bookstodon I swear, honest, I was tidying up files on the computer last night and found this Iain Banks’ quote before he went. I couldn’t find it again this morning but instead found a lost collection of goody images archived from when I was active on Twitter and a copy was in amongst. Too good not to share again now - at 40 years, the financial news, and todays two bi-elections. #IainMBanks I read the Sci Fi.
Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real
Today’s Silicon Valley billionaires grew up reading classic American science fiction. Now they’re trying to make it come true, embodying a dangerous political outlook
"The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past."
The Waning of the Middle Ages
Johan Huizinga Dutch historian was born #OTD in 1872. Huizinga had an aesthetic approach to history, where art and spectacle played an important part. His most famous work is The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919). Other works include Erasmus (1924) and Homo Ludens (1938). via @wikipedia
“A little more than ten years after his death, we are experiencing a timely, double-pronged Banks bump. His 13 sci-fi books as Iain M Banks are being reissued this month with eye-catching new cover art […] Even more exciting: the recent publication of behind-the-curtain coffee table tome The Culture: The Drawings, collating his earliest conceptual designs for what would become his signature sci-fi creation.”
The Culture Drawings book is full of pages like this - all these raw worldbuilding thoughts and sketches lovingly scanned in and restored! Whether there's much that can actually be deciphered coherently is another matter, but it's kinda fascinating to see :) #TheCulture#IainMBanks#SciFi
“The novels of Iain M. Banks have forever changed the face of modern science fiction. His Culture books combine breathtaking imagination with exceptional storytelling, and have secured his reputation as one of the most extraordinary and influential writers in the genre”
Orbit Books are reissuing all of Iain M. Banks’s #ScienceFiction novels with new cover designs
The Hitchhiker’s Guide was famously written by correspondents like Ford Prefect. It wasn’t an #AI that made shit up based on some random sub-ether drivel. As a result, it was useful.
Curiously enough, an edition of The Guide that fell through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the executive board of X as “a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came”.
@Nickiquote Elon's whole thing is getting the asthetics of a SFF property, but missing the meaning. He has had the utter gall to name his barges after ships from #TheCulture too. #IainMBanks would loathe him, and The Culture would be giving him the #SpecialCircumstances#AfterlifeExpress treatment if they were real. He has just not an ounce of self awareness in him.
”There are no guarantees in war,” green said.
”Oh, there are,” blue said quietly, looking away into the darkness. ”It’s just that they guarantee death, destruction, suffering, heartache and remorse.”
What is the best book in Iain M Bank’s ”Culture” series, and why is it Surface Detail? 🤔
Ok. Player of Games, Use Of Weapons and Excession are awesome too. But if any should be made into a screenplay now it would surely have to be Surface Detail
It really puts forward where #conservative values can lead, if we let a sly techie give traditionalists all the #technology in the world: They’ll just use it to enforce their hate & fear on everyone