182 pages
English language
Published Nov. 10, 1991 by Orbit.
The first ever collection of Iain Banks’s short fiction, this volume includes the acclaimed novella, The State of the Art. This is a striking addition to the growing body of Culture lore, and adds definition and scale to the previous works by using the Earth of 1977 as contrast. The other stories in the collection range from science fiction to horror, dark-coated fantasy to morality tale.
A reasonable collection of short stories, but the central Culture-based novella, which revolves around an assessment of 1970s Earth by Special Circumstances, doesn’t hold up well compared to his longer works.
