The State of the Art

Originally a novella, first published in 1989, in which a Culture ship visits Earth in 1977 and its crew argue over whether to make contact or leave the planet alone as a control group. It later gave its name to a 1991 Orbit collection that gathers the novella with other short fiction — Culture and non-Culture, science fiction and not, including pieces first published under Banks’s byline without the middle initial.

Context: the one short-form entry in a16z’s ten-volume Culture listing, and the only place in the sequence where the Culture is measured directly against the actual Earth rather than an invented civilisation. Useful as a sampler; not a substitute for the novels.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates it.
• Iain M. Banks — the author.
• Consider Phlebas — the first Culture book.
• Historical Futurism — the research lens.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.