Iain M Banks: The Culture - The Drawings

Hardcover | 36.2 x 2 x 25.8 cm | 160 pp

Orbit | 2023 | 9780316572873 

This beautiful large-format hardback features original drawings by Iain M. Banks, giving a fascinating insight into the creation of his bestselling Culture universe - an essential collector's edition for all Iain M. Banks fans.

One of the most important and influential writers in modern science fiction this extraordinary collection celebrates Banks' dazzling world-building. Faithfully reproduced from notebooks he kept in the 1970s and 80s, these annotated original illustrations depict the ships, habitats, geography, weapons and language of Banks' Culture series of novels in incredible detail.

'The Culture: The Drawings pulls together his art work for the first time, and it's clear he was a very good draughtsman. Maps of alien archipelagos. Sketches of spaceships and guns and castles and tanks . . . This isn't an archive of ideas so much as the melting pot from which ideas came' The Times

'Banks was a dude who loved his whisky and his amateur draftsmanship has some of the character of cask spirit: raw and unrefined but heady and intoxicating' Eurogamer