Awarded the Locus Award for Best Illustrated and Artistic Book

This exceptional volume celebrates the fantastical world of Iain M. Banks, one of the most significant and influential writers of modern science fiction. With faithful reproduction from the notebooks he kept in the '70s and '80s, the annotated original illustrations depict the ships, houses, geography, weapons, and language of Banks' series of novels.

This collection includes designs, diagrams, notes, and sketches that highlight Banks' mastery. Designs from alien archipelagos, spaceship hulls, weapons, castles, and chariots... This is not a mere archiving of ideas, but the ferment from which the ideas were born.

Award-winning reviews for the Culture series:

"Epic in scope, ambitious in ideas and absorbing in execution" Independent on Sunday

"Few of us have been exposed to talent this effusive and with such an astonishing range" New York Review of Science Fiction

"Banks’ science fiction, at its best, is stunningly inventive, beautifully written, and dramatic—often very funny" New Scientist

The Culture series includes the titles: Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, The State of the Art, Excession, Inversions, Look to Windward, Matter, Surface Detail, The Hydrogen Sonata.

Other books by Iain M. Banks include: Against a Dark Background, Feersum Endjinn, The Algebraist.

Also, see the Deluxe "Special Circumstances" edition of The Culture: The Drawings, which includes a numbered cloth edition, in a luxurious presentation.