Iain M. Banks

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  • Bibliography:
    32 Books (1 Series)
  • First Book:
    August 1984
  • Latest Book:
    November 2023
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Full Series List in Order

The Culture

1 - Consider Phlebas (May-1988)
2 - The Player of Games (Feb-1989)
3 - Use of Weapons (1992)
4 - State of the Art (Dec-1989)
5 - Excession (1996)
6 - Inversions (Feb-2000)
7 - Look to Windward (Aug-2001)
8 - Matter (Mar-2008)
9 - Surface Detail (Nov-2010)
10 - The Hydrogen Sonata (Oct-2012)

Book List in Order: 32 titles

  • The Wasp Factory

    The polarizing literary debut by Scottish author Ian Banks, The Wasp Factory is the bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath.Meet Frank Cauldhame. Just sixteen, and unconventional to say the least: T...

  • Walking on Glass

    'Establishes beyond doubt that Iain Banks is a novelist of remarkable talents' Daily TelegraphGraham Park is in love. But Sara Fitch is an enigma to him, a creature of almost perverse mystery. Steven Grout is paranoid - and with justice. He knows tha...

  • Espedair Street

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Daniel Weir used to be a famous - not to say infamous - rock star. Maybe still is. At thirty-one he has been both a brilliant failure and a dull success. He's made a lot of mistakes that have paid off and a lot of smart moves he'll regret forever (ho...

  • Consider Phlebas

    The Culture - 1

    Bora Horza Gobuchul is a Changer, one of a near-extinct race who alter cell structure to become anyone they want--the most feared and sought-after spies in the universe. Horza fights on the side of the Idirans in a religious crusade against the smug...

  • The Player of Games

    The Culture - 2

    The Culture -- a human/machine symbiotic society -- has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels ...

  • The Bridge

    'A stunning book. Banks' powerful imagination is joined to a rare ability to be truly funny while exploring a nightmare world' Sunday TimesA man lies in a coma after a near-fatal accident. His body broken, his memory vanished, he finds himself in the...

  • State of the Art

    The Culture - 4

    From New York Times bestselling and modern master of science fiction, Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art is the acclaimed collection of Banks's short fiction.  “Banks is a phenomenon...writing pure science fiction of a pec...

  • Canal Dreams

    'Banks once again demonstrates his extraordinary dark powers of imagination' Sunday TimesHisako Onada, world-famous cellist, refuses to fly. And so she travels to Europe as a passenger on a tanker bound through the Panama Canal. But Panama is a count...

  • Use of Weapons

    • / Space Opera
    • Buy Buy
    The Culture - 3

    The man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe was one of Special Circumstances' foremost agents, changing the destiny of planets to suit the Culture through intrigue, dirty tricks and military action.The woman known as Diziet Sma had plucked him from obscurit...



  • The Crow Road

    When Prentice McHoan returns to his home town of Gallanach he meets a former girlfriend of his missing uncle Rory, who provides him with a folder of Rory's writings that inspires him to seek out the man who had disappeared eight years earlier....

  • Against a Dark Background

    They had government permission to hunt down and assassinate her. What the religious Huhsz cult wanted was simple--the most deadly and enigmatic weapon constructed, the Lazy Gun, lost among the planets of the Thrial star system. Whoever controls the G...

  • Feersum Endjinn

    Ever since his stunning novel The Wasp Factory set readers on fire, Iain M. Banks has been defying category and convention with his thrilling speculative fiction. Now he goes a step beyond his previous imaginative journeys to create his most exciting...

  • Complicity

    Complicity n. 1. the fact of being an accomplice, esp. in a criminal act
    Local journalist Cameron Colley writes articles that are idealistic, from the viewpoint of the underdog. A twisted serial killer seems to have the same Mo -- he comm...

  • Excession

    • / Space Opera
    • Buy Buy
    The Culture - 5

    Diplomat Byr Genar-Hofoen has been selected by the Culture to undertake a delicate and dangerous mission. The Department of Special Circumstances--the Culture's espionage and dirty tricks section--has sent him off to investigate a 2,500-year-old myst...

  • Whit

    A little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing... Innocent in the ways of the world, an ingenue when it comes to pop and fashion, the Elect of God of a small but committed Stirlingshire religious cult: Isis Whit is no ordinary teenager.When her cou...

  • A Song of Stone

    The war is ending, perhaps ended. For the castle and its occupants the troubles are just beginning. Armed gangs roam a lawless land where each farm and house supports a column of dark smoke. Taking to the roads with the other refugees, anonymous in t...

  • The Business

    Kate Telman is a senior executive officer in The Business, a powerful and massively discreet transglobal organisation. Financially transparent, internally democratic and disavowing conventional familial inheritance, the character of The Business seem...

  • Inversions

    The Culture - 6

    ON A DISORDERED WORLD In Haspidus, Dr. Vosill serves as the personal physician to the king, an incredible achievement for a foreigner and--even more unthinkably--a woman. Sharp-tongued, independent, and full of dangerous ideas, Vosill has more enemi...

  • Look to Windward

    The Culture - 7

    Eight hundred years after the most horrific battle of the Idiran war, light from its catastrophic, worlds-destroying detonations is about to reach the Masaq' Orbital, home to the far-flung Culture's most adventurous and decadent souls. There it will ...



  • Dead Air

    Iain Banks' daring new novel opens in a loft apartment in the East End, in a former factory due to be knocked down in a few days. Ken Nott is a devoutly contrarian vaguely left-wing radio shock-jock living in London. After a wedding breakfast people ...

  • The Algebraist

    As complex, turbulent and spectacular as the gas giant on which it is set, this novel from Iain M. Banks is space opera on a truly epic scale. “An enormously enjoyable book, full of wonderful aliens, a sense of wonder and subtle political commentar...

  • The Steep Approach to Garbadale

    Dark family secrets and a long-lost love affair lie at the heart of a fabulous new novel by the author of Matter and The Wasp Factory The Wopuld family built its fortune on a board game called Empire!, now a hugely successful computer game. So su...

  • Matter

    The Culture - 8

    In a world renowned even within a galaxy full of wonders, a crime within a war. For one man it means a desperate flight and a search for the one -- maybe two -- people who could clear his name. For his brother it means a life lived under constant thr...

  • Transition

    There is a world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse. Such a world requires a firm hand and...

  • Surface Detail

    The Culture - 9

    It begins in the realm of the Real, where matter still matters. It begins with a murder. And it will not end until the Culture has gone to war with death itself. Lededje Y'breq is one of the Intagliated, her marked body bearing witness to a ...

  • The Hydrogen Sonata

    The Culture - 10

    The Scavenger species are circling. It is, truly, probably, the End Days for the Gzilt civilization. An ancient people, organized on military principles and yet almost perversely peaceful, the Gzilt helped set up the Culture ten thousand years ear...

  • Stonemouth

    Stewart Gilmour is back in Stonemouth, Scotland. After five years in exile, his presence is required at the funeral of local patriarch Joe Murston, even though the last time Stewart saw the Murstons he was running for his life. An estuary town nor...

  • The Quarry

    Eighteen-year-old Kit is weird: big, strange, odd, socially disabled, on a spectrum that stretches from "highly gifted" at one end, to "nutter" at the other. At least Kit knows who his father is; he and Guy live together in a decaying country house o...

  • Poems

    Iain Banks is celebrated as a novelist and science fiction writer. It is less well known that his first published work was the poem '041', in New Writing Scotland in 1983. Like the poems that appeared within his novels, this was selected from the man...



  • The Culture

  • Burning Brightly

    An anthology featuring some of the biggest names in British genre fiction, including rare, previously uncollected stories by Iain M. Banks, Stephen Baxter, Peter F. Hamilton, Justina Robson, Paul McAuley, Juliet E McKenna, Anne Nicholls, and Geoff Ry...

  • The Culture: The Drawings

    This extraordinary collection celebrates the dazzling worldbuilding of Iain M. Banks, one of the most important and influential writers in modern science fiction. WINNER OF THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST ILLUSTRATED AND ART BOOK Banks created many original...

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Iain M. Banks has published 32 books.

Iain M. Banks does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, The Culture: The Drawings, was published in November 2023.

The first book by Iain M. Banks, The Wasp Factory, was published in August 1984.

Yes. Iain M. Banks has 1 series.
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