It is the worst book to start reading about the Culture. Yes, thanks to that one scene it shows how different, far and alien Culture is. But in this book there is no tangible context to “why?”. It is a nice exploration of Culture from the human point of view, no doubt about it, but in the same time almost any intelligent reader can have it reading other books about Culture him/herself.

“Use of weapons”, “Excession” and “Surface Detail” – three books that show Culture in all its complex glory (if you can call it that, if not then whatever you call it). They all together can show all of what was said in this book without resorting to the direct speech by characters introduced strictly for that purpose. This book feels little bit artificial. It was made to be what it is. It was not grown in you. ( )

It's hard to rate a short story collection because of all the different feelings each story provokes. Banks has a lot of fun with his short fiction and you can tell he used it to wander off (what was already) a very unusual path. Stories both playful and morbid.

The chunk of this book is taken up by The State of the Art which is set in the Culture universe. I really enjoyed the story even though it's the most blatant statement of his worldview. I'm not sure I agree with his some of his conclusions, but The State of the Art is a fantastic look at mortality, privilege, and finding the savor in life. ( )

The jacket copy boasts that The State of the Art is "the only collection of Iain Banks' short fiction," and it appears that it does account for most of the short fiction that he ever published. Three of the eight stories, including the novella that makes up about half of the eponymous book, are explicitly Culture tales, and several of the others seem to sit comfortably in the Culture's universe. It is thus figured as the fourth book of the Culture series, and I read it as such.

The novella brings the Culture's exploratory agency Contact to 1970s Earth, thus linking Banks' science fiction to the hardly sfnal "Piece"--a meditation on censorship and violence with an arch irony--and to the quite terrestrial prose poem "Scratch." The narrator of "The State of the Art" is even Diziet Sma, the Special Circumstances operative from Use of Weapons.

I had wondered before about the genealogical relationship of the Culture's posthumans to our own population. Banks clearly implies that we are a not-especially-remarkable instance of a galactically ubiquitous pan-humanity, products of parallel evolution it appears. The differences between the Culture's phenotype and ours are briefly described in what Sma needs in order to pass for Earth-human: "I got a couple of extra toes, a joint removed from each finger, and a rather generalized ear, nose, and cheekbone job. The ship insisted on teaching me to walk differently as well" (106-7).

"Cleaning Up" involved an extraterrestrial influence that was almost certainly not the Culture. The story seemed like Banks' take on the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic, playing up the comical elements of that work. The comedy in all of these stories tends towards the decidedly dark.

There is a full-page illustration by Nick Day for the frontispiece and one for each story. These are all in black-and-white and seem to be linocuts. The style is more diagrammatic than representational. By refusing to offer more eidetic images, these made me conscious of their lack in the larger Culture corpus, where the cover art tends to be abstract and symbolic. A quick 'net search for art depicting the Culture revealed that just last week saw the posthumous publication of The Culture: The Drawings reproducing Banks' own diagrams and sketches of Culture environments and technology.

Despite The State of the Art being a quick read, I think I'll likely take a breather from the Culture for a little while, since I don't have a copy of Excession, and I am also engaged with a couple of other series that seem to have more urgent plot continuity between volumes.

I don't love short stories and thus goes the same for this book. A few were cool, but then they just left me wanting more. A few were terrible including the first and last ones of the book.
Towards the middle there's a longer story which is more predicated on other full books that the author has. It was definitely the best of the book and I will read another book by him based on the theme of that story. ( )

Just generally not very good writing, to me at least.

Short stories:

Road of Skulls: short and pretty flimsy, only the very ending is much interesting.

A Gift from the Culture: pretty decent. Has a kind of interesting premise but it's hard to sympathise with someone who leaves utopia in general given it's far beyond our own experience

Odd Attachment: vaguely amusing, pretty gross, a little confusing, eh

Descendant: best story of the book, about a human and their sentient spacesuit. Not perfect but it's interesting with a well done ending and a pretty unusual perspective.

Cleaning Up: Reminds me of some 50s/60s pulp story - some humour that sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, cold war theme, generic giant bad corporation. It's ok but written kind of confusingly and not that interesting

Piece: Rolled my eyes hard at the end. Pretty incoherent with some bad poetry stuck in for some reason. Neither a clear "point" or a decent plot or mood or setting or anything.

Scratch: "experimental" writing that's like an expression of anger over the Thatcher era and politics/economy in general. Alright over it's pretty hard to read and you get the point pretty quick (luckily it's short)

The main novella (State of the Art) itself kind of sucks because it's from the perspective of the Culture looking at Earth and it just feels... wrong. It sort of does an "Earth is unique" thing and tries to justify why we haven't been contacted (which is always a bad idea for a sci-fi thing to do imo) but it's just not convincing. And a lot of the speeches and stuff that go on don't really make sense - they don't fit with what you'd expect from the culture and they just seem silly. I dunno. It felt like another expression of anger but what's cathartic to one person generally isn't cathartic to another. Oh well ( )