The Works
Iain Banks published a whopping 29 books in his 29 year career from The Wasp Factory in 1984 to The Quarry in 2013. Poems, a joint collection with Ken Macleod (2015) and The Culture: The Drawings (2023) were both published posthumously.
Covering literary fiction, science fiction, short stories, poetry, artwork, non-fiction and Transition, every title is summarised here.
When you click on Discover More, you’ll find additional information on each publication including Iain’s insights alongside some personal information, adventures away from writing and plenty of photographs from Iain’s own archive.
THE WASP FACTORY was published in 1984
It went on to be named ‘one of the top 100 novels of the 20th century’ by The Independent.
Enter – if you can bear it – the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least.
‘Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through.’
Frank lives with his father on a tidal island outside a remote Scottish village. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; and his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale.
When news comes of Eric's escape from the hospital, Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return - an event that explodes the mysteries of the past and changes Frank utterly.
WALKING ON GLASS was published in 1985
Graham Park is in love, but Sara ffitch is an enigma to him; a creature of almost perverse mystery.
Steven Grout is paranoid - and with justification. He thinks that They are out to get him. They are.
Quiss, insecure in his fabulous if ramshackle castle, is forced to play interminable impossible games. The solution to the oldest of all paradoxical riddles will release him. But he must find an answer before he knows the question.
Park, Grout, Quiss – no trio could be further apart, but their separate courses are set for collision...
THE BRIDGE was published in 1986
His body broken, his memory vanished, a man finds himself in the surreal world of the bridge where his doctor doesn’t seem to want to cure him.
This is a world free of the usual constraints of time and space, a world where dream and fantasy, past and future fuse.
Who is this man? Where is he? Is he more dead than alive? Or has he never been so alive before?
CONSIDER PHLEBAS was published in 1987
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions have died, billions more were doomed.
Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction - cold-blooded, brutal and – worse – random.
The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender.
Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep inside a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, to actually find it, and with it their own destruction.
ESPEDAIR STREET was also published in 1987
“Two days ago, I decided to kill myself...last night I changed my mind and decided to stay alive. Everything that follows is...just to try and explain.”
Daniel Weir used to be an infamous rockstar. Maybe he still is.
At thirty-one he has been both a brilliant failure and a dull success. His friends all seem to be dead, fed up with him or just disgusted - and who can blame them? As he contemplates his life, Daniel realises he only has two problems: the past and the future. He knows how bad the past has been. But the future - well, the future is something else.
THE PLAYER OF GAMES was published in 1988
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 to the cruel and incredibly wealthy Empire of Azad, to try their fabulous game...a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor.
Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life – and very possibly his death.
CANAL DREAMS was published in 1989
Hisako Onoda, world famous cellist, refuses to fly.
Instead, she chooses to travel to Europe as a passenger on a tanker bound through the Panama Canal.
But Panama is a country whose politics are as volatile as the local freedom fighters and it is not long before Hisako's ship is captured.
Soon the atmosphere is as flammable as an oxy-acetylene torch, and the tension as sharp as the spike on her cello...
USE OF WEAPONS was published in 1990
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 or military action.
The woman known as Diziet Sma had plucked him from obscurity and pushed him towards his present eminence, but despite all their dealings she did not know him as well as she thought.
The drone known as Skaffen-Amtiskaw knew both of these people. It had once saved the woman’s life by massacring her attackers in a particularly bloody manner. It believed the man to be a burnt-out case. But not even its machine intelligence could see the horrors in his past.
THE STATE OF THE ART was published in 1991
The first and only collection of Iain M Banks’ short fiction, this volume includes the acclaimed novella, The State of the Art.
The State of the Art is a striking addition to the growing body of Culture lore, using the Earth of 1977 as contrast.
Two other tales, A Gift from the Culture and Descendant are set in the Culture universe. The remaining stories in the collection range from horror to dark-coated fantasy to morality tale.
THE CROW ROAD was published in 1992
Prentice McHoan is full of questions.
Will the long-limbed, golden-haired Verity ever notice him? Wil his odiously talented brother Lewis make it as a stand-up comic? Will his father ever speak to him again? Will his mother ever forgive him? Will uncle Hamish’s newly-minted religion stand the test of time? Does Ashley Watt know it was he who broke her nose with a snowball when she was a kid? Did Grandma Margot have to fall through the conservatory roof? What is Aunt Ilsa doing in Patagonia? Is there a God? Why does Uncle Fergus never use the observatory he built back in 1974? Will he ever get rid of this hangover? And is Uncle Rory still alive somewhere, or is he ‘away the Crow Road’?
Prentice has returned to the bosom of his complex but enduring Scottish family and though full of questions about the McHoan past, present and future, he is mostly deeply preoccupied with death, sex, drink and illegal substances...
COMPLICITY was published in 1993
A few spliffs, a spot of mild S&M, phone through the copy for tomorrow's front page then catch up with the latest from your mystery source… in fact, just a regular day at the office for free-wheeling, substance-abusing Cameron Colley, a fully paid-up Gonzo hack on an Edinburgh newspaper.
Cameron senses a scoop and checks out a series of bizarre deaths from a few years ago - only to find that the police are checking out a series of bizarre deaths that are happening right now. And Cameron might just know more about it than he'd care to admit...
AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND was also published in 1993
She came from one of the more disreputable aristocratic families.
Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the civilisation based around the planet Golter.
On an island with a glass shore – relic of some even more ancient conflict – she discovers she is to be hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes she is the last obstacle before their faith’s apotheosis.
She has to run, knowing her only hope of finally escaping the Huhsz is to find the last of the ancient, apocalyptically powerful but seemingly cursed Lazy Guns...but that is just the first as well as the final step on a search that takes her on an odyssey through the exotic Golterian system. It results in both a trail of destruction and a journey into her own past, as well as that of her family and the system itself; a journey that changes everything...
FEERSUM ENDJINN was published in 1994
Count Sessine is about to die for the very last time…
Chief Scientist Gadfium is about to receive the mysterious message she has been waiting for from the Plain of Sliding Stones…
And Bascule the Teller, in search of an ant, is about to enter the chaos of the crypt...
And everything is about to change...for this is the time of the Encroachment and, although the dimming sun still shines on the vast, towering walls of Serehfa Fastness, the end is close at hand.
The King knows it, his closest advisers know it, yet still they prosecute the war against the clan Engineers with increasing savagery.
The crypt knows it too; so an emissary has been sent, an emissary who holds the key to all their futures.
WHIT was published in 1995
Innocent in the ways of the modern world, Isis Whit is no ordinary teenager.
Instead, she is the ‘Elect of God’ of the Luskentyrians, a small, isolated Scottish religious cult.
When her cousin Morag - Guest of Honour at the upcoming four-yearly Festival of Love - disappears after renouncing her faith, Isis is sent to venture among the Unsaved and bring the apostate back into the fold.
But the road to Babylondon (as Sister Angela puts it) is a treacherous one, particularly when Isis discovers that Morag appears to have embraced the ways of the Unsaved with spectacular abandon...
EXCESSION was published in 1996
Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe.
It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing.
Then it disappeared. Now it is back.
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 2500 year–old mystery: the sudden disappearance of a star fifty times older than the universe itself. But in seeking the secret of the lost sun, Byr risks losing himself.
There is only one way to break the silence of millennia: steal the soul of the long-dead starship captain who first encountered the star, and convince her to be reborn. And in accepting this mission, Byr will be swept into a vast conspiracy that could lead the universe into an age of peace... or to the brink of annihilation.
A SONG OF STONE was published in 1997
Armed forces roam the lawless land where columns of smoke rise up from the surrounding farms and houses.
The war is ending, has perhaps already ended, but for the castle and its occupants - a young lord and lady - the trouble is just beginning.
Fearing an invasion of soldiers, they take to the road with the other refugees, disguised in rags, but the brutal female lieutenant of an outlaw band of guerrillas has other ideas. Just hours into their escape, the fleeing aristocrats are delivered back to the castle, where, now prisoners in their own home, they become pawns in the lieutenant’s dangerous game of desire, deceit and death.
INVERSIONS was published in 1998
Some years ago, rocks and fire fell from the sky and the old Empire fell with them. In the lands released from that crushing hegemony, a new world order is about to emerge. Two people in particular can see all this in a wider context.
In the winter palace, the King’s new physician has more enemies than she at first realises. But then she also has more remedies to hand than those who wish her ill can know about.
In another palace across the mountains, in the service of the regicidal Protector General, the chief bodyguard, too, has his enemies. But his enemies strike more swiftly, and his means of combating them are more traditional.
THE BUSINESS was published in 1999
Kate Telman is a senior executive officer in The Business, a powerful and massively discreet transglobal organization whose origins predate the Christian Church.
Financially transparent, internally democratic, and having once owned the Roman Empire for 66 days, it now wants to buy its own State to gain a seat at the UN.
Kate’s job is to keep abreast of current technological developments and her global reach stretches from Silicon Valley to the remote Himalayas. In the course of her journey Kate must peel away layers of emotional insulation and the assumptions of a lifetime. She must learn to control the world at arm’s length.
To take control, she has to do The Business.
LOOK TO WINDWARD was published in 2000
It was one of the less glorious incidents of a long-ago war. It led to the destruction of two suns and the billions of lives they supported. Now, eight hundred years later, the light from the first of those ancient deaths has reached the Culture’s Orbital called Masaq’.
For the Hub Mind, overseer of the massive bracelet world, its arrival is particularly poignant. But it may still be eclipsed by events from the Culture’s more recent past.
When the Chelgrian – Ziller – a composer of galactic renown living in self-imposed exile on Masaq’, learns that an emissary from his home world is being sent to the Orbital, he fears what he assumes to be the worst: that the Chelgrians want him to return.
But the composer is far from being the only thing on the Chelgrian emissary’s mind. His mission has another purpose; one so secret he does not know it himself at first. Discovering its nature will take him on a journey into his past and the haunting memories of another terrible war whose legacy threatens to be much more than just an unfortunate diplomatic incident.
DEAD AIR was published in 2002
A loft apartment in London’s East End; cool but doomed, with demolition slated for the following week.
Ken Nott, devoutly contrarian leftish shock-jock attending a mid-week wedding lunch, starts dropping stuff off the roof of a London East End loft, hurling it towards the deserted car park a hundred feet below.
Other guests join in and soon half the contents of the flat are on the pitted tarmac… just as mobiles start to ring, and the TV is turned on, because apparently a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center...
RAW SPIRIT was published in 2003
Malt whisky is made in tiny quantities in some of the most breathtaking and inaccessible places in Scotland. To get to many of the distilleries requires careful planning and lots of different modes of transport. Getting there might not be the problem: surviving them might be.
Along with a curious bunch of fellow travelers – some svelte, some burly, some vintage, some just over the top; in a selection of cars, planes, ferries, trains, bikes and shoes – Iain journeys to remote shores and hidden glens.
He finds people engaged in a centuries old tradition where eccentricity is the norm. It’s a journey of a thousand ‘cheers’ and subsequent wobbly walks, of beautiful place names and daft customs and superstitions. Will Iain prevail? As he puts it, “someone’s got to do it, and I’m damn sure it’s going to be me.”
THE ALGEBRAIST was published in 2004
It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year.
The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilisation.
In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data without order, hunting their own young and fighting pointless formal wars.
Seconded to a military-religious order he’s barely heard of – part of the baroque hierarchy of the Mercatoria, the latest galactic hegemony – Fassin Taak has to travel again amongst the Dwellers. He is in search of a secret hidden for half a billion years, but with each day that passes a war draws closer – a war that threatens to overwhelm everything and everyone he’s ever known.
THE STEEP APPROACH TO GARBADALE was published in 2007
After years of exile, Alban Wopuld has been summoned back to his family's highland estate, Garbadale.
The Wopuld clan are closing ranks.
They have built their fortune on the boardgame Empire! - which has become a hugely successful computer game – and now the Americans want to buy them out.
As the family gathers for their Extraordinary General Meeting, old grudges, forbidden passions and dark secrets emerge. What drove Alban’s mother to take her own life? And is he yet over Sophie, his bewitching cousin and teenage love?
MATTER was published in 2008
In a world renowned even within a galaxy full of wonders, there is 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 threat of treachery and murder. And for their sister, even without knowing the full truth, it means returning to a place she’d thought abandoned forever.
Only the sister is not who she once was; Djan Seriy Anaplian has changed almost beyond recognition to become an agent of the Culture’s Special Circumstances section, charged with high-level interference in civilisations throughout the greater galaxy.
Concealing her new identity – and her particular set of abilities – might be a dangerous strategy. In the world to which Anaplian returns, nothing is as it seems; and determining the appropriate level of interference in someone else’s war is never a simple matter.
TRANSITION was published in 2009
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 a guiding light. But does it need the Concern: an all-powerful organization with a malevolent presiding genius, pervasive influence and numberless invisible operatives in possession of extraordinary powers?
On the Concern’s books are Temudjin Oh, an unkillable assassin journeying between the high passes of Nepal, a version of Victorian London and the dark palaces of Venice under snow; Adrian Cubbish, a restlessly greedy City trader; and a state-sponsored torturer known only as the Philosopher, moving between the time zones with sinister ease.
Then there are the renegades: the bandit queen Mrs Mulverhill, roaming the worlds recruiting rebels to her side; and Patient 8262, under sedation and feigning madness in a forgotten hospital ward, in hiding from a dirty past. As these vivid, strange and sensuous worlds circle and collide, the implications of turning traitor to the Concern become horribly apparent, and an unstable universe is set on a dizzying course.
SURFACE DETAIL was published in 2010
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 family shame, her life belonging to a man whose lust for power is without limit. Prepared to risk everything for her freedom, her release - when it comes - is at a price, and to put things right she will need the help of the Culture.
Benevolent, enlightened and almost infinitely resourceful though it may be, the Culture can only do so much for any individual. With the assistance of one of its most powerful – and arguably deranged – warships, Lededje finds herself heading into a combat zone not even sure which side the Culture is really on. A war – brutal, far-reaching – is already raging within the digital realms that store the souls of the dead, and it’s about to erupt into reality.
It started in the realm of the Real and that is where it will end. It will touch countless lives and affect entire civilisations, but at the centre of it all is a young woman whose need for revenge masks another motive altogether.
STONEMOUTH was published in 2012
Stonemouth is home to Stewart Gilmour.
Or at least it used to be, until an incident with the town’s biggest crime family forced him into exile. Now his presence is required at the funeral of patriarch Joe Murston, and even though the last time Stu saw the Murstons he was running for his life, staying away might be even more dangerous than turning up.
An estuary town north of Aberdeen, Stonemouth, with its five-mile beach, can be beautiful on a sunny day. On a bleak one it seems to offer little more than seafog, gangsters, cheap drugs and a suspension bridge irresistible to suicides. There’s supposed to be a truce, but it’s soon clear that only Stewart is taking this promise of peace seriously. A drop into the cold grey Stoun begins to look like the soft option. As he steps back into the minefield of his past to confront his guilt, and all that it has cost him, Stu’s homecoming takes a more lethal turn than even he had anticipated.
THE HYDROGEN SONATA was also published in 2012
The Scavenger species are circling. It is, truly, the End Days for the Gzilt civilisation.
An ancient people, the Gzilt helped set up the Culture ten thousand years ago and were very nearly one of its founding societies, deciding not to join only at the last moment. Now they’ve made the collective decision to follow the well-trodden path of millions of other civilisations: they are going to Sublime, elevating themselves to a new and almost infinitely more rich and complex existence.
Amid preparations, though, the Regimental High Command is destroyed. Lieutenant Commander (reserve) Vyr Cossont is now wanted – dead, not alive. Aided only by a reconditioned android and a suspicious Culture avatar, Cossont must complete her last mission and find the oldest person in the Culture, a man over 9000 years old, who might have some idea what really happened all that time ago.
It seems that the final days of the Gzilt civilization are likely to prove its most perilous.
Iain began writing THE QUARRY in January 2013.
Eighteen-year-old Kit is weird: big, strange, odd, 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 on the unstable brink of a vast quarry in the Pennines. His mother’s identity is another matter. Now, though, his father’s dying, and old friends are gathering for one last time.
‘Uncle’ Paul’s a media lawyer; Rob and Ali are upwardly mobile corporate bunnies; pretty, hopeful Pris is a single mother; Haze is still living up to his drug-inspired name, twenty years on; and fierce, protective Hol is a gifted if acerbic critic.
As young film students they all lived at Willoughtree House with Guy, and they've all come back because they want something. Kit, too, has ulterior motives. Before his father dies he wants to know who his mother is, and what's on the mysterious tape they're all looking for. But most of all he wants to stop time and keep his father alive.
POEMS was published in 2015, with work by both Iain and Ken Macleod
Iain Banks is celebrated as a novelist of literary fiction and science fiction.
It is less well known that his first published work was the poem 041, in New Writing Scotland in 1983, though he also had poetry published in the University magazine while a student.
Banks took his poetry seriously and worked on it assiduously but showed it mostly to friends. Readers of Iain Banks' novels will find in the poems a further affirmation of the humane, sceptical and clear-eyed sensibility that informed all his work, shot through as ever with a dry wit that continues to disturb and delight.
THE CULTURE: THE DRAWINGS was published in 2023
This extraordinary collection celebrates Iain’s dazzling worldbuilding.
Faithfully reproduced from notebooks he kept in the 1970s and 80s, these annotated original illustrations depict the ships, habitats, geography, drones, weapons and language of Banks’ Culture series of novels in incredible detail.
In 2024, The Culture: The Drawings won the Locus Award for Best Illustrated and Art Book.