Book of the Month: The State of the Art

My first book of the month post for 2026 represents one of the shortest time lapses between me getting a book and reading a book. This was a Christmas gift from my brother and sister in law. 

The State of the Art is a milestone book for me because reading it means I have now read all the science fiction books written by Iain M. Banks. There are three stories relating to the Culture - the galaxy-spanning utopian society that features across most of Banks' sci-fi - but the handful of other stories aren't directly Culture related.

A rejig of the shelves will be necessary

The title novella, The State of the Art, is about a review and exploration of Earth by a Contact team from the Culture. The main protagonist is recalling their visit to Earth at the tail end of the 1970s. There is a vivid description of divided Berlin and travelling through abandoned underground stations in parts of the city under communist control. 

Another stand out segment is the protagonist visiting the Memorial to the Deportation on Ile de la Cite in Paris. I first visited the memorial as a teenager and remember being really struck by it's profound simplicity. The protagonist in the story is similarly struck, and also feels anger that humans could do something so terrible to other humans and then create something so beautiful as a way of marking it. 

"I was angry at their stupidity, their manic barbarism, their unthinking, animal obedience, their appalling cruelty... but what really hit me was that these people could create something that spoke so eloquently of their own ghastly actions; that they could fashion a work so humanly redolent of their own inhumanity."

I felt the emotional juxtaposition was probably Banks' own feelings about it, and I get what he is trying to say. If that is him sharing his own feelings, then I also remember the impact of that monument on me when I visited it. I felt a connection with Banks through his description of his character's reaction.

Eventually the Contact team decides to leave Earth without making contact to see what happens to the human society left to its own devices. They hope the planet will be OK, but sense doom for this "backwater rock ball infested with slavering death-zealots on a terminal power trip." (Another eye-catching, brain-snagging, angry description.)

Being blunt, the other pieces of writing in the book aren't too great. The first story, The Road of Skulls, starts with a joke that I found quite funny and then meanders out. Odd Attachment is grisly dark humour. The rest are just a bit meh. The two stories set in the Culture don't really add much. 

Sometimes, though, a book isn't satisfactory in itself but provides satisfaction in another, meta, way. For me, reading this means I can 'tick off' the Culture books, almost 35 years after I read the first one in the series. That's a pleasing way to kick off my reading for the year.