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The State of the Art
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
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Publisher's summary
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 peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance.”–William Gibson
This is a striking addition to the body of Culture lore, and adds definition and scale to the previous works by using the Earth of 1977 as contrast. The stories in the collection range from science fiction to horror, dark-coated fantasy to morality tale. All bear the indefinable stamp of Iain Banks's staggering talent.
“Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth.”–New York Review of Science Fiction
“[Banks] can summon up sense-of-wonder Big Concepts you've never seen before and display them with narration as deft as a conjuror's fingers."–scifi.com
The Culture series:
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
Critic reviews
“Banks writes with a sophistication that will surprise anyone unfamiliar with modern science fiction.”—The New York Times
“Banks never lets up in a dizzying array of characters, mind-bending ideas, and dazzling action.”—Booklist
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-
Story
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 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?
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Finally an Iain M. Banks book on audible...
- By Kurt on 10-29-09
By: Iain M. Banks
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The Bridge
- By: Iain Banks
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A man lies in a coma after a near-fatal accident. His body broken, his memory vanished, he finds himself in the surreal world of the bridge - 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?
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Sci-fi fans might skip, but it’s fantastic and well crafted
- By Moore Creative on 07-25-18
By: Iain Banks
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The Quarry
- By: Iain M. Banks
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
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 on the unstable brink of a vast quarry. His mother's identity is another matter. Now, though, his father's dying, and old friends are gathering for one last time.
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By Iain Banks, not Iain M. Banks
- By Reader X on 05-19-18
By: Iain M. Banks
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The Wasp Factory
- By: Iain Banks
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Wasp Factory is a bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath - one of the most infamous of contemporary Scottish novels.
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A history of a young psychopath
- By Eduardo on 03-11-13
By: Iain Banks
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The Algebraist
- Culture
- By: Iain M. Banks
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 19 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Surprisingly meh
- By Ryan on 05-19-24
By: Iain M. Banks
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Consider Phlebas: Booktrack Edition
- By: Iain M. Banks
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 16 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Consider Phlebas: Booktrack Edition adds an immersive musical soundtrack to your audiobook listening experience! The first audiobook in Iain M. Banks's seminal science fiction series, The Culture. Consider Phlebas introduces listeners to a utopian conglomeration of human and alien races that explores the nature of war, morality, and the limitless bounds of mankind's imagination.
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Music is super distracting and constant
- By Anonymous1234 on 06-17-20
By: Iain M. Banks
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Transition
- By: Iain M. Banks
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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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 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?
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Finally an Iain M. Banks book on audible...
- By Kurt on 10-29-09
By: Iain M. Banks
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The Bridge
- By: Iain Banks
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
A man lies in a coma after a near-fatal accident. His body broken, his memory vanished, he finds himself in the surreal world of the bridge - 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?
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Sci-fi fans might skip, but it’s fantastic and well crafted
- By Moore Creative on 07-25-18
By: Iain Banks
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The Quarry
- By: Iain M. Banks
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
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 on the unstable brink of a vast quarry. His mother's identity is another matter. Now, though, his father's dying, and old friends are gathering for one last time.
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By Iain Banks, not Iain M. Banks
- By Reader X on 05-19-18
By: Iain M. Banks
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The Wasp Factory
- By: Iain Banks
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Wasp Factory is a bizarre, imaginative, disturbing, and darkly comic look into the mind of a child psychopath - one of the most infamous of contemporary Scottish novels.
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A history of a young psychopath
- By Eduardo on 03-11-13
By: Iain Banks
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The Steep Approach to Garbadale
- By: Iain Banks
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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The Wopuld family built their fortune on a board game called Empire, now a wildly successful computer game. So successful, in fact, that the American Spraint Corp wants to buy the Wopulds out. Alban, who has been evading the family tentacles for the last few years, thinks Spraint should be treated with suspicion, but he also has other things on his mind. What, for example, drove his mother to take her own life?
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Entirely enjoyable. More AudioBooks by Iain Banks?
- By Daniel on 08-23-09
By: Iain Banks
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Raw Spirit
- By: Iain Banks
- Narrated by: Tom Cotcher
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In a bid to uncover the unique spirit of the single malt whisky, author lain Banks has decided to undertake a tour of the distilleries of his homeland. His tour of Scotland combines history, literature and landscape in an entertaining and informative account.
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I miss this guy!
- By Marcos Ibarguen on 07-28-22
By: Iain Banks
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Matter
- By: Iain M. Banks
- Narrated by: Toby Longworth
- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
- Abridged
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In a world renowned even within a galaxy full of wonders, a crime within a war. For one brother 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.
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Don't Buy this Abominable Abridgement
- By Jim Sabshin on 05-06-12
By: Iain M. Banks
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Lake of Souls
- The Collected Short Fiction
- By: Ann Leckie
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
- Length: 15 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke award-winner Ann Leckie is a modern master of the SFF genre, forever changing its landscape with her groundbreaking ideas and powerful voice. Now, available for the first time comes the complete collection of Leckie's short fiction, including a brand new novelette, “Lake of Souls.”
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Terrible audio quality
- By Robin Kunde on 05-24-24
By: Ann Leckie
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Exodus: The Archimedes Engine
- By: Peter F. Hamilton
- Length: 15 hrs
- Unabridged
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Forty thousand years ago, humanity fled a dying Earth. Traveling in massive arkships, these brave pioneers spread out across the galaxy to find a new home. After traveling thousands of light-years, one fleet of arkships arrived at Centauri, a dense cluster of stars with a vast array of potentially habitable planets. The survivors of Earth signaled to the remaining arkships that humanity had finally found its new home among the stars.
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Dichronauts
- By: Greg Egan
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Seth is a surveyor, along with his friend Theo, a leech-like creature running through his skull who tells Seth what lies to his left and right.
In the universe containing Seth's world, light cannot travel in all directions: there is a "dark cone" to the north and south. Seth can only face to the east (or the west, if he tips his head backwards). Every living thing in Seth's world is in a state of perpetual migration as they follow the sun's shifting orbit and the narrow habitable zone it creates.
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It's not an easy book
- By Amazon Customer on 05-13-18
By: Greg Egan
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Proxima: Book 1
- By: Stephen Baxter
- Narrated by: Kyle McCarley
- Length: 17 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The very far future: The galaxy is a drifting wreck of black holes, neutron stars, and chill white dwarfs. The age of star formation is long past. Yet there is life here, feeding off the energies of the stellar remnants, and there is mind, a tremendous galaxy-spanning intelligence each of whose thoughts lasts a hundred thousand years. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light... The 27th century: Proxima Centauri, an undistinguished red dwarf star, is the nearest star to our sun. How would it be to live on such a world?
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No Sense of Conclusion
- By Lisa Davidson on 04-24-16
By: Stephen Baxter
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Ogres
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Narrated by: Emma Newman
- Length: 4 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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It's always idyllic in the village until the landlord comes to call. Because the landlord is an Ogre. And Ogres rule the world, with their size and strength and appetites. It's always been that way. It's the natural order of the world. And they only eat people sometimes. But when the headman's son, Torquell, dares lift his hand against the landlord's son, he sets himself on a path to learn the terrible truth about the Ogres, and about the dark sciences that ensured their rule.
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Beautiful
- By Joseph Krump on 03-22-24
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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
- By: Samuel R. Delany
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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The story of a truly galactic civilization with more than 6,000 inhabited worlds. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science-fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far-flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel's central issues - technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism - have only become more pressing with the passage of time.
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Masterwork of postmodern fiction
- By G. Benett on 04-14-20
By: Samuel R. Delany
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The Prefect
- By: Alastair Reynolds
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 19 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Tom Dreyfus is a Prefect, a law enforcement officer with the Panoply. His beat is the multifaceted utopian society of the Glitter Band, that vast swirl of space habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone, the teeming hub of a human interstellar empire spanning many worlds. His current case: investigating a murderous attack against one of the habitats that left 900 people dead, a crime that appalls even a hardened cop like Dreyfus.
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Best yet of the Revelation Space series
- By Michael G Kurilla on 04-03-11
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Jennifer Government
- By: Max Barry
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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The irreverent author of the cult classic Syrup hits his target in this satire on the wages of big capital. In Max Barry's hilarious vision of the near future, the world is run by giant American corporations, and employees take the last names of the companies they work for; The Police and The NRA are publicly traded security firms, and the U.S. government may only investigate crimes if they can bill a citizen directly.
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Fun Allegory
- By Steven F Giovanni on 01-11-10
By: Max Barry
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The Mercy of Gods
- Captive's War, Book 1
- By: James S.A. Corey
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 18 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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The Carryx—part empire, part hive—have waged wars of conquest for centuries, destroying or enslaving species across the galaxy. Now, they are facing a great and deathless enemy. The key to their survival may rest with the humans of Anjiin. Caught up in academic intrigue and affairs of the heart, Dafyd Alkhor is pleased just to be an assistant to a brilliant scientist and his celebrated research team. Then the Carryx ships descend, decimating the human population and taking the best and brightest of Anjiin society away to serve on the Carryx homeworld, and Dafyd is swept along with them.
By: James S.A. Corey
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Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Rob
- 04-29-24
not the best of the culture novels.
read the other ones over this this entry in b the series. ok, but eh.
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- Scott
- 04-19-24
Great(but missing final chapter)
Great reading of a fantastic collection of short stories.. BUT the final chapter of the book is left out - which is a huge oversight as the final chapter is probably the most important offering in the whole book... it is in fact the whole reason I had pre ordered this when they announced it on Audible, so that is really unfortunate.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Mule
- 04-06-24
Great read by a great narrator
I’ve always enjoyed this book and can’t thank Peter Kenny enough for the spot on narration - the Drone
ps. can’t wait to hear The Algebraist all over again!!
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- Aaron Hill
- 04-13-24
Audio is too quiet
For some reason this book seems like it’s half as loud as normal. Even with my volume up all the way it’s hard to hear sometimes and sounds like the reader is practically whispering
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1 person found this helpful
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- Will
- 04-19-24
Finally
Can we get the rest of the Culture series now? The work itself is great, a short story collection.
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- paris1230
- 05-24-24
Brilliant
What can’t the imagination of Mr Banks encompass and expose? Superb narration as always by Mr Kenny.
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- Vicente Buritica
- 06-08-24
Short story format was great!
I wasn't sure i was going to like it, but definitely at the top with Banks other books.
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- Deane Morris
- 04-29-24
Worst banks book ever.
Tedious. Absolutely awful. Full of redundant, endless babble and religious Christian BS. Take this book and shove it.
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