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This chapter recounts how Banks began to get his first novels of the Culture published under the name Iain M. Banks. It examines the way that the central characters are either hostile to the Culture, or else are bored by it, so, right from the start of his career, it suggests an ambivalence about the supposed utopian characteristics of the Culture. The chapter also recounts how, with input from Ken MacLeod, the earliest of his Culture novels, Use of Weapons, became one of the most structurally complex of all of his novels.

At the height of his career, Banks abandoned the Culture for two very different science fiction novels. Against a Dark Background presented an extreme capitalism that was a deliberate contrast to the communist character of the Culture; while Feersum Endjinn presented a structurally complex and linguistically dense account of a world in collapse. Civil war as a political manifestation of Laing’s divided self would also inform subsequent works of the Scottish fantastic, notably Whit and A Song of Stone. His return to the Culture with Excession and its companion Look to Windward were, it is proposed, intended to end the sequence by addressing the Sublime as a form of the death of civilization.

This chapter examines the work of Iain M. Banks. It discusses how Banks re-images his future villains into the ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ (the ‘Other’) of Edward Said's mystical and allusive Orient. Often using a physical response to deal with enemies that are ideologically perilous, Banks' Others threaten not only the physical, but more importantly, the philosophical. His Culture-citizens will not be beaten despite apparently overwhelming odds and unspeakable force. Banks wants the ideology of his protagonists to survive intact rather than simply witness an obliteration of the enemy. The analysis includes works such as Consider Phlebas (1987), The Player of Games (1988), Use of Weapons (1990) and Excession (1996).

Changes in his personal life, in particular separation from his first wife and the death of his trusted editor James Hale, brought a change in Banks’s fiction. The Algebraist ran directly counter to the innovations he had introduced to space opera. The chapter shows how his best late-period novel, Transition, was written in dialogue with The Steep Approach to Garbadale. It then examines the religious issues underlying the last Culture trilogy, in which the Culture is often peripheral to the action, while ideas about the nature of God, the afterlife and religious texts are central to the novels.