The State of the Art
Banks's only short fiction collection, built around the title novella in which Contact first discovers Earth.
The title novella follows a Culture Contact ship crew as they observe 1970s Earth and debate whether — and how — to make contact, offering an outsider's view of the Culture's own moral confidence by holding it up against our own world. The rest of the collection gathers seven earlier stories, only some of them Culture-related, ranging from science fiction to horror and black comedy, along with the essay "A Few Notes on the Culture" in later editions.
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