The Culture: The Drawings (Hardback)

Superb - well worth it for the hardcore fans. This is an incredibly well put-together collection of drawings, diagrams, notes and schematics from one of the all-time greats of Science Fiction and Space Opera. This book looks absolutely stunning and the quality is extraordinarily high. It was well worth the wait - Waterstones bookseller review

The recent publication of behind-the-curtain coffee table tome The Culture: The Drawings [collates] his earliest conceptual designs for what would become his signature sci-fi creation. Banks was apparently a habitual scribbler and doodler, conjuring crude but detailed geographical maps, architectural drafts, spaceship designs, weapons prototypes and the sketched-out foundations for an entire glyph-based language . . . His amateur draftsmanship has some of the character of cask spirit: raw and unrefined but heady and intoxicating - EUROGAMER

A beautiful book. If you enjoy The Culture, have been immersed in it and moved by it, I doubt you will be disappointed in the book - Reader review

Banks has created one of the most enduring and endearing visions of the future - GUARDIAN

Jam-packed with extraordinary invention - SCOTSMAN on The Culture series

Epic in scope, ambitious in its ideas and absorbing in its execution - INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY on The Culture series

Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth - NEW YORK REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION

The first glimmerings of the Culture emerged from young Banksie's schoolboy doodlings. The Culture: The Drawings pulls together his art work for the first time, and it's clear he was a very good draughtsman. Maps of alien archipelagos. Sketches of spaceships and guns and castles and tanks. Although the contents are arranged by broad themes (Locales, Ships, Transport, Weaponry and the rest), there has been (wisely, I think) no attempt to explain the material further. What is that Second World War-era battle tank doing on the ramparts of Thra-dra-Ostlehep? Who knows? This isn't an archive of ideas so much as the melting pot from which ideas came - THE TIMES