But that’s not his real “literary” strength. Banks has a very dark imagination, and a very clear understanding of human evil. It’s those explorations, about the horrors of war and what they do to people, that make Look to Windward and Use of Weapons such good books.

I always start people off with The Player of Games, just because it serves as such a good Culture 101 book. Matter and Excession are my favorites because I love the portrayal of advanced AI as the equivalent of Greek gods.

Can’t wait for the new one. He’s finally going to fill in the origin story of the Culture. I’m amazed that he can still find interesting stories in a universe that is essentially run by perfect, flawless machines. It should be boring as hell, but people still manage to find ways to start wars and blow stuff up.

I’m a massive Iain Banks fan. I’d go so far as to say Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons are my top two favourite books and I couldn’t get through either Inversions or Transitions. I got about a third of the way through both of them before I gave up.

If you really want to get into Banks’s Sci-Fi works then try reading the Culture series in order. Not only will the universe make more sense but the books pretty much go in order of quality. That’s not to say the later books in the series are bad, just that the first four are absolutely brilliant.

Skip Inversions, it’s debatable whether it’s even part of the series. It’s apparently set in the same universe but it’s completely detached from anything that goes on in any of the other books

The last three books are good but they don’t meet the standard of the first four. His other non Culture sci-fi novels are worth reading as well, although Feersum Endjinn is a tough read. It’s an enjoyable book but huge chunks of the dialogue are written phonetically (in the style of the title “Fearsome Engine”) and it frequently becomes a chore to decipher what is actually being said.

All the culture novels can be enjoyable if you remember a very important thing, all the stories are about a vast game played by the Culture to defeat their target.

I read criticisms of the last novel that it seemed to be about nothing much and rambling, but if you remember what I said the story makes sense. The Culture will do anything to succeed and if it has to spend a thousand years and cause wars to get one agent into a supposedly impossible location, it will.

His stories can be very subtle. Inversions is great example where it’s never said that the main character is from the Culture (Not a spoiler because it’s never said).