... and 3 days ago, one of my favourite SF authors, Iain M. Banks, died, age 59.
In this entry, I'll mostly talk about five of his science fiction novels, "Consider Phlebas", "Player of Games", "Use of Weapons", "Against a Dark Background" and "The Algebraist. The first three, as well as most of his later SF novels, take place in Banks' "Culture" universe, named after a humanoid post-scarcity communist utopia (although personally I'm more and more inclined to try to coin/promote the phrase post-maslowian, because "post-scarcity" gets very strong reactions from some people, and is also somewhat misleading).
If you just want to know where to start with his works, and want to read the rest of this blog at a later time, the standard recommendation, which I support, is to begin with either "Consider Phlebas" or "Player of Games" (the later available in a tolerable Danish translation).
