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Which sub-genre of sci-fi can claim both the literary greats, the grandmasters of science fiction, like Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, and the recently departed Iain M. Banks and the...

The 1980s and 90s were a time of richness and change in science fiction. The release of Star Wars in the late 70s had triggered a renewed interest in the...

We've completely updated this list with 25 new entries, updated the old ones and generally filled this list out substantially.Space Opera is one of those genres of science fiction that...

Iain Banks burst onto the literary scene with his controversial first novel, The Wasp Factory, the violent story of a girl who had been brought up as an emasculated boy....

Probably the best of Ian Bank's Culture novels. Strong characters and a light-hearted tone to the novel despite the "seriousness" of the actual plot make this an easy, addicting read....

Banks himself once described the plot of Consider Phlebas as: "a shipwrecked sailor falls in with a gang of pirates and goes in search of buried treasure." And that's precisely...

The only negative accusation that the Culture Novels series receives is that it's too complicated and detailed, with so many AI characters to remember. Now of course, we don't think...

I wonder if inserting an M in between my first name and surname will magically turn me into a top science-fiction writer like Iain Banks. (Really, he writes non science...

Strictly speaking, Banks’s Culture novels have nothing to do with posthumanity, since the humans of Earth are no part of the Culture, and many of the novels are actually theoretically...

Iain Banks had written a string of science fiction before he finally burst into print with his brilliant and controversial novel, The Wasp Factory. That and the two novels that...

M. John Harrison's The Centauri Device (1974) was a new wave space opera that was acknowledged as a major influence by writers as varied as Iain M. Banks and China...

With The Centauri Device, M. John Harrison provided the foundation text of the British Renaissance, or the New Space Opera, or both (depending on who you listen to). Then he...

By the late 1980s, British science fiction was ready for the kick-start that would become the British renaissance. And that kick start came from two unexpected writers. One was Iain...

One of the abiding themes of science fiction in the early twenty-first century is a careful delineation of everyday life in the near future, a future in which the steady...

In 1960s Oxford, Professor Henry Lytten is attempting to write a fantasy novel that forgoes the magic of his predecessors, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. He finds an unlikely confidante...

Ken MacLeod was a lifelong friend of Iain Banks, and their interest in science fiction was parallel, though MacLeod's interest in Trotskyist politics gave his work a harder political edge...

Back in the 1950s, a young Alasdair Gray entered a short story in a competition. It came second. That story was part of what would become, nearly 30 years later,...

Beginning with his first novel, Gridlinked, Neal Asher has consistently explored a fecund and violent future known as the Polity. In something like 13 novels to date, he has combined...