La historia de , son tres historias en realidad. En la primera tenemos a Graham, un joven artista que se dirige a casa de su amiga Sarah, acompa?ado de una carpeta con varios dibujos de ella. En segundo lugar est? Steven Grout, un tipo verdaderamente extra?o, que acaba de renunciar a su puesto de trabajo y que siempre va con casco, huyendo de sus Atormentadores. Y por ?ltimo tenemos a Quiss y Ajayi, un hombre y una mujer, respectivamente, ya mayores, que est?n encerrados en un extra?o castillo, algunas de cuyas paredes son de cristal, detr?s de las cu?les hay peces luminiscentes, y donde pasan los d?as jugando a estramb?ticos juegos de mesa con el fin de poder obtener la opci?n de responder a un acertijo, y as? poder salir libres.
La guerra se recrudece a lo largo de la galaxia. Las lunas, los planetas y las mismas estrellas se enfrentaron a una destrucci?n a sangre fr?a, brutal y, lo que es peor, aleatoria. Los Iridanos luchan por su fe; la Cultura, por su derecho moral a existir. No hay lugar para la rendici?n. En medio del conflicto c?smico, en las profundidades de un Planeta de los Muertos, yace una Mente fugitiva. Los rumores dicen que Horza el Cambiante, y su horda de mercenarios impredecibles, humanos y m?quinas, se embarcaron en su propia cruzada por encontrarla… solo para hallar su propia destrucci?n.
It begins in the realm of the Real, where matter still matters.It begins with a murder.And it will not end until the Culture has gone to war with death itself.Lededje Y'breq is one of the Intagliated, her marked body bearing witness to a family shame, her life belonging to a man whose lust for power is without limit. Prepared to risk everything for her freedom, her release, when it comes, is at a price, and to put things right she will need the help of the Culture.Benevolent, enlightened and almost infinitely ...
It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year.The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilisation. In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data without order, hunting their own young and fighting pointless formal wars. Seconded to a military-religious order he’s barely heard ...
A man lies in a coma after a near-fatal accident. His body broken, his memory vanished, he finds himself in the surreal world of the bridge - a world free of the usual constraints of time and space, a world where dream and fantasy, past and future fuse. Who is this man? Where is he? Is he more dead than alive? Or has he never been so alive before?'Iain Banks of THE WASP FACTORY eclipses that sensational debut...a real dazzler' 'Great artistry, great virtuosity ... great exuberance' 'This one's his best yet' 'THE BRIDGE is serious, but playful; it is full of throwaway jokes, minor tangles for the reader to sort out, political/cultural references to the kind of reality that rarely gets into British literature, and nuggets of surprising truth juxtaposed with outrageous lies... convincing in a way too little fantasy or mainstream literature is'
The Business, a nearly omnipotent enterprise, is so infinitely discreet that even its top executives are vague about its actual business. It predates the Christian church and counts among its vast riches dozens of Michelangelo's pornographic paintings and several sets of Crown jewels. The only thing it lacks is political clout, a problem the Business plans to solve by buying a nation and joining the United Nations. Kate Telman, the Business's foremost expert on emerging technologies, is chosen to lead the effort. As this beautiful, ambitious American woman pursues the ultimate prize for her highly secretive transglobal employer, Iain Banks -- whom of London calls "the most imaginative British novelist of his generation" -- offers a portrait of today's ubiquitous multinational corporations. Already a bestseller in England, paints a picture that is at once wickedly satirical and frighteningly familiar.
The Scavenger species are circling. It is, truly, the End Days for the Gzilt civilization.An ancient people, organized on military principles and yet almost perversely peaceful, the Gzilt helped set up the Culture ten thousand years earlier and were very nearly one of its founding societies, deciding not to join only at the last moment. Now they've made the collective decision to follow the well-trodden path of millions of other civilizations; they are going to Sublime, elevating themselves to a new and almost infinitely more rich and complex existence.Amid preparations though, the Regimental High Command ...
The Culture — a human/machine symbiotic society — has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. Player of Games. Master of every board, computer and strategy.Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game … a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life — and very possibly his death.
The first ever collection of Iain Banks's short fiction, this volume includes the acclaimed novella, The State of the Art. This is a striking addition to the growing body of Culture lore, and adds definition and scale to the previous works by using the Earth of 1977 as contrast. The other stories in the collection range from science fiction to horror, dark-coated fantasy to morality tale. All bear the indefinable stamp of Iain Banks's staggering talent.
Enter — if you can bear it — the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least."Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim."That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again."It was just a stage I was going through."
A world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse, such a world requires a firm hand and a guiding light. But does it need the Concern: an all-powerful organisation with a malevolent presiding genius, pervasive influence and numberless invisible operatives in possession of extraordinary powers? On the Concern's books are Temudjin Oh, an un-killable assassin who journeys between the peaks of Nepal, a version of Victorian London and the dark palaces of Venice; and a ...
Horza est un M?tamorphe, un des derniers survivants de cette vari?t? de l’esp?ce humaine qui peut modifier ? sa guise. Et il est engag? dans une croisade personnelle contre la Culture.Son combat, comme celui de Balveda, l’envoy?e de la section Circonstances Sp?ciales de la Culture, n’est qu’une escarmouche insignifiante sur la toile de fond de la guerre qui oppose la Culture et les ldirans.Une guerre qui embrase la Galaxie. Une guerre inexpiable comme toute guerre de religion. Une guerre o? aucun compromis n’est possible, ...
Cheradenine is an ex-"special circumstance" agent who had been raised to eminence by a woman named Diziet. Skaffen-Amtskaw, the drone, had saved her life and it believes Cheradenine to be a burnt-out case. But not even its machine intelligence can see the horrors in his past.
Graham Park is in love. But Sara Ffitch is an enigma to him, a creature of almost perverse mystery. Steven Grout is paranoid - and with justice. He knows that They are out to get him. They are. Quiss, insecure in his fabulous if ramshackle castle, is forced to play interminable impossible games. The solution to the oldest of all paradoxical riddles will release him. But he must find an answer before he knows the question.Park, Grout, Quiss - no trio could be further apart. But their separate courses are set for collision..."A feast of horrors, variously spiced with incest, conspiracy, and cheerful descriptions of torture... fine writing" The Times"The author's powerful imagination is displayed again here every bit as vividly as in his debut" Financial Times"Establishes beyond doubt that lain Banks is a novelist of remarkable talents" Daily Telegraph
A little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing…Innocent in the ways of the world, an when it comes to pop and fashion, the Elect of God of a small but committed Stirlingshire religious cult: Isis Whit is no ordinary teenager.When her cousin Morag - Guest of Honour at the Luskentyrian's four-yearly Festival of Love - disappears after renouncing her faith, Isis is marked out to venture among the Unsaved and bring the apostate back into the fold. But the road to Babylondon (as Sister Angela puts it) is a treacherous one, particularly when Isis ...
W galaktyce szaleje straszliwa wojna. Zag?ada dosi?ga ksi??yce, planety, orbitale, a nawet gwiazdy. Gin? miliardy rozumnych istot. Idrianie walcz? za wiar?. Kultura o moralne prawo do istnienia. Tam, gdzie stawk? s? zasady, nie ma miejsca na lito??. Losy konfliktu spoczywaj? w r?kach jednego z ostatnich metamorf?w; od wyniku jego strace?czej misji zale?y przysz?o?? wszech?wiata.
