Close Encounters of the "Arbitrary" Kind...
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"The State of the Art" is a collection of short stories by Iain M Banks, similar in theme to the rest of his writings. The best of the collection is the novella from which the book derives it's title. In that piece, Banks describes how a Culture GCU almost made contact with Earth in 1977, but decided to leave us alone ,at least for a while longer. It is a pity that tale couldn't have been expanded upon and turned into a proper full-length novel, because most of the rest of the stories in this collection are too short and inconsequential. The "best of the rest" in my opinion are "Cleaning Up" , a humourous story about a malfunctioning Quality Control system on a starship and "Descendant" , a sad tale of one man and his sentient spacesuit stranded on an alien world. "Road of Skulls", "Scratch" and "Piece" weren't really worth including in this compilation in my opinion.
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Short but sweet…
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The State of the Art is currently Iain (M) Banks only short story collection, the majority of the pieces falling towards science fiction. Probably the weakest two pieces are the opening and closing stories – ‘Road of Skulls’ which is too slight to have any impact, and ‘Scratch’ – a Burroughs-style does of cut-up weirdness which seems to have little point beyond being ‘experimental’. More enjoyable is the light-hearted farce of ‘Cleaning Up’, where a malfunctioning alien matter transmitter causes havoc on Earth. The three stories set explicitly in Banks’ Culture setting are all excellent – ‘The State Of the Art’ itself is a novella concerning the Culture’s discovery of planet Earth, ‘A Gift From the Culture’ concerns the blackmailing of a Culture ex-patriot, and best of all ‘Descendant’ examines the man / machine intelligence relationship of the Culture when a man is trapped in his sentient spacesuit on an alien world. Non-SF story ‘Piece’ concerns fundamentalist religion and terrorism, and sadly is just as disturbing today as when it was written. And lastly my favourite in the collection is ‘Odd Attachment’, a wickedly funny look at a lovestuck alien vegetable, complete with a punchline that will leave all male readers wincing. With a couple of slightly flat stories this isn’t consistently brilliant, but the vast majority of this collection is highly recommended.
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This Night Shade Books edition is the full collection
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The Night Shade Books edition is the first time the collection of Banks short stories (mainly from the late 1980s) has been published in the USA. The title novella was published as a stand alone title.
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Ziesing Hardback is JUST the Novella
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The majority of these reviews have a little bit at the bottom which says that this refers to the Paperback edition. Well the paperback edition IS a collection. This Ziesing harback edition is just the novella called The State of the Art WITHOUT any of the other short stories some of the reviewers mention. It is a good novella, and this is its first appearance in print - just be aware of what you are buying.
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State of the Art indeed - he has done even better
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This was the first Ian M. banks book I bought, and I was so lucky to get a bargain hardcover edition as well. The books offers a lot of stories from his beginning period, most of them outside the 'Culture', about which most of Ian M. Bank's succesful SF-work handles. To me it was a good , but unspectacular introduction to his work, not as powerful as the early science fiction works like 'The Player of Games' or 'The Use of Weapons'. Nor did it leave the impression of his early mainstream novels 'The Wasp Factory', 'The Bridge' or 'Walking on Glass'. Altogether I would say that Ian Banks is better at longer works, where his whit and cleverness can be used to a better extend than in his short stories, good as they are. I do look forward to read his next short story collection, for he is one of the best writers in Britain at the moment.
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