The State Of The Art: Iain M. Banks

First collection of Banks' short fiction. In this volume: Road Of Skulls: Two men in a carriage travel over the eponymous Road of Skulls, to reach a distant City that seems to be constantly retreating and producing the infinite road.A Gift From The Culture: A man in self-imposed exile from the Culture is pressured into committing an act of terrorism with the help of Culture technology. Odd Attachment: A lovesick alien encounters a humanoid explorer. Descendant: A Culture soldier and his sapient spacesuit struggle to survive after being shot down and crash-landing on a barren planet. Cleaning Up: An alien race discovers that a faulty teleporter has been sending junk onto the surface of Earth instead of the Sun, where scientists from across the world have been studying these "Gifts." Piece: A commentary on religion and fundamentalism in the form of a recovered letter from the Lockerbie disaster. The State Of The Art: A chronicle of a Culture mission to Earth in the late 1970s (prequel to Use of Weapons). Diziet Sma argues for contact with Earth, to try to fix the mess the human species has made of it; another Culture citizen, Linter, goes native, choosing to renounce his Culture body enhancements so as to be more like the locals; and Li, a Star Trek fan, argues that the whole "incontestably neurotic and clinically insane species" should be eradicated with a micro black hole. Scratch: A stream-of-consciousness narrative that samples random sections of the future, eventually ending in an abrupt nuclear apocalypse. Illustrated by Nick Day.