When the Culture General Contact Unit _Arbitrary_ arrives at Earth, it
finds nothing that is at all novel in the global scheme of things -- a
textbook "sophisticated stage three" culture, this one obsessed with weird
concepts like "property" and "money." But for the people on board it is
still rather exciting, and they respond in radically different ways: Sma
argues for contact, for an attempt to try and fix the mess; Linter goes
native, even choosing to have his body crippled so as to be more like the
locals; and Li argues that dropping a micro black hole into the Earth's
core would be a more elegant way to dispose of the whole "incontestably
neurotic and clinically insane species" than using a virus or collapsed
anti-matter. But the _Arbitrary_ has ideas of its own and, being a
million times more intelligent (and powerful) than anything else in the
system, it gets to call the shots.

With its direct juxtaposition of the Culture and Earth reality, the
novella "The State of the Art" is less subtle in its politics than Banks'
other Culture novels, but still a major addition to the corpus. It takes
up half of the collection named after it; seven short stories make up the
rest. Among them are two more Culture stories ("A Gift From the Culture"
and "Descendant"), the playfully macabre "Odd Attachment", the surreal
"Road of Skulls", and another alien contact story with a twist ("Cleaning
Up"). Newcomers should probably start with one of the novels, but Banks
fans won't want to miss _The State of the Art_.

Danny Yee's Book Reviews
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