Hacker News Reader

Comment by pseudolus | Hacker News Reader

On a tangent there are two Iain Banks related books that might be of interest. The first is an academic study and overview of Banks "Iain M. Banks (Modern Masters of Science Fiction)" and, more particularly, his culture books:

https://www.amazon.com/Banks-Modern-Masters-Science-Fiction/...

The second book "The Culture: The Drawings" is slated to be released in early November (2023) and is a collection of drawings by Iain Banks that, per Amazon, details "the universe of his bestselling Culture novels":

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Drawings-Iain-M-Banks/dp/0316...

View on HN

Reminds me, someone on Reddit did a whole series of Player of Games images using Midjourney

Part 1

https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/1109hmz/the_pla...

Part 2

https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/111j7hc/the_pla...

Part 3

https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/11428xm/the_pla...

I'm just glad they didn't do Phlebas; I could live without seeing an image generator's attempts at that island scene...

I'd like to see the body modder from Hydrogen Sonata and his "53 is the ideal number of cocks".

Apparently Gurgeh is Ian McShane, and lives at Fallingwater 2.0...

That's a fun idea. In this particular case they did a great job capturing a relatively consistent look, and it's telling that several people are asking if this is from a movie.

Of course, they got the spaceships wrong. Banks complained about this in an interview in the 90s ("They're going to get it wrong - they're going to make them look like everybody else's"). Banks' ships vary in how they look, but they're generally different from what you see in most SF. From my recollection, most are either ellipsoids or extremely long, sleek cylinders. Chronologically later ships, such as Sleeper Service, don't have physical hulls at all, but are "multiple-layer field-complex" projections consisting of several nested, concentric fields projected by the Minds enclosing one another.

There is also “the culture series of Iain M. Banks” by Simone Caroti that I highly recommend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com