The State of the Art
- 224
- Pages
- about 4 h
- Reading time
- Ignotus Award for Best Foreign Short Story
Affiliate link: buying through it supports BookRank at no extra cost to you.
Our view
“The State of the Art” gathers Banks’s short fiction around a title novella that measures the Culture against the Earth of 1977. The other pieces range across science fiction, horror and dark fantasy, not all of them set in that universe. The centrepiece divides opinion: some feel it deepens the series, while some readers find it dull and self-absorbed and prefer the shorter stories. An addition for existing Culture readers more than an introduction.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The State of the Art was initially a novella by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, first published in 1989, and then a short story collection first published in the UK by Orbit in 1991. The collection includes SF, both Culture and non-Culture, as well as non-SF works originally published under his other byline "Iain Banks".
Reading order · Culture series
Full order & progress →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 7.1 across 255 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 63% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Science fiction average of 7.8. That is how 7.4 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 6.8 | 32 | 13% |
| Hardcover | 7.2 | 223 | 88% |
Frequently asked
How long is The State of the Art?
It has 224 pages — shorter than 91% of the ranked books in Science fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Science fiction — with scores between 7.3 and 7.4, closest to this book.
