An anthology comprising eight short stories of varying length with the titular story taking up more than half the book. I found the stories themselves to be of wildly different taste too.

Road of Skulls

A morbidly humorous story about two companions traveling a seemingly endless road paved with skulls.

A Gift from the Culture

Heavy in societal commentary, a Culture man is blackmailed into shooting down a Culture starship.

Odd Attachment

Perhaps the most alien story I have read so far. A plant-like alien is playing a game of “loves me, loves me not”. I would say this is my favorite story from this book. Short and sweet.

Descendant

Sombre yet peaceful, leaves the reader to muse about what actually happened. A crashlanded Culture soldier tries to make his way back to civilization, slowly going insane. Quite memorable.

Cleaning up

Cautionary tale about nuclear war. Instead of sending it into the sun, an alien civilization accidentially dumps their waste on earth which tries to reverse engineer the technology.

Piece

A letter on religion and zeal. Not sure I really have an opinion about it. By the end of the book I had forgotten all about it.

The State of the Art

Featuring characters from Use of Weapons, this one is about a Culture ship stumbling upon earth in the late 1970s. While most of the crewmembers are appaled by the genocides, poverty and general state of society, one of them falls in love with earth, believing to have found something life in the Culture is lacking: meaning through the possibilty of failure. I thought this story is way too drawn out. It spends whole chapters simply describing larger european and american cities (probably accurately) with very little interpretation through a Culture lens. The end was somewhat interesting, but overall it was pretty boring. There is a radio play of this produced by the BBC which is a lot shorter, perhaps a bit too short. On the other hand, the radioplay also lacks some of the little jokes that I liked, a reference to Russell’s teapot for example. I do like all the different ways the Culture culture and earth culture are compared though. Banks certainly isn’t shy of dissecting his utopian Culture.

Scratch

I don’t even know how to describe this. It’s a mumbling collection of half sentences, hardly connected. Here’s a sample:

No one likes to think about what No one likes to think No one likes to think about what might happen happen in the event of your Large Tax-Free Bonus Tax Free Bonus but have you provided for your family should your Tax Free Bonus Home Fire Alarm will protect your family Large Tax Free better than almost any competing product product Will not Better than almost any product Can you afford not to be without this inexpensive Easy Credit Terms Available Easy Easy Easy Credit Terms Available Will not damage carpets

minor spoilersI think it ends in some sort of nuclear apocalypse, but I’m really not sure.

Overall the book is a pretty mixed bag and even the best stories have a hard time competing with Use of Weapons and Player of Games.