My Mum is pals with him and he said his formula for the contemporay fiction is plenty of sex, drugs and fast cars. Sounds alright.

For fans of the non-SF work there's a free podcast of an abridged version of Transition.

I listened to chapter 1 this morning. It's definitely to the weird end of the scale.

Good to see so many fans on here, non of my friends have read any of his books in either guise.

Against a Dark Background and the The Player of Games get read every couple of years and I recently re-read Complicity for the umpteenth time in 24 hours when I was in hospital.

It was good to be back with the Culture for Matter, but it didn't grab me, I felt he hurried the ending. Re-read next year me thinks. THe Algebresisisisisist(?) was pants. As was Feersum Enjin or whatever.

I find his more recent non-SciFi stuff quite light and throwaway compared to the old stuff like Crow Road or Wasp Factory. Garbardale and Business were just holiday books for me in comparison to the 'good' stuff.

If I have any money for good whisky then Raw Spirit usually gets a look to inspire me.

My vote would be The Algebraist or Excession.

Huge Iain (M) Banks fan, think i've read them all except transition and matter. always loved the description of the garage with the array of land rovers outside the front of it as i've passed it many times, always makes me smile.

Crow road and either use of weapons/ look to windward for me as favourites.

think i'll have to give them all a re-read (although dunno how many times i've read crow road now)

Reynolds (absolution gap is brilliant as are many aspects of his other books), Asher and Morgan are both epic too (the Kovacs are superb but i also liked market forces). William Gibson is also another worth reading 9father of cyberpunk).

think i have 2 copies of diamond dogs, turquoise days after an amazon cock up!

for another amazingly diverse sci-fi try Victor Vinge – A fire upon the deep, was radically different to a lot of the other sci-fi i've read.

Oh, so many to choose from. I have only read The Wasp Factory from his real world stuff.

From the Sci-Fi stuff The Algabrist is a great book with good pace but lots of detail. Matter was a great start and end (if hurried) with lots of nothing in the middle filled up with unnecissary species and travel arrangements. I will re-read it at some point but not my fave.

Consider… is a great book with amazing scope and quite an accomplishment for a first book in a style. Player… and Look to Windward are both great and interesting.

The outstanding ones have to be Excession and Use Of Weapons. Excession for all its high tech stuff and ships minds (including the ammusing bit where a Mind starts trolling a private "web forum" discussion!) has a lot of human story. Same for "…Weapons" which had me crying at the end. Probably the book the wife will end up reading as its most like a regular fiction book.

Ok choose 1? Use of Weapons for a Culture novel and The Algebrist for another universe.

I.m.B fans might like this short film too, shame it was not developed further.

SSP

Not really that into the non sci-fi ones personally. I love Excession, Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games. I agree about the ending of Matter – bit disappointing.

I really like the Culture novels – I find the concepts really interesting. Some of the ones that are a bit more fantasy than sci-fi I wasn't really that into.

Read a couple of Alistair Reynolds novels which were interesting but not in the same league imo.

singlespeed punk: love the movie.

I also thought that Matter was a let-down at the end. I really enjoyed Excession, and also 'Inversions', with the guessing game of whether or not it is a Culture novel, but 'Use of Weapons' absolutely blew me away, not just the story, but the way that the narrative structure enhanced the story. Every time I read it, I notice something new. But I'm really enjoying 'Transitions' and think it's the best thing he's done for some time.

has anyone read dan simmonds hyperion/ endymion also epic mind boggling stuff but Ilium is my fave of his – its homers iliad with robots shakespearean monsters and the odd dinosaur

grumm wrote, "Read a couple of Alistair Reynolds novels which were interesting but not in the same league imo."

Reynolds can't pace a novel to save his life, he's got some good ideas and he can write but some bits just dribble on and on… The lighthugger chase scene in, er, Absolution Gap, is it? With Clavain and the pigs chasing the conjoiner… Goes on for about a hundred pages and all it says is "The ships keep going faster and faster, occasionally fighting a bit, then one of them breaks".

Others to check out for the Banks fans might be Michael Marshall Smith, and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Just finished the Algebraist again, brilliant. TBH I much prefer his Sci Fi stuff tough I read everything he writes.

Harry_the_Spider – Member
Not read any of his sci-fi stuff (I don't work in IT), but his other stuff is very good.

Over the years I've met so many people who don't read sci-fi because it is sci-fi. But they'll read general fiction – which is made up anyway.

So you'll read one version of make believe but not another.

You like one set of books by an author, but because you've got preconceived ideas about a particular genre, you won't read his other novels? Is that plain weird or just narrow minded?

You are missing out on a huge number of excellent books if you limit yourself that way.

Oh, and to return to subject, I've always loved IB. He can be a bit variable but he is always readable, whatever the subject. I'm looking forward to reading Transition next week, buying it on Monday.

Be easier to list the ones I don't like – Whit, A Song of Stone.

Thought they were a bit rubbish but loved pretty much everything else.

Espedair street by far the most re-read.