The State of the Art (story)

Banks, Iain M. "The State of the Art." 1989. Coll. The State of the Art. London: Orbit, 1991.

A novella in IMB's Culture series. In large part, a eutopian/dystopian, multivoiced dialog concerning life in the highly advanced Culture vs. life on Earth in 1977, with the debate deciding whether Earth will be destroyed, brought into the Culture, entirely left alone, or studied as a "control." Features an AI ship (one of IMB's "Minds"), and a brief but important section with comments on Manhattan as a highly geometric jungle (188) and machine: "This was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky" (190). (RDE, 20/10/97)