Use Of Weapons (1992)

432pp, Fiction
Notes
2025-06-21
I enjoy The Culture books but they never quite land for me. On the other hand, the idea of The Culture is just endlessly compelling. I feel like the series is missing a big volume of short stories but given that short stories were never really Bank's thing I think the best expression of the idea is the Notes on the Culture post that his friend Ken MacLeod posted on rec.arts.sf.written back in the mid-nineties.
Another thought: Special Circumstances, the branch of The Culture that does war, typically by mans of sending a well resourced individual to an enemy planet and letting them fuck shit up, is basically Wasp(wikipedia)