Why sci-fi novelist Iain M. Banks was an ‘astounding’ world-builder

As a writer of space operas set in foreign universes, I’ve always written exhaustive world-building documents, everything from character graphs to hyper-detailed plot outlines to encyclopaedic entries on the cultures I’m creating. This is an essential part of my process, and I’ve studied some of the best: the late Iain M. Banks, who died in 2013, was an astounding world-builder.

Best known for his Culture series, Banks described the Culture civilisation as a “secular heaven”. Its human/machine/AI population has achieved a post-scarcity utopia where benevolent AIs (called Minds) manage the health and maintenance of society. Unlike other science fiction that imagines AI overlords stamping out or enslaving humanity (think The Matrix), in the Culture, humans and machines share equal rights and have meaningful, trusting relationships. Yes, at the end of the day, the machines call the shots, but they generally call them right, and their human citizens don’t experience oppression.

Of course, it’s not always that simple. In Banks’s The Player of Games (1988), the protagonist Gurgeh is bored with his perfect Culture life; when he visits the comparatively shifty Azad Empire, its people are hostile toward the Culture’s supposed utopia. They have good reason. The Culture takes an ethnographic and condescending view of other civilisations. It debates whether to leave them alone or take them over. In the novella The State of the Art, members of the Contact service acknowledge that absorbing Earth into the Culture would kill billions, but that’s acceptable if it creates something better in the long run. This tension between the Culture as paradise and supremacist empire is a well-known theme, and Banks finds fascinating ways to explore it. His world-building is one of them.

As a writer obsessed with the craft of world-building, I’ve recently devoured Banks’s posthumously published The Culture: The Drawings. The book reprints a large collection of Banks’s hand drawings and notes.

Therein, we see him answering questions that are also important to my own writing: what language do the characters speak and why? What are the naming conventions of people and places? How does technology impact not just broad societal structures, but the nitty-gritty of daily life? In Banks’s drawings, he answers these questions with rough sketches of ships, intricate diagrams of weapons, rows and rows of numerical calculations, and maps labelled down to the smallest corner. These documents point both to the idyllic nature of the Culture and its militaristic aspects. Through these details, we see the complexity of Banks’s writing process and how he achieved his fully-developed universe and civilisation.

I’m working on a novel now that also features an advanced alien civilisation. I keep returning to Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, whose benevolent aliens deny humans agency in their own lives. I also keep thinking about Jacques Sternberg’s short story “So Far From Home”, where an alien visiting Earth walks around in constant disgust with humanity. And then there’s Banks, whose work serves as a guidebook for how I might make my world feel real, lived in, accessible if not familiar. I don’t have Banks’s drawing talent, but I identify with his need to visualise his society, to map the blueprints of the ship where everybody is hanging out, or chart a star map of significant locales.

This is the delicious pleasure for me of science fiction. The imagined world.

But there are other, subtler ways that Banks builds his worlds. My entry into Banks was the aforementioned The State of the Art, whose protagonists are alien visitors to Earth. They are a pleasant group who approach Earth’s history and culture with curiosity, if not horror over its atrocities. But while much of the story has a lighthearted tone, Banks creates sinister moments that show us the intrinsic problems in the Culture.

For instance, there’s a scene late in the novella, a dinner party, where the character Li eccentrically argues for destroying Earth. His companions heckle him, but without the despair they’ve shown toward earthly atrocities like the “Final Solution”. The scene culminates with Li presenting his guests a dish of lab-grown human cells, that is to say, cooked human flesh. “If they could see us now!” one character exclaims gleefully. “Cannibals from outer space!”

This moment of world-building fascinates me.

Eating vat-grown human steaks is clearly on a different scale to the Holocaust, but both reveal a carelessness toward human life, the laughter-tinged indifference of humans to those they consider subhuman. It gives us a glimpse into the Culture that Banks’s drawings of weapons and super ships may have hinted at, but don’t necessarily capture on an emotional level. In other words, world-building in Banks’s novels is about more than geography, linguistics and technology. It’s about tone. The unsettling admixture of lightness and dread that show him for a master of his craft.

Anyone new to Banks should look at his drawings and technical descriptions. They provide rich insight into the process and mechanics of creating a new world. I would also urge you to pay attention to the moments of contradiction and uncertainty threaded through character dialogue and self-reflection, areas in which Banks particularly excels. Watch his tone. Watch his humour. For me, that’s where the sharpest lessons are.

Bethany Jacobs is the author of the Philip K. Dick award-winning novel These Burning Stars (Orbit). Iain M. Banks’s Culture novel The Player of Games (Orbit) is the December 2025 read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up to read along with us here.