Alistair Reynolds has a number of good books which can capture some of the same darkness you'd find in part's of Banks's work. The Revelation Space books are great in their gothic way, and House of Suns has a lot of the galactic wonder aspects of the Culture books.
Ken MacLeod as a friend of Bank's and a good writer. His Fall Revolution books are probably the best known and explore various radical leftish ideas for organizing society across the nearish future.
And this last is a bit of an oddball but Leonard Richardson's Constellation Games was a book I really enjoyed that starts with aliens coming to Earth looking to help out and our protagonist, a video game reviewer, asking for alien games to review but ends up in a place that resonated with The Culture very strongly.
Neal Asher's Polity Universe will probably ring a lot of the same bells (realpolitik, AIs in charge, a dash of horror).
Probably the biggest difference between the milieus is that in the Polity, machines are just as likely to be suffering from PTSD as organic intelligences.
I just finished reading A Deepness in The Sky by Vernor Vinge which I totally enjoyed and as I read it reminded me of the scale and depth of Banks' Culture novels.
Symmetry|2 years ago
Alistair Reynolds has a number of good books which can capture some of the same darkness you'd find in part's of Banks's work. The Revelation Space books are great in their gothic way, and House of Suns has a lot of the galactic wonder aspects of the Culture books.
Ken MacLeod as a friend of Bank's and a good writer. His Fall Revolution books are probably the best known and explore various radical leftish ideas for organizing society across the nearish future.
And this last is a bit of an oddball but Leonard Richardson's Constellation Games was a book I really enjoyed that starts with aliens coming to Earth looking to help out and our protagonist, a video game reviewer, asking for alien games to review but ends up in a place that resonated with The Culture very strongly.
webmaven|2 years ago
Probably the biggest difference between the milieus is that in the Polity, machines are just as likely to be suffering from PTSD as organic intelligences.
davecanderson|2 years ago
exolymph|2 years ago