Автор - Iain Banks
The Business
Автор: Iain BanksЖанр: Иностранная литература
Who Do You Work For? The Business, a nearly omnipotent enterprise, is so infinitely discreet that even its top executives are vague about its actual business. It predates the Christian church and counts among its vast riches dozens of Michelangelo's pornographic paintings and several sets of Crown jewels. The only thing it lacks is political clout, a problem the Business plans to solve by buying a nation and joining the United Nations. Kate Telman, the Business's foremost expert on emerging technologies, is chosen to lead the effort. As this beautiful, ambitious American woman pursues the ultimate prize for her highly secretive transglobal employer, Iain Banks -- whom The Times of London calls "the most imaginative British novelist of his generation" -- offers a portrait of today's ubiquitous multinational corporations. Already a bestseller in England, The Business paints a picture that is at once wickedly satirical and frighteningly familiar.
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The Crow Road
Автор: Iain BanksЖанр: Иностранная литература
A new novel from the author of CANAL DREAMS and THE WASP FACTORY, which explores the subjects of God, sex, death, Scotland, and motor cars.
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The Player of Games
Автор: Iain BanksЖанр: Иностранная литература
The Culture — a human/machine symbiotic society — has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game … a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life — and very possibly his death.
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The State of The Art
Автор: Iain BanksЖанр: Иностранная литература
The first ever collection of Iain Banks's short fiction, this volume includes the acclaimed novella, The State of the Art. This is a striking addition to the growing body of Culture lore, and adds definition and scale to the previous works by using the Earth of 1977 as contrast. The other stories in the collection range from science fiction to horror, dark-coated fantasy to morality tale. All bear the indefinable stamp of Iain Banks's staggering talent.
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The Wasp Factory
Автор: Iain BanksЖанр: Иностранная литература
Enter — if you can bear it — the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least. "Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. "That's my score to date. Three. I haven't killed anybody for years, and don't intend to ever again. "It was just a stage I was going through."
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Transition
Автор: Iain BanksЖанр: Иностранная литература
A world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse, such a world requires a firm hand and a guiding light. But does it need the Concern: an all-powerful organisation with a malevolent presiding genius, pervasive influence and numberless invisible operatives in possession of extraordinary powers? On the Concern's books are Temudjin Oh, an un-killable assassin who journeys between the peaks of Nepal, a version of Victorian London and the dark palaces of Venice; and a nameless, faceless torturer known only as the Philosopher. And then there's the renegade Mrs Mulverhill, who recruits rebels to her side; and Patient 8262, hiding out from a dirty past in a forgotten hospital ward. As these vivid, strange and sensuous worlds circle and collide, the implications of turning traitor to the Concern become horribly apparent, and an unstable universe is set on a dizzying course.
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Une forme de guerre
Автор: Iain BanksЖанр: Иностранная литература
Horza est un Métamorphe, un des derniers survivants de cette variété de l’espèce humaine qui peut modifier sa forme à sa guise. Et il est engagé dans une croisade personnelle contre la Culture. Son combat, comme celui de Balveda, l’envoyée de la section Circonstances Spéciales de la Culture, n’est qu’une escarmouche insignifiante sur la toile de fond de la guerre qui oppose la Culture et les ldirans. Une guerre qui embrase la Galaxie. Une guerre inexpiable comme toute guerre de religion. Une guerre où aucun compromis n’est possible, qui se soldera par la victoire d’un seul camp. Celui des Idirans qui veulent soumettre à leur divinité tous les peuples de la Galaxie. Ou bien celui de la Culture qui est parfaitement tolérant et qui, à ce titre, ne peut accepter aucune intolérance. Comme dans L’usage des armes et L’homme des jeux, lain Banks décrit ici une immense société galactique, complexe, rusée, bigarrée, baroque et attachante, qui prendra place dans les annales de l’Histoire du Futur aux côtés de Dune et d’Hypérion.
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Use of Weapons
Автор: Iain BanksЖанр: Иностранная литература
Cheradenine is an ex-"special circumstance" agent who had been raised to eminence by a woman named Diziet. Skaffen-Amtskaw, the drone, had saved her life and it believes Cheradenine to be a burnt-out case. But not even its machine intelligence can see the horrors in his past.
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Walking on Glass
Автор: Iain BanksЖанр: Иностранная литература
Graham Park is in love. But Sara Ffitch is an enigma to him, a creature of almost perverse mystery. Steven Grout is paranoid - and with justice. He knows that They are out to get him. They are. Quiss, insecure in his fabulous if ramshackle castle, is forced to play interminable impossible games. The solution to the oldest of all paradoxical riddles will release him. But he must find an answer before he knows the question. Park, Grout, Quiss - no trio could be further apart. But their separate courses are set for collision... "A feast of horrors, variously spiced with incest, conspiracy, and cheerful descriptions of torture... fine writing" The Times "The author's powerful imagination is displayed again here every bit as vividly as in his debut" Financial Times "Establishes beyond doubt that lain Banks is a novelist of remarkable talents" Daily Telegraph
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Whit
Автор: Iain BanksЖанр: Иностранная литература
A little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing… Innocent in the ways of the world, an ingénue when it comes to pop and fashion, the Elect of God of a small but committed Stirlingshire religious cult: Isis Whit is no ordinary teenager. When her cousin Morag - Guest of Honour at the Luskentyrian's four-yearly Festival of Love - disappears after renouncing her faith, Isis is marked out to venture among the Unsaved and bring the apostate back into the fold. But the road to Babylondon (as Sister Angela puts it) is a treacherous one, particularly when Isis discovers the Morag appears to have embraced the ways of the Unsaved with spectacular abandon … Truth and falsehood; kinship and betrayal; 'herbal' cigarettes and compact discs - Whit is an exploration of the techno-ridden barrenness of modern Britain from a unique perspective. 'Fierce contemporaneity, an acrobatic imagination, social comment, sardonic wit ... the peculiar sub-culture of cult religion is a natural for Banks, and Luskentyrianism is a fine creation' The Times 'One of the most relentlessly voyaging imaginations around' Scotsman 'Banks is a phenomenon ...I suspect we have actual laws against this sort of thing, in the United States, but Iain Banks, whether you take him with the "M" or without, is currently a legal import' William Gibson 'Entertaining ... comically inspired' Guardian
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Wspomnij Phlebasa
Автор: Iain BanksЖанр: Иностранная литература
W galaktyce szaleje straszliwa wojna. Zagłada dosięga księżyce, planety, orbitale, a nawet gwiazdy. Giną miliardy rozumnych istot. Idrianie walczą za wiarę. Kultura o moralne prawo do istnienia. Tam, gdzie stawką są zasady, nie ma miejsca na litość. Losy konfliktu spoczywają w rękach jednego z ostatnich metamorfów; od wyniku jego straceńczej misji zależy przyszłość wszechświata.
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