« Me, Putin and Judo
Josie Long: All of the Planets Wonders »

The State of the Art

March 6th, 2009 by James Bridle

As one of the centrepieces of the current SciFi season across BBC Radio, Radio 4 put out this dramatisation of one of Iain M. Banks' rare short pieces: The State of the Art. It's a rare example of outright humour in Banks' work, which is usually darker in his non-M fiction, and more oblique in his Science Fiction (see this excellent list of Ship Names in the Culture). It's 1977, and a Culture ship visits earth to survey it. Enjoy. [MP3]

Listen: [MP3] [Real]

This entry was posted by by James Bridle on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 3:20 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “The State of the Art”

  1. All aboard the Bökship. And a Science question. — Bookkake Says:
    March 6th, 2009 at 5:52 pm

    [...] Some good SciFi news as well: a new imprint from HarperCollins, Angry Robot, launches its website and titles on Monday, but you can follow the pre-blogging here. We’ve also been enjoying BBC Radio’s scifi season, and in one of my other preoccupations, as an agent of the wonderful Speechification, I’ve posted the dramatisation of Iain M. Banks’ The State of the Art here. [...]

  2. Adam Says:
    March 10th, 2009 at 3:51 am

    Great to see you’re still putting up the mp3s – they’re really appreciated.

  3. Hakan Says:
    March 12th, 2009 at 8:55 pm

    One of my favourites and the adaptation was quite good.
    Any chance with the rest of the season? These days I’m missing too much stuff on the BBC Radio 4. :(

  4. listen to this « no.plan. Says:
    March 28th, 2009 at 2:53 pm

    [...] been going through some neglected mp3s and after finishing ‘state of the art‘ went onto ‘all the planets [...]

Leave a Reply

(You can do this safely while listening; thanks to Internet Magic you can add a comment here without causing the page to refresh and reloading the programme you are listening to. Try it.)