'Banks is a phenomenon: the wildly successful, fearlessly creative author of brilliant and disturbing novels, he's equally at home writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly nature and elegance.' (William Gibson) Banks discusses his new sci-fi novel Look to Windward. It was one of the less glorious incidents of the Idiran wars that led to the destruction of two suns and the billions of lives they supported. Now, 800 years later, the light from the first of those deaths has reached the Culture's Masaq' Orbital. A Chelgrian emissary is dispatched to the Culture. 'Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary depth.' (New York Review of Science Fiction)