Surface Detail

By Iain M. Banks

First edition, first impression: London: Orbit, 2010. Signed by the author to the title page.

Original black cloth, the spine lettered in silver. In the original unclipped dust jacket, priced £18.99 on the front flap, the front panel lettered “The New Culture Novel” and bearing a “Signed First Edition” sticker.

A very good or better copy: a bump to the top corner of the upper board and to the top edge of the lower board, and a little white transfer from the jacket to the fore-edge of the upper board; the boards and contents otherwise fresh.

The dust jacket near fine and unclipped, with only mild traces of edge wear in places.

The penultimate of Banks’s Culture novels, followed by "The Hydrogen Sonata" in 2012 prior to his passing in 2013. It turns on the artificial hells kept by some civilisations for the minds of their dead, and on a war fought in simulation to decide whether they may continue. At its centre is Lededje Y’breq, one of the Intagliated, “her marked body bearing witness to a family shame”, who is murdered by her owner and revived aboard a Culture ship.