A Gift from the Culture
"A Gift from the Culture", published in 1987, is a short work of space opera, by the Scottish science fiction author Iain M. Banks. The story is an early venture into the "complex and unusual and very distant" setting of the Culture, which Banks would further develop through various of full length novels, stories, and his essay "A Few Notes on the Culture".
Culture and Society
When first published, the book was widely regarded as having overturned conventional social and historical thinking about culture. It argues that the notion of culture developed in response to the Industrial Revolution and the social and political changes it brought in its wake. This is done through a series of studies of famous British writers and essayists, beginning with Edmund Burke and William Cobbett, also looking at William Blake, William Wordsworth, etc., and continuing as far as F. R. Leavis, George Orwell and Christopher Caudwell.