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".
List of spacecraft in the Culture series
The following ships have not appeared in any books, however they were named by Iain M Banks in an interview with "The Guardian". These ships obtained their names as a result of another (unnamed) Involved civilisation criticizing Culture ship naming policy, claiming that such powerful ships ought to have names with a little more gravitas.The autonomous spaceport drone ships "Just Read the Instructions" and "Of Course I Still Love You", operated by SpaceX, were named after General Contact Units mentioned in "The Player of Games", as a posthumous homage to Banks by Elon Musk. The construction of a third drone ship, named "A Shortfall of Gravitas", was announced by Elon Musk via Twitter on February 12, 2018. It is named after the "Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall", a ship mentioned in "Look to Windward" and "Matter" as a GSV and GCU respectively.