Books to Read Next if You Loved Iain M Banks’s Culture Series

Readers who finish Iain M Banks’s Culture novels often describe the same feeling. Awe at the scale of the imagination. A lingering sense of possibility. And the frustration of knowing there will never be another entry in that universe. The good news is that a handful of writers have kept alive the blend of giant ideas, moral tension, and star-spanning drama that made the Culture series so distinctive.

Banks was a Scottish novelist whose Culture series reshaped modern science fiction with its sweeping imagination and sharp moral questions. The Culture itself is a far-future post-scarcity civilisation run by hyper-intelligent artificial intelligences (AIs) known as Minds, where citizens live free from want, hierarchy, or coercion. Across the series Banks (who died from cancer in 2013) used this setting to explore the tensions between idealism and intervention, the limits of Utopia, and the messy choices that arise when a powerful society engages with more fragile or dangerous worlds.

Fans who enjoyed Banks’s talent for mixing philosophical puzzles with reality-bending technology will find a natural successor in Alastair Reynolds. His Revelation Space universe offers the same sense of deep time and ancient mysteries, but with a sharper noir edge. The worlds feel worn- and lived-in and the stakes grow slowly until they hit Banks-level magnitude. It rewards patient reading and gives you that same vertigo of scale.

Those who loved Culture’s playfulness may gravitate toward Ann Leckie. Her Imperial Radch trilogy features heightened questions about identity and power told through the voice of a starship AI placed into a single human body. It captures something Banks did so well by contrasting immense machinery with personal loyalty and moral doubt.

For a more political and intellectually restless experience, Ada Palmer’s TerraIgnota quartet offers a future built on competing philosophies rather than competing empires. The books ask difficult questions about freedom, hierarchy, and human nature. You get the same feeling of a civilisation trying to engineer itself into something higher while still being dragged back by instinct and emotion.

And for readers who want the combination of humour, danger, and moral inquiry that defined the Culture series, John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series fits the bill. It is lighter in tone but rich in big ideas, using augmented bodies, military service, and interstellar conflict to explore identity and the price of survival.

Each of these writers builds worlds with the ambition and curiosity that made Banks’s work unforgettable. They will not replace the Culture series but they will remind you how wide the universe of ideas can still be.