Just finished Iain M. Banks' latest novel, Surface Detail. Not his best, but as usual crammed with ideas useful for games. A big part of the plot deals with the problem of hells. There is a nice section describing why it is common for primitive intelligent life to start believing in an afterlife, how they become able to implement it once they are technologically advanced enough - and why some build nasty afterlives for some fraction of their members. There is a lot of good ideas here about simspaces, including a massive virtual war populated by widely forked and merged soldiers. Veppers: a portrait of a real oligarch. Ruthless, powerful, with all bases covered - yet a bit naive when things really happen. The Intagliated: an interesting biomod, and slightly related to the indentured of EP. It is not too hard to see how an oligarch might sleeve people in debt to him in this way. The Tattoo: a very nice little nanoenhancement. The Tsungarial Disk: just the kind of resource gatecrashers might come across. And of course plenty of Ship Minds, giving some ideas for AGIs. Especially Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints and its avatar is a character I am itching to spring on my poor players. The spaceship battle description is a good one for the players... "Ha! You didn't think this is happening in real time, did you?" Overall, Banks Culture novels are full of good ideas for EP. Great settings for gatecrashing, habitats and weird transhuman societies. Various imaginative and truly nasty ideas to use for nastier NPCs. Zakalwe from Use of Weapon is just the kind of operative Firewall would be using (and Firewall is after all Special Circumstances, without the Culture).