Rob Rea asked Charles Stross:

Hi Charles, I read recently that Iain Banks (RIP) asked his good friend Ken McLeod to pick up where he left off on the Culture series and use his notes to write the next book. Unfortunately Iain was not able to complete these notes and Ken has no plans to write a Culture novel. Understandable but a pity he would write a great book as I believe you could. Pure hypothetical if asked to write a Culture novel would you?

Charles Stross Short answer: nope, I would not write a Culture novel.

Medium answer: I'm a huge fan of Iain's work and I feel trying to piggy-back on it for profit alone — which at this point is what a Culture novel would be -- would be disrespectful. Having said that, if at some future point his executors put together a collection of tributes to his work, that'd be another matter.

Longest answer: asking any other author to write a Culture novel is futile; they could use the setting but it wouldn't feel quite right because Iain was a marvelous and subtle literary novelist who just happened to use space opera to explore big (often political) questions that didn't fit inside the restrictive frame of his realist-mode novels. I can't write an Iain M. Banks novel because I am not Iain M. Banks. However, I am currently writing a Charlie Stross novel that just happens to be a wide-screen far future space opera (in a wholly new setting), that attempts to examine big political questions. I'm not borrowing Iain's setting: I'm attempting to borrow his toolbox to come up with something of my own that scratches the same itch that the Culture series scratched so successfully. (Ghost Engine is currently scheduled for publication in mid-2018; if successful, there will be more in that universe.)

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