If I remember my lore correctly, even the great Iain M. Banks struggled to convince his regular publisher to put out a collection of his short stories. More fool them. ‘Descendant’ is a brutal tale of a damaged, intelligent suit and a damaged man trying to reach safety on an inhospitable moon. Every success is only temporary, and only ekes out their survival a while longer. It’s a bit like ‘The Martian’, but on a really bad day. Which sounds pretty grim, but still… here’s an author who has risen to the challenge to throw the worst possible at their protagonist. Do they make it? That would be spoiling it for you. But like other classic Iain M. Bank’s stories, such as ‘Use of Weapons’, the conclusion stays with you, as inevitable as it should be, but somehow shattering at the same time.

Published in the anthology Tales from the Forbidden Planet, Titan Books, 1987, and included in the short story collection State of the Art,Orbit, 1991