The Drones of The Player of Games

Over recent years I've found myself listening repeatedly to the books of the late Iain M Banks, particularly the Culture series narrated by Peter Kenny. I've gotten mildly obsessed with the Culture society and one aspect I've been interested in is the design of Drones. Drones are sentient artificial entities running on a wide variety of substrates which hold their consciousness. Their appearances vary enormously and it's sometimes hard to visualise them in a story. They can be simple blocks roughly the size and shape of a suitcase or a hovering cube of components held together by fields.

To help my visualising I've decided to go through the books and find all the descriptions and then attempt to draw them. So here's the Drones from The Player of Games.

Mawhrin-Skel - Special Circumstances reject, de-weaponised offensive drone.

• Small enough to sit comfortably on a pair of hands.
• Looks like a model of an intricate and old-fashioned spacecraft.
• Surface of its casing is grey-blue with an odd mottled mixture of grey tones.

Chamlis Amalk-ney - good-natured but mischievous geriatric.

• 1.5 metres tall, 0.5 metres wide and deep.
• Plain casing, matte with accumulated wear - 'minutely battered'.
• Sensing band.
• Broad, flat top.
• Some slight bulges.

Loash - Gurgeh's initial contact from Special Circumstances/Contact.

• Able to sit comfortably in a rectangular sandwich plate.
• Gunmetal casing.
• More complicated and knobbly than Mawhrin-Skel but about the same size.

Worthil - Contact drone.

• Tiny, small and grey-white.
• Fieldless.

Flere-Imsaho - Library drone.

• Even smaller than Mawhrin-Skel - could have hidden inside a pair of cupped hands.
• Circular in plan and composed of seperate revolving sections - rotating rings around a stationary core.
• Spinning outher sections and disc-like white casing resembles a hidden wafer piece from the game of Possession (hidden piece is a circular white ceramic wafer which a location ID is dialled and locked into).
• Described later as 'a little white disk'.

I imagine I've missed some references (and I ignored Flere-Imsaho's disguise) but there you go.