Against a Dark Background

Against a Dark Background is a science fiction novel by the Scottish writer Iain Banks, first published in 1993. It was his first science fiction novel that neither featured nor was set in the Culture, the interstellar civilisation of his other spacefaring books.

Lady Sharrow is a former military pilot and antiquities thief living on Golter, a planet orbiting a star in an isolated system with no nearby galaxies to reach. The cult of the Huhsz has been granted the right to assassinate her, on the belief that its messiah cannot be born until the last of her family's female bloodline is dead. She is offered a choice between hiding for a year or recovering the final Lazy Gun, an ancient weapon of mass destruction that her ancestor took from the cult, and she decides to go after the Gun instead of waiting. Finding it means tracking down the Universal Principles, a long-lost book rumoured to hold a clue to where the weapon was hidden, and Sharrow turns down an offer of help from her cousin Geis, a wealthy industrialist, so that she can follow the trail her own way. The search carries her across the Golterian system and back through the history of her own family.

The setting is one of the least hospitable Banks wrote: a single star system cut off from the rest of the universe, with a long record of small wars and a market in the weapons those wars left behind. The novel follows a single hunted woman through a system that knows exactly who she is.