RIP Iain Banks 1954-2013

We've known this day was coming, of course, since Banks made his statement regarding his diagnosis of terminal cancer, declaring that he was "officially Very Poorly." Yet, it still comes as a shock. That statement was made only two months ago. To come to terms with the fact that your life is going to end so soon, and to be unable to do anything about it... I'm not sure I can imagine what that was like.

Iain optional-M Banks was truly one of the greats of modern English literature. A proud Scotsman, a lover of fine scotch whisky (and what right-thinking man isn't?) and a highly intelligent, eloquent, occasionally belligerent and frequently hilarious author. Not long before the diagnosis of his illness, he had discussed his future writing plans with periodicals such as SFX. There was so much more to come from him.

That's what stings for me, of course. I never knew the man; I can't appreciate a fraction of how his wife and family must feel. My sympathies go out to them, of course, but I wasn't his friend, I was a fan and a follower. It's the missed opportunities that hurt me the most. The books left unwritten.

I first discovered Banks about fifteen years ago, I think. I'm a sci-fi nut (what, you haven't noticed?), so his 'M' works have always been my main interest. The Player of Games was my first Banks novel, and I'd certainly agree with the majority view that it is the best introduction to the Culture universe, rather than the first in the sequence, Consider Phlebas. My favourites remain the mind-blowing Excession and the gripping Use of Weapons. The vast galactic backdrop of the supremely powerful Culture and its alien peers always impressed me, the imagination on display matched only by the craft of the prose. Nonetheless, the stories, in spite of often dealing with Galaxy-shaking events, were often small scale, focusing tightly on the personal dramas of the near-human protagonists. The first that springs to mind is Diziet Sma, the proud interventionist who starred in Use of Weapons, and the wonderful Culture-meets-Earth novella The State of the Art. Then there's Zakalwe, her contact and ward in Weapons, who, it is hinted, appears in the more recent novel Surface Detail.

Then there are the Minds, the sardonically superior hyper-intelligent handlers of pan-humanity in the Culture, and specifically the Ships, with their endlessly inventive, and frequently ingeniously funny, names. Size Isn't Everything, Frank Exchange of Views, You'll Clean That Up Before You Leave, and the gloriously amoral Grey Area, aka 'Meatfucker.' The Ships aren't everything; this is a universe in which everything from orbital habitats to weaponry to sex toys can be sentient.

Banks retired from the Culture for a few years in the early part of this century, before coming back with such fine works as Surface Detail, Matter and The Hydrogen Sonata, which expanded the Culture universe and delved into its background. There's the unremitting sense that there was so much more left to learn. The next novel was, supposedly, going to deal with the von Neumann-like 'smatter' outbreaks, an oft-mentioned element of the Culture universe. It wasn't always the Culture, of course; Banks's vast imagination created such works as the challenging Feersum Endjinn, the hugely fun The Algebraist, and the secretly-Culture Inversions, one of his more underrated works.

So, that's the science M. fiction. However, Banks was best known for his first novel, the brutal, powerful, controversial The Wasp Factory. I wonder if Banks ever felt put out by the fact that he was almost certainly never going to top his first novel. I read The Wasp Factory when I was fourteen or fifteen, and my god, that has stuck with me. Certain scenes still surface unwarranted to my conscious mind. I'm too nervous to go back and read it again, for fear of disrupting the memory of that affecting first reading.

Banks was that rare thing: an author who was equally known and loved for his mainstream and genre fiction. It is to my shame that I have red only one other of his non-SF works, The Bridge, which I don't think I appreciated fully at the time and must return to. I have a lot of reading to do now - not only my long-planned reread of the Culture sequence, but discovering all of those novels I have yet to try. His final novel, The Quarry, will be published posthumously later this month. So, for me at least, there is still plenty more to go before Banks is truly gone.

I was going to end with a quote from one of Banks's books, but instead, I have decided to quote my friend Miles, who I think captured something of the writer and his sense of humour here.

"Maybe if we're lucky, Iain M. Banks' personality gets uploade to a Mind in the far-far-future and he gets to control a superpowerful Spaceship called 'Lover of Fine Dram.'"

Iain M. Banks

Very, very sad news from one of my favourite authors. Our thoughts are with you, Mr Banks.

http://www.iain-banks.net/2013/04/03/a-personal-statement-from-iain-banks/

Cultural Reflections: The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks

The Culture novels are full of intriguing details that hint at a vast, under-explored universe beyond what little we’ve been permitted to see. In The Hydrogen Sonata, the latest novel in the series, Banks finally explores something that has existed on the fringes of the Culture universe since the very first book, 1987’s Consider Phlebas: the Sublimed.

For a long while now Banks has released a trickle of information regarding the Sublimed, those civilisations and Minds that have reached such a level of development as to take the next step in their evolution, and have left the material plane altogether. Tenuously linked to the material universe and still able to influence it in some ways, the Sublimed are distantly removed and remain the one great enigma of the Culture universe. This novel doesn’t tell us much about the physical realities of Subliming, the truth, inevitably, being beyond what our pitiful mortal minds can understand. Instead, Banks takes the more interesting track of exploring how, when and why a civilisation would consider upping sticks to another plane of reality (something the Culture themselves have resisted for their long history).

The results are characteristically cynical. The Gzilt, a semi-reptilian humanoid species, have reached the stage in their history at which Sublimation is the next logical step, and have seemingly decided upon it as a ‘now-or-never’ opportunity. Counting down their final twenty-four days of material existence, the Gzilt wallow in their petty politics, their martially organised culture breaking apart under the strain, after millennia of determined peace. A violent incident against a Culture ship kicks off a sequence of events that threaten to destabilise the whole process. Gzilt politicians manipulate their alien allies to cover their backs for long enough to reach the big day, after which, nothing will matter ever again.

Cultural Reflections: Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks

Finally got round to reading Surface Detail, the latest Culture novel by Iain ‘Optional M.’ Banks. It’s the seventh novel to feature the Culture (well, the ninth if you include the novella State of the Art and the sneaky Inversions), and one I’ve been meaning to buy for a while. Banks is one of the finest authors in Britain, science fiction or otherwise, and his Culture sequence is a universe I particularly enjoy visiting. Good thing, too - Surface Detail makes few concessions for someone new to the Culture. If that includes you, then here goes: the Culture is an apparently benevolent, hedonistic super-society that has existed from the distant past and will exist far into our future, populated by various interbreeding humanoid species (or ‘pan-humans’) and a vast array of sentient artificial intelligences known as Minds. They span the Galaxy, which they share with sundry other space-faring civilisations of varying levels of sophistication, promoting a façade of diplomatic integrity and righteousness while interfering left, right and centre in secret.

Surface Detail expands the universe of the Culture, introducing a variety of new alien civilisations and exploring in some detail the nature of their sophisticated virtual realities. Central to the novel is the idea of an artificially created Hell: the Culture, and its peers, can copy and store a living being’s mind, restoring it after the individual’s death, either to a newly grown body or a virtual afterlife. It follows that some, less salubrious civilisations will not only create heavenly versions of cyber-afterlife, but hellish ones too. Depressingly, this is probably right. Although belief in a literal Hell has diminished among the various religions of the world over recent years, it certainly persists in some fundamentalist quarters. Some people genuinely believe that the threat of eternal suffering is all that can keep our sinful species on the straight and narrow.

This is also the view of the Pavulean civilisation, who have created a particularly loathsome Dante-esque virtual hell. We follow the suffering of Prin and Chay, two Pavuleans who bravely, or foolishly, infiltrated Hell to bring back the truth of its existence, only to find escape very difficult indeed. These sequences are, in some cases, extremely distressing, Banks presenting us with some truly abominable punishments. It’s easy to forget that Prin and Chay are two trunk-bearing quadrupeds. Why Banks decided to tell the Hellish scenes from an elephant’s point of view I’m not sure; perhaps it’s easier for a reader to stomach if the victim isn’t exactly human.