Iain Banks

Iain Banks
Occupation	Writer.

Iain Menzies Banks (officially Iain Banks, born on February 16, 1954 in Dunfermline, Fife) is a Scottish writer. As Iain M. Banks he writes science fiction; as Iain Banks he writes literary fiction.

Biography

Banks father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Banks studied English, philosophy and psychology at the University of Stirling.

His latest book is a mainstream novel called The Steep Approach to Garbadale.

Personal life

Married in 1992, he currently lives in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge.

In February 2007, Banks sold his extensive car caollection. Since 2000, Banks spent more than £150,000 on cars, including a bottle green 3.2 litre Porsche Boxster, a burgundy Porsche 911 Turbo, a 3.8 litre Mark II Jaguar, a 5 litre black BMW 7 series and a daily use diesel Land Rover Defender whose power he had boosted by about 50%. Banks traded all of the vehicles for a Lexus GS400h hybrid, and vowed in future to vote Green Party

Politics

As with his friend Ken MacLeod (another Scottish writer of technical and social science fiction) a strong awareness of left-wing history shows in his writings. The argument that an economy of abundance renders anarchy and adhocracy viable (or even inevitable) attracts many as an interesting potential experiment, were it ever to become testable. He is known as a supporter of Scottish independence, and has campaigned with the Scottish Socialist Party.

In late 2004 Banks was a prominent member of a group of British politicians and media figures who campaigned to have Prime Minister Tony Blair impeached following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In protest he cut up his passport and posted it to 10 Downing Street.

Banks is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society (see Quotations) and a Distinguished Supporter of the Humanist Society of Scotland.

Miscellany

• Banks tends to produce a novel in around three months, working solidly, then take nine months off. In his leisure time, he has had flying lessons and records his own rock music.
• Banks tends to alternate writing between science fiction and literary fiction novels.
• Many of his science fiction books are based in the universe of 'The Culture' (a powerful, multi-species civilization living in our galaxy). The novella, The State of the Art records the Culture coming into contact with planet Earth (see Bibliography below).
• Following the release of his most recent science-fiction work, The Algebraist in 2004 (a non-Culture novel), Banks has stated that he intends to write more Culture novels. However, as he intends to slow the release of such books from one every 12 months to one every 18 months, the next Culture novel cannot be expected until sometime in 2008.
• Although Banks generally confines his writing to his own novels, he has written occasional reviews for The Guardian newspaper and is a semi-regular music reviewer for Marc Riley's Rocket Science radio show on BBC 6 Music. He was the subject of a South Bank Show television programme broadcast on 16 November 1997, subtitled The Strange Worlds of Iain Banks, which concentrated on his mainstream work. The Curse Of Iain Banks, a play written by Maxton Walker, was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1999, with Banks contributing as a voice on tape. He has appeared on the BBC's political discussion television programme Question Time.
• While a student at Stirling University, Banks appeared as an extra in the final battle scene of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which was filmed at the nearby Doune Castle.
• At the beginning of 2006 Banks captained a team of writers to victory in a special series of University Challenge: The Professionals on BBC2, beating a team of actors 185-105 (January 1), and then the 'news' team 190-45 in the final (January 2). He also won an edition of Celebrity Mastermind, taking "Malt whisky & the distilleries of Scotland" as his specialist subject on BBC1 on January 2.
• Interviewed on Mark Lawson's BBC Four series, first broadcast in the UK on 14 November 2006, Iain explained why his novels are published under two different names. His parents named him Iain Menzies Banks but his father made a mistake when registering the birth and he was officially registered as Iain Banks. Despite this he continued to use his unofficial middle name and it was as Iain M. Banks that he submitted The Wasp Factory for publication. However, his editor asked if he would mind dropping the 'M' as it appeared "too fussy". The editor was also concerned about possible confusion with Rosie M. Banks, a minor character in some of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves novels who is a romantic novelist. After agreeing to drop the 'M' his family were a bit upset but it wasn't possible to put the 'M' back for subsequent novels, as this could have confused the readers. After publishing his first three mainstream novels his publishers agreed to publish his first SF novel, Consider Phlebas. They agreed that it would be a good idea to distinguish between the mainstream and SF novels, to avoid confusing his mainstream readership, so Iain suggested the return of the 'M', although at one stage he considered John B. Macallan as his SF pseudonym, the name deriving from his favourite whiskys: Johnnie Walker Black Label and The Macallan single malt.

Bibliography

Novels as Iain Banks

• The Wasp Factory (1984)
• Walking on Glass (1985)
• The Bridge (1986)
• Espedair Street (1987) – adapted for BBC radio in 1998 (directed by Dave Batchelor)
• Canal Dreams (1989)
• The Crow Road (1992) – adapted for BBC TV in 1996 (directed by Gavin Millar)
• Complicity (1993) – filmed in 2000 (directed by Gavin Millar), retitled Retribution for its US DVD/video release
• Whit (1995)
• A Song of Stone (1997)
• The Business (1999)
• Dead Air (2002)
• The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007)

Novels as Iain M. Banks

Much of Banks' science fiction deals with a vast interstellar civilisation, the Culture, which he has developed in some detail over the course of six novels and a number of short stories.

• Consider Phlebas (1987)
• The Player of Games (1988)
• Use of Weapons (1990)
• Excession (1996)
• Inversions (1998) (makes covert references to the protagonists being Culture citizens)
• Look to Windward (2000)

His other, non-Culture, science fiction novels are:

• Against a Dark Background (1993)
• Feersum Endjinn (1994)
• The Algebraist (2004)

Short fiction

Banks writes less short fiction but has published one collection, as Iain M. Banks:

• The State of the Art (1989)

It contains both science fiction and less categorizable works of fiction. The eponymous novella deals with the Culture, as do two other of the stories contained in this collection.

Non-fiction

• Raw Spirit (2003) (a travelogue of Scotland and its whisky distilleries)

Introductions

Banks has written a number of introductions for works by other writers including:

• Viriconium (1988) by M. John Harrison, the Unwin edition, ISBN 0-04-440245-7.
• The Adventures of Luther Arkwright: Book 3, Gotterdammerung (1989) by Bryan Talbot from Proutt Publishing, ISBN 0-907865-03-8.
• The Orbit Science Fiction Yearbook Three (1990) edited by David S. Garnett, ISBN 0-07-088833-7.
• The Human Front (2001) by Ken MacLeod, the PS Publishing edition, ISBN 1-902880-30-7 (hbk) and ISBN 1-902880-31-5 (pbk).

Contributions

Banks has contributed to a number of publications, including:

• 041. A poem published in the first New Writing Scotland (1983) ISBN 0-9502629-4-3. The title comes from the old subscriber trunk dialling code for Glasgow.
• The Edinburgh Pub Guide (1989) edited by James Bethell, Polygon Press, ISBN 0-7486-6053-4. A review of The Green Tree.
• Forbidden Love. A photo story that Banks wrote for Viz, but which they would not publish without a cut that he would not agree to. It was written (and photographed) at the 1989 Eastercon. The words were eventually published in issue 4 of The Culture fanzine in 2001.
• Isaac Asimov, in Critical Wave #26. After the death of the author, Banks contributed an appreciation for the fanzine.
• Escape from the Laws of Physics (1993). An article about the science (or lack of it) in science fiction that appeared in the magazine New Scientist #1865, pp38-9.
• Tower Restaurant. A review of the restaurant on the top floor at the Museum of Scotland, published in The Observer.
• Into the 10th Dimension. A review of the M. John Harrison novel Light in The Guardian, 02/11/2002.
• A Sense of Belonging to Scotland (2002), edited by Andy Hall, The Mercat Press, ISBN 1-84183-036-4. Banks contributed a few paragraphs to this book about the "favourite places of Scottish celebrities". His chosen place was the Forth Road Bridge.
• Banks occasionally writes letters to the editor of New Scientist, most recently mocking creationism in November 2005.[1]

Quotes

• "I write because I love it, I enjoy it, I've spent most of my life trying to do it better, and I can make a living from it: beats a day job." [2]
• "The Universe says simply, but with every possible complication, 'Existence' and it neither pressures us nor draws us out, except as we allow. It all boils down to nothing, and where we have the means and will to fix our reference within that flux, then there we are. Let me be part of that outrageous chaos... and I am." [3]
• "In all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and in every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots." (Use of Weapons)

External links

• Official site
• Culture Shock
• The Banksoniain - Fanzine
• Iain Banks FAQ
• The Culture Data Repository
• http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?IainBanks
• Iain M. Banks at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Template:Contemporary writers
• Iain Banks at the Internet Book List
• Internet Movie Database entry
• Interview at Wells Literature Festival 2006
• Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
• Spike Magazine Interview
• Interview
• A Few Notes on the Culture - essay by Banks