Iain Banks

Iain Menzies Banks (16 February 1954 - 9 June 2013 in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland) was a British philologist, philosopher, psychologist and science fiction writer.

Biography

Banks was born in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, on February 16, 1954. His mother was a professional figure skater and his father was an Admiralty officer. He was an only child. Banks lived in North Queensferry until he was nine years old, near the Rosyth Naval Dockyards where his father worked, until the Banks family moved to Gourock for work reasons due to the demands of his father's job. Around this time he was introduced to science fiction through the Kemlo saga of books by Reginald Alec Martin.

Banks was born in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, on February 16, 1954. His mother was a professional figure skater and his father was an Admiralty officer. He was an only child. Banks lived in North Queensferry until he was nine years old, near the Rosyth Naval Dockyards where his father worked, until the Banks family moved to Gourock for work reasons due to the demands of his father's job. Around this time he was introduced to science fiction through the Kemlo saga of books by Reginald Alec Martin.

Married in 1992 and lived in North Queensferry, Scotland.

In April 2013, the author announced on his official website that he was suffering from cancer, a disease that ended his life on June 9 of the same year, managing to finish his latest novel against the clock: The Quarry (The quarry).

Career

Writer

She completed her first novel The Hungarian Lift-Jet at age 16 and her second novel TTR (also known as The Tashkent Rambler) during his first year at the University of Stirling in 1972. His first published novel was The Wasp Factory, which was published in 1984 when he was thirty years old.

His second novel, Walking on Glass, was published in 1985. The Bridge in 1986, and Espedair Street in 1987. The latter it was adapted by the BBC as a radio series. His book Think of Flebas was published in 1987 and was the first of several novels in his acclaimed fictional universe "The Culture".

The Crow Road, published in 1992, was adapted as a BBC television series. It is a novel whose approaches fall within science fiction (place of the human being in the universe, the natural order...) but that transcends the genre, being difficult to frame it, due to its writing, implications and resources.

Banks continued to write mainstream science fiction and novels, with his latest novel, The Quarry, published in June 2013, on month of his death.

Banks has cited Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison, and Dan Simmons as his literary influences on the genre.

Theater and music

Banks was in the stage production The Curse of Iain Banks, written by Maxton Walker and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe festival in 1999. Banks frequently collaborated with the composer of the soundtrack for the Gary Lloyd's work, including a collection of songs they co-composed in tribute to the fictional band 'Frozen Gold'; from Banks's novel Espedair Street. Lloyd also composed the score for a spoken word and musical production of Banks's novel, The Bridge which was written by Banks himself. Lloyd recorded Banks for inclusion in the play as a disembodied voice appearing as himself in one of the cast members' dreams.

Politics

Like his friend Ken MacLeod (another Scottish science fiction writer) he showed stories steeped in left-wing ideology. A well-known supporter of Scottish independence, he has campaigned with the Scottish Socialist Party.

In late 2004 Banks was a leading member of a British group of politicians and public figures that campaigned to charge then Prime Minister Tony Blair with trespass following the 2003 Invasion of Iraq., tore up his passport and sent it to 10 Downing Street.

He was an honorary member of the National Secular Society, a British society that promotes secularism.

Miscellaneous

• He had to write a novel in about three months, working without stopping; then he took nine months off. In his free time he has taken flight lessons and recorded his own rock music.
• He alternated science-fiction writing and fiction novel.
• Many of your science-fiction books are based on the universe of Culture (a powerful civilization of several species living in our galaxy). The novel The State of the Art records the arrival of Culture to planet Earth.

Work

Like Iain Banks

• The wasp factory (The Wasp Factory, 1984)
• Steps on glass (Walking on Glass, 1985)
• The bridge (The Bridge, 1986)
• Espedair Street (1987); adapted for radio (BBC) in 1998 (dir. Dave Batchelor)
• Canal Dreams (1989)
• The Crow Road (1992); adapted for television (BBC) in 1996 (dir. Gavin Millar)
• Completion (1993); filmed in 2000Complicity, dir. Gavin Millar); the video edition is entitled Retribution
• Whit (1995)
• A stone song (1997)
• The Business (1999)
• Dead Air (2002)
• The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007)
• Transition (2009)
• Stonemouth (2012)
• The Quarry (June 2013)

Like Iain M. Banks

Series Culture

In many of his science fiction works he deals with a large pan-galactic organization called The Culture, described in great detail:

• Pensad in Flebas (Consider Phlebas, 1987)
• The player (The Player of Games, 1988)
• Use of arms (Use of Weapons, 1990)
• Last Generation (The State of the Art, 1991) 2 stories try Culture)
• Excession (Excession, 1996)
• Investment (Inversions, 1998) (It makes implicit reference to the fact that the protagonists are citizens of Culture)
• To the wind (Look to Windward, 2000)
• Matter (Matter, 2008)
• Surface Detail (2010)
• The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)

Other novels

Other science fiction novels that do not belong to The Culture series are:

• Against the darkness (Against a Dark Background, 1993)
• The Artefakto (Feersum Endjinn, 1994)
• The algebrist (The Algebraist, 2004)
• Transition (2009)

Science Fiction Stories

Banks wrote few short stories, but has published a compilation book under the name Iain M. Banks:

• Last Generation (1991) contains both science fiction and less cataloguing works of fiction.

Nonfiction

• Raw Spirit (2003) is a travel documentary for Scotland and its whiskey distilleries.

Banks was considered in many circles as the initiator, with his The Culture series, of the so-called new British space opera.

As with Ken MacLeod (another technical and social science fiction writer, also Scottish and a friend of Banks), he showed a keen interest in the history of the left in his writing. In his works, he argued that an economy of abundance makes anarchy viable (not to say inevitable).

Additional bibliography

• Kincaid, Paul (2017). Iain M. Banks. Modern Masters of Science Fiction (in English). University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-04101-3.