Science Fiction Book Club
Interview with Paul Kincaid March
2024
Paul Kincaid wrote an award-winning study of Iain M. Banks’s work. His
writing has appeared in a wide range of publications including New Scientist,
Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, New York Review of Science Fiction,
Foundation, Science Fiction Studies, Interzone and Strange Horizons. He is a
former editor of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction
Association.
Dave Hook: Iain M. Banks appeared to write a fairly modest amount of short
fiction compared to novels. I wonder if this was a matter of personal
preference, or more the economics of the industry?
Although
some of it appeared much later, I think all, or nearly all, of his short
fiction was written shortly before he sold his first novel. The same is true of
his poetry, which was published posthumously in a collection with Ken MacLeod.
The poems are dated, and the most recent of them was finished in July 1981,
which would have been when he was working on The Wasp Factory. When he
started writing he began with novels, and most of what he wrote before he got
published was at novel length. But sometime around the late-70s he reached that
frustrating stage when he felt he was getting close to publication without
quite making the breakthrough. This is the period when many of the poems were
written, and also I suspect when the short stories were written. They were
exercises, experiments, a way of trying things out. In science fiction in
particular new writers were (still are) encouraged to begin with short stories
as a way of getting experience, learning on the job as it were. I’m pretty sure
that’s how he saw it. I suspect that once he started on The Wasp Factory,
and definitely once he sold it, he stopped writing short fiction. The pieces he
had written then all appeared in a rush after he began to make a name for
himself, when magazine editors came asking if he had anything. It is
significant that all of his short fiction was first published in a short period
of two or three years, and after the collection The State of the Art
there was no more. It wasn’t an economic question; he wanted to be a science
fiction writer, and in science fiction there was and still is a thriving market
for short stories, so it would have made economic sense to write more of them.
I think he just saw himself primarily as a novelist, that’s what he was
interested in writing so that’s what he concentrated on.
Phil Nichols: Did Banks have a working definition of SF? Did he see his
SF and non-SF works as doing different things, or was it just a difference in
how the books were marketed? (Or something else?)
If
I say yes and no, I’m not trying to evade the question. I think it genuinely is
a mixture of both. For a start, there is no comprehensive, workable definition
of science fiction that everyone agrees with. But everyone who reads sf has
their own individual notion of what it is they are reading, though it is
perfectly possible that no one else would agree with them. Banks was very
familiar with sf. When they were at school, he and Ken MacLeod would both read
the magazine New Worlds, and they paid particular attention to the
reviews by M. John Harrison and John Clute, which suggests a very thorough and
very sophisticated awareness of sf. But any personal notion of what science
fiction was is likely to have been vague and constantly open to change.
Nevertheless, he still felt that science fiction was where he belonged. When I
invited him to his first sf convention in 1986, he told Ken MacLeod afterwards,
“These are our people.” Everything he wrote before The Wasp Factory was
science fiction, and he wrote The Wasp Factory as a “mainstream” novel
as a conscious effort to get published. Even so he was fully aware that there
was a strong science fiction sensibility running through the novel, and the
next two supposedly mainstream novels, Walking on Glass and The
Bridge both had overt science fictional elements. At this stage, therefore,
I don’t think he was making any distinction between the sf and the non-sf.
When,
after that first convention I’d invited him to, he decided to pick up one of
his overtly science fictional novels and see if he could get it published, it
was the publishers who asked for it to appear under a pseudonym. They had never
published science fiction before, they were nervous of it, and they didn’t want
to damage the brand of their best-selling new author. As it happens, Banks’s
family had already been giving him grief for dropping the Menzies from his name
on those first books, and he had already been contemplating signing all of his
future books as by Iain M. Banks. After some back and forth, therefore, (at one
point he devised a pen name that combined his two favourite brands of whisky,
Johnny Walker and MacAllan), he decided simply to sign Consider Phlebas
as by Iain M. Banks. I think that the fact that the only difference from his
earlier books was the letter “M” is meant to signify that it really isn’t that
different at all.
Curiously
it was only after he had, as it were, come out of the closet to declare himself
a science fiction writer that he felt empowered to write straight mainstream
fiction: Espedair Street, The Crow Road, Complicity, etc. Though many of
the non-M novels were still overtly science fiction (Canal Dreams, A Song of
Stone, The Business), just not the same sort of science fiction as the M
signified. So, short answer after all that, I don’t think he saw the books as
doing anything different, it was just the story he chose to tell.
Paul J Goodison: Where do you think the themes of the Culture would have
eventually taken Iain, had he lived?
This
is a tricky one, largely because I think the Culture had run its course and
Banks knew it. Based on a very close reading of the novels, and on interviews
he gave after, I am pretty sure that he intended Look to Windward to be
the last Culture novel. After Look to Windward there was an eight-year
gap before the next Culture novel appeared. And the last three Culture novels
that did appear, Matter, Surface Detail, and The Hydrogen Sonata,
written I suspect in response to public demand, did not take the sequence in a
new direction the way all the previous Culture novels had done. Rather, each
one was a variation on a theme that had already appeared in the background of
earlier Culture novels. What I am saying is that I think he had grown tired of
the Culture and wanted to do other things. At the same time he was conscious of
how popular the sequence was, and that he had a large audience who didn’t want
him to let it go. So who knows what might have come next.
But
this is just my interpretation, I could be wrong. There was a rumour that when
Banks knew he was dying he set out to produce an outline for a new Culture
novel that Ken MacLeod could complete after his death. But in the end he died
much sooner than had been anticipated, and there was not enough written for
MacLeod to work with. What shape that novel might have taken we just don’t
know.
Philip Cowan: Do you think The Culture reflects a sort of Western
liberal capitalism, or a fully realised socialism, or neither? In short, do you
think he was a political writer, albeit on a grand scale, or not?
Definitely
not capitalism. The only capitalist futures he presents, in Against a Dark
Background, for instance, are proof of how much he despised such a culture.
But
neither is it the communism that his friend Ken MacLeod might have portrayed.
The
key to the Culture is that there is no want, no shortage. As a result everyone
has access to everything they need to live the sort of life they want to lead.
Even to the extent of living an incredibly long lifespan. If there is no lack
of energy, food, amenities, if everyone is free to become what they want,
whether it is changing sex multiple times, or turning yourself into a bush as
one character has done in Matter, then the situation is ripe for
complete individualism. You cannot take away from others because they
automatically have as much as you do; you cannot even kill them because their
personalities can be uploaded, their bodies can be revived. So living your own
life the way you want will never impinge on others doing exactly the same.
It
is idealist, of course, but it signifies complete equality. And this is
definitely a political position. But then, everything he wrote, with or without
the M, was political. The post-scarcity universe of the Culture is only one
extreme of the political ideas and aspirations that filled every one of his
works. You cannot read The Bridge without absorbing his ideas on
Scottish nationalism (he was for it); and as I said, you cannot read Against
a Dark Background without absorbing his ideas on capitalism (he was against
it).
Kevin Kuhn: Was Banks a fan of Fleming’s Bond books. Many of Banks’s
books give me a strong feeling of Bond influences. Nothing overt, but I view
many of his Culture books as James Bond meets Star Trek.
I’m
pretty sure he would have read some Bond. Growing up in the 1960s, particularly
after the first film came out in 1962, the paperbacks were ubiquitous. I don’t
imagine there was a schoolboy in the country during the 60s who didn’t read at
least one. But I’m damned sure that Banks would have hated the chauvinism, the
misogyny, and the casual violence. And I’m certain that Bond wasn’t an
influence. His earliest attempts to write novels, works that never have been
published like The Hungarian Lift-Jet and The Tashkent Rambler
were inspired far more by the action-adventure stories of Alistair Maclean than
by anything written by Fleming.
Similarly,
if Star Trek was any sort of an influence, he would have been reacting
against it rather than following the pattern. Star Trek is a very
hierarchical world, all ranks and officers, people giving orders and red shirts
getting killed. Banks was always careful in the Culture to have no ranks, no
hierarchy, no officers.
Roy Upton: Given the way the world is in 2024, (wars, trillion dollar companies,
austerity Mk 2), what kind of Culture or other SF novels would Banks be writing
today?
Well,
as I said in an earlier answer, I’m not sure he would have been addressing it
in a Culture novel. But the one thing you can be sure of is that he would have
been addressing the issue, and he would have been apoplectic in his opposition
to everything that is going on in the world today. He saw wars, austerity, and corporations
enriching themselves at the expense of the very people who work for them, all
as expressions of our ultimate failure as human beings. And his work would have
been full of bitter comedy about just such failure. If we engage in war, we are
not civilized. If our own citizens cannot afford to feed their children or heat
their homes, then our society is an abject failure. And if individuals continue
to enrich themselves while everyone around them gets poorer, then it is hard to
see how we can consider them rational human beings. All of that would have been
in his work, because it already was.
Damo Mac Choiligh: How Scottish do you think Banks’ work is? In other words,
how much is it influenced by his own cultural background? Is that influence
background colour or something deeper?
Oh
very Scottish, very important, very deep. Two of the most important influences
on his work were the Scottish novelist and playwright Alasdair Gray (author of Lanark
and Poor Things) and the Scottish psychologist R.D. Laing (author of The
Divided Self). When I was researching my book on Banks I came across a lot
of Scottish critics, people like Gavin Miller, who very carefully and
convincingly identified key characteristics of Scottish writing. One of the
most obvious, for instance, which is central to Laing’s work, is the idea of a
divided self and you find that in Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner,
in Stevenson’s Jeckyll and Hyde, in Irving Welsh’s Maribou Stork
Nightmares, in just about everything by Gray; and Banks is slap bang in the
middle of all that. There are other things, a sense of rootlessness, the
importance of place, and so on. You cannot fail to identify all of the
characteristics of Scottish writing in the work of Banks. When I was working on
my book I took to talking about something I called the Scottish Fantastic,
which is the way certain themes and approaches to the fantastic link together
and overlap in the work of Gray and Banks and Welsh and Alan Warner and others.
If Banks had not been Scottish, he would not have been the writer he was.
Alan Kovski: How seriously did Banks take his work? I ask because he
wrote novels that sort of mash together space opera, thriller/mystery elements,
and some sociological and psychological elements. I have trouble determining
whether I should take him seriously. When I read Use of Weapons, I did
not get a good impression, but maybe I was failing to appreciate something.
Very
seriously; or to be precise he took his writing very seriously even if the
books he wrote were not meant to be entirely serious. Now that doesn’t mean he
struggled to write, far from it, he had a facility with writing. But he also
paid very close attention to everything he was doing, the structure, the way
different characters would interact in different circumstances, and so on. The
way that different plot elements mesh together that you talk about is actually
a sign of how seriously he took his work. You cannot bring different elements
together in that way without taking great care. And he had studied sociology
and psychology, and he brought that awareness to the care he invested in making
sure that his characters behaved realistically whatever the situation they
found themselves in.
Use of Weapons which you mention is actually a good example of the care he
took in structuring his work. It is the first of the Culture novels he wrote,
though it was the fourth one published, and he struggled with the structure. He
had what he believed was a good story, but no matter how he tried to put it
together he always ended up with the climax in the middle of the novel. Then
his friend Ken MacLeod suggested that he try telling one part of the story
backwards. That is what he did. The chapters numbered One, Two, Three … go forwards
in time; the alternating chapters numbered XIII, XII, XI … go backwards in
time. The two threads converge at what is the mid-point of the story, but is
actually the end point of the novel. That is not an easy structure to write, it
requires a lot of skill and serious attention to detail, and it is a measure of
the achievement that it is reckoned by many to be his best novel. I certainly
don’t think that someone who wasn’t serious about his work could have written
that novel, or the others with similarly experimental structures like The
Bridge, Feersum Endjinn, or Transition.
Hubert Siwecki: Was Banks planning to write a novel in which he would
show the origins of Culture as a symbiosis of various forms of intelligent
entities?
He
might have been, but somehow I doubt it. As I said earlier, I’m pretty sure
that he intended Look to Windward to be the last Culture novel, it
closes off the sequence. But the three subsequent Culture novels simply pick up
on and expand on ideas that had been mentioned casually in the background of
earlier books. Now he had already written a lot about the early history of the
Culture, both in the Notes on the Culture, which you’ll find online, and in the
background of several of the other Culture novels. By his reckoning, I suspect
he had said enough on the topic, but there is always the chance he might have
turned specifically to this subject if he had continued to write Culture novels
as variations on earlier themes.
Toracube Andy M: What’s his best book?
Trick
question; or at least, tricky question. I suppose it all depends on what you
mean by “best”. As I said above, technically, in terms of structure, then Use
of Weapons is probably the best novel, although The Bridge runs it
close. In terms of character development, I would say The Crow Road is
probably best. In terms of plotting, it’s difficult but I’d probably say Complicity
or perhaps The Wasp Factory. If you just want to know my favourite
novels, then for the moment it is The Bridge and Look to Windward,
but ask me again tomorrow and I’ll probably say something completely different.
Bill Rogers: Paul, where did Iain get his inspirations for the
Culture, specifically which political thinkers and/or real-life
organisations/institutions? Also, on a thematic note, what inspired him to add
at least some darker aspects to his works, even the Culture novels? Thanks!
Look
around you! The situations that inspired his anger, and that therefore fed into
his fiction, are all around us, and getting more blatant as the days go by. I
think a lot of what drove him was how he felt when he read the daily papers. Is
it not obvious that if he was writing now he would be writing about climate
change?
He
never really made a point of naming specific political thinkers. Marx crops up
a few times in interviews, and Margaret Thatcher is named regularly as a
representative of everything he abhorred. But generally radical left wing ideas
and feminism were the political positions that he felt were closest to his own.
That and the need for Scottish independence, of course. The people he was more
likely to cite were psychologists, people like R.D. Laing (who I’ve named
already) and Erving Goffman. I think this is because he was much more
interested in understanding what made people tick, why they acted the way they
did, rather than abstract political theories.
As
for the darker aspects, as you call them, they were always there. Can you
honestly read The Wasp Factory and not see the darkness throughout the
book. It is part and parcel of how he saw the world. He treated it with humour,
practically everything he wrote has some elements of black comedy about it, but
he saw the world as a dark place.
Lucius Nelligan Sorrentino: I’m only on my 4th Banks novel, so I’m rather a
neophyte. But I taught a SF elective for 12 years and don’t know of anything in
the history of the genre that even approaches the Culture. Star Trek,
for all its post capitalist, idealised utopian society is still pretty much run
by humans and confined to star ships that still operate via a chain-of-command.
I know that Banks has written about the Culture, but how did he envision
it as a society vis a vis the ‘average’ man and woman? Sure, they can literally
be all they can or want to be, but what do they do with themselves? Is there a
need for teachers and architects, engineers and doctors when the Mind and its
drones can do all of that more efficiently?
So, how did Banks imagine everyday Culture society on its worlds and
habitats?
And
that, ladies and gentlemen, takes us right into the heart of the major question
about the Culture. A question that Banks was well aware of, but failed to
answer. How utopian is the utopia of the Culture?
I
will attempt to answer this, but with no guarantee how successful I will be. It
is possibly unanswerable.
Let
us start by going right back to the beginning. He invented the Culture for the
novel that became Use of Weapons. He wrote the first draft in 1973,
while he was still at university. He was 19, it’s a young man’s book, and the
utopian society he envisaged for that book is a young man’s dream: everybody
has everything they could possibly want, and nobody has to work. Even though
the novel would not be completed and published until 1990, it still retained
much of that youthful idealism.
Having
invented the society for that novel, he returned to it again and again. As we
know, the Culture featured in 9 novels, a novella, and a couple of short
stories, but in fact in most of these the Culture is little more than
tangential to the focus. In most of them our attention is on societies outside
of, or even actively hostile to, the Culture. Only two of the novels, Player
of Games and Look to Windward, spend a serious amount of time dealing
with ordinary people within the Culture itself. What we know about everyday life
within the Culture, therefore, is fragmentary, intermittent, partial, and the
overwhelming impression we get is that youthful dream of getting everything you
could want and never having to do anything for it.
One
of the things you notice when you look closely is that an awful lot of the
people we glimpse within the Culture spend their time playing games, because
for Banks, a game player himself, that was how you passed the time when there
was nothing else you had to do. Whenever we glimpse people on board the ships,
they are essentially passengers because the Minds do everything that is needed,
and do it better and faster than any human could manage. As you suggest, there
are no teachers, architects, engineers, or doctors, because there is no need
for them. There are remarkably few artists either; in the ultimate leisure
society wouldn’t there be more musicians or painters or writers? Though there
are a lot of people indulging in dangerous sports, though they are hardly that
dangerous when you can be reconstituted if anything happens.
Over
time, Banks himself would begin to question what this said about his utopia. Or
more precisely he would begin to ask whether the Culture actually was a utopia.
He didn’t arrive at an answer. Whether he would have done so if he had lived
and continued to write Culture novels I don’t know, but I rather doubt it.
What
is at issue here, of course, is much broader than just the Culture. It takes us
back to some of the earliest critical writing about utopias. If everything is
good and easy and straightforward, what is the value of life in a utopia?
Wouldn’t it be boring? I think Banks instinctively realised this right from the
start, which is why so many people end up in Special Circumstances. And even in
Consider Phlebas, the first published novel, the notion that the Culture
is a utopia is being questioned, for instance when Fal ‘Ngeestra reflects that
the Culture is “killing the immortal, changing to preserve, warring for peace.”
Right the way through the sequence, therefore, there are contradictions in the
way the Culture is presented, and it comes out particularly in the later novels
when the issue of subliming becomes ever more dominant. The Culture is
supposedly an ideal candidate to sublime, but it consistently resists the idea,
partly, I think, because it recognises that it is not as utopian as it pretends
to be, and partly because it can’t imagine how to live in a state of perfection.
And
no, I know that doesn’t answer the question, not fully. But it’s the best I can
do.
Arnold Symmonds: Each of The Culture novels seems to focus on a different
theme or aspect of The Culture, and often from a different perspective,
including societies which were hostile to it, or insufficiently advanced to
even recognise what it was, as if to give us the clearest possible picture of
it from as many vantages as possible. Did Iain suggest what focuses or
perspectives future Culture novels might encompass?
No,
he didn’t. And as I’ve indicated, I suspect if he’d had his way there wouldn’t
have been more Culture novels. Which leads us to …
Noel Wood: I think I read that he was attempting to finish another culture novel
before his death. He obviously did not finish. I know it’s a bit selfish but
any chance that it was close enough that his family would consider another
author finishing it?
The
way Banks worked, he would start thinking of an idea for his next novel towards
the end of the year. Over Christmas and the New Year he would put together an
outline, and then have the novel written by Spring and take the rest of the
year off. When he received his diagnosis he tried to accelerate this process,
hoping to at least get the outline done so Ken MacLeod could write the novel.
But he died more quickly than anticipated, and the outline was barely begun.
There was literally nothing for MacLeod to work with. So, no, there can be no
further novels.
Andrzej Wieckowski: Sadly I’ve not read any of his non-SF works yet, but do
you think any of his SF themes are reflected in them either consciously or
subconsciously?
Yes.
As I’ve said, Banks saw no thematic difference between his science fiction and
his mainstream fiction. The only difference represented by the presence or
absence of the M is in terms of setting and the nature of the plot. And even
that isn’t absolute: of the non-M novels, Walking on Glass, The Bridge, Canal
Dreams, A Song of Stone, The Business, and Transition are wholly or
partly science fiction.
Whether
the novels are classified as science fiction or not, it is the same sensibility
behind them, the same approach to issues, the same humour, the same style, and
the same interests.
Damo Mac Choiligh: What is your overall view of Banks’s attitude to
religion? A lot of his Culture novels and his other SF works are quite scathing
about religion, especially scathing on instances of the triumph of faith over
reason, yet in other works, notably Whit, he acknowledges the value of communities
that grow around faiths. Did he even have a consistent view on this? And do you
think his views on religion were influenced by any experience of fundamentalist
Christianity and sectarianism growing up in Scotland?
Ken
MacLeod grew up as part of a very strict protestant sect, so Banks would have
known what that was like from a young age. But so far as I can make out his own
family were non-religious if not actually atheist, and he himself was pretty
well always an atheist. All of his books celebrate reason over faith. Whit does
recognise the value of community, but then all of his books do. But even in Whit
the way that the community is based on religious faith is ridiculed. I don’t
think, for Banks, that religion had any intrinsic value.
Damo Mac Choiligh: Did Banks ever get a new British passport? Did he ever
consider taking out citizenship in another country? Or was he waiting for an
independent Scotland?
He
must have done, if only because when he was told he was dying he took Adele on
a honeymoon to Venice and Paris. Though I have a feeling that he turned up at
sf conventions overseas not too long after destroying the passport. So it was a
dramatic gesture, but not one with long-term consequences.
Did
he ever consider becoming a citizen of another country? No. Scotland was always
his home, spiritually if not always physically, and I don’t imagine he ever
contemplated leaving. Though I am also sure that he always believed he would
see Scotland as an independent country before he died.
Damo Mac Choiligh: Banks often said that The Bridge was his most
complex work and advised new readers not to start with it. I don’t want to
contradict the Great Man but I disagree, it may have subtleties that escape the
new reader at first pass, but it’s still a great yarn. What would you recommend
as the first Banks novel for a neophyte, if they wanted a SF book, something
not SF but still weird, or if they wanted something more mainstream?
Well
the first Banks novel I ever read was The Wasp Factory, and I reckon
that would be an excellent place to start, it is an almost perfect introduction
to the weirdness of his imagination and the blackness of his humour. If you get
The Wasp Factory, then you are going to get everything else he wrote.
But I also disagree with him over The Bridge, it is such a rich and
rewarding novel that I can’t help thinking any reader would get something from
it. If you want to start on his science fiction, then I suppose the obvious
place is Consider Phlebas. It is far from being the best of his science
fiction, but it probably serves as the most accessible introduction to the
Culture. And for a straightforward mainstream novel, nothing can beat The
Crow Road.
Damo Mac Choiligh: My first experience of any social media was leaving a
comment of condolences on Banks’s website when I heard about his diagnosis of
pancreatic cancer. Banks seemed in public to accept this death sentence with
stoicism and humour. Yet he must have been frustrated at the work he would not do,
the novels he would not write and just plain angry at a life cut short. This
comes across to a certain extent in The Quarry, his last novel. Did he
show any of these emotions around his untimely death in any other way or did
his retreat to privacy conceal it all from us?
You
are asking for something that none of us can ever know. I cannot imagine anyone
receiving a sentence of death and not experiencing some inner turmoil. But
exactly what people feel inside at that moment is something no one can share.
On the outside, Banks seemed to be calm and collected at all times. On the day
he received his prognosis, he had taken his laptop to the hospital with him,
and immediately after receiving the news he sat down and wrote a key scene in The
Quarry. He then asked his partner, Adele, to do him “the honour of becoming
my widow.” And then, after a short honeymoon in Venice and Paris, he embarked
on a tour of Britain visiting old friends and acquaintances. All of that speaks
to me of an extraordinary equanimity. He had a novel to finish, which he did,
and though the publishers tried to rush it into print it still appeared a few
days after his death. He had friends to see, which he did. I wasn’t able to
make any of those get-togethers, but from what I hear they were typical jovial,
boozy affairs. He tried to plan a new Culture novel, but ran out of time. I
don’t think he was frustrated, I don’t think he was concealing any great dread.
But we can never really know.
Connie Marshall Thompson: Did Banks model his protagonists and antagonists
after real individuals whether historical or present-day?
Like
any novelist I suspect, if you look closely enough, you will find shadows of
his friends and acquaintances, and of public figures, cropping up in his books.
And I have heard rumours that there are real rock stars who can be identified
in Espedair Street. But no, I don’t think he was consciously putting
real people into his books.
Mel Anderson: I still miss the excitement of getting a new Banks book.
His imagination, humour and optimism were always inspiring. Do you think he
retained his optimism towards the end? I dread to think what he would have
thought of the current political situation.
As
I said above, he seems to have retained his humour and his equanimity, right to
the end. And I’m sure I know what he would have thought of the current
political situation, and it would have been caustic.
Marco Cimarosti: I’ve always been curious about the friendship between
Banks and Ken MacLeod. How similar were their political views? I know that
MacLeod was a left-wing militant in his youth: did he share this experience
with Banks? Were they ever schoolmates or colleagues in the same workplace?
And, more to the point: how much did they share with each other about their
creative work, and how much did they influence each other’s stories and themes?
Banks
was born in Dunfermline and brought up in North Queensferry, just across the
Forth from Edinburgh and within sight of the Forth Rail Bridge. When he was
nine years old his father’s work, for the Admiralty, took the family across
Scotland to Gourock on the Clyde. At 17 he transferred to Greenock High School,
and it was there that he met Ken MacLeod, and they remained close friends for
the rest of Banks’s life. According to Banks, they met when MacLeod, who edited
the school magazine, approached him for a contribution, which was eventually
rejected because it contained mild swearing. According to MacLeod, they met
when MacLeod was reading Banks’s copy of Private Eye over his shoulder.
However they met, they shared an interest in science fiction. They would read
the same books, and pounce on each issue of New Worlds Quarterly as it
appeared. In particular they read it for the reviews by M. John Harrison and
John Clute, who railed against the conservative character of most contemporary
sf, in particular space opera which Harrison described as “clammy witlessness”.
This shaped their shared view of what science fiction should be, and they were
both determined to write sf that reclaimed the moral high ground of space opera
for the left.
MacLeod
read everything Banks wrote, usually written in tiny handwriting in old
exercise books. In time they came to rely on each other’s input into the things
they were writing. It was MacLeod, after all, who suggested the necessary
structural changes that made Use of Weapons work. They went to different
universities but remained in fairly constant touch. Eventually, both would work
for the same firm of solicitors in London, and it was there that Banks began
writing The Wasp Factory.
Banks
had been submitting his manuscripts to publishers even when he was still at
school. Although MacLeod was writing, he didn’t submit his work. It was only
after Banks had not only been published, but had got his science fiction into
print, that he managed to persuade MacLeod to start submitting his own novels.
So both depended on the creative input and the encouragement of the other.
As
for their political views, both were on the left, but MacLeod was further to
the left than Banks.
John Grayshaw: Banks said that he’d been trying to get his science
fiction published for a decade before writing The Wasp Factory. Can you
tell us more about his struggles and how he found success?
A
decade is probably an underestimate. He also said that he had written close to
a million words before The Wasp Factory got into print, and that’s
probably true.
Banks
started writing when he was about 11, and by the time he was 14 he had finished
a thriller called Top of Poseidon. When he counted the words, though, he
realised it was far too short to be a novel, so he reused the plot for another
novel called The Hungarian Lift-Jet which he finished around 1969. Next
(around the time he met Ken MacLeod) he wrote a massive novel called The
Tashkent Rambler which was meant to be a satire but was mainly an excuse to
fit in as many bad puns as he could come up with. He was already confident
enough that he submitted the novel to various publishers, with predictable
results.
After
that, everything he completed he submitted. He next began a science fiction
novel (probably Against a Dark Background, though this isn’t certain)
but abandoned it part way through. Starting at university, he next wrote the
first version of Use of Weapons but couldn’t get the structure to work.
After this he completed Against a Dark Background. There seems to have
been a slight break in production here, presumably as he started work for
British Steel, initially as a “Non-Destructive Testing Technician (Trainee)” at
Nigg north of Inverness, the landscape that would reappear as the setting for The
Wasp Factory. In 1977 he went to stay with Ken MacLeod in London for a
while, and there wrote State of the Art. The next year he was hired to
drive someone’s car from Washington DC to Los Angeles, and along the way
witnessed the burning of the median strip which became the inspiration for Player
of Games. This apparently came close to being accepted for publication, but
when it missed out he decided to try his hand at something that wasn’t science
fiction to give himself a better chance of being published, so he started
writing The Wasp Factory. He has said, possibly somewhat ingenuously,
that the reason this novel sold is that it was the first time he wrote a second
draft. Nevertheless it didn’t have an easy road to publication, being rejected
by at least half a dozen publishers before Macmillan decided to take a chance
on it. In the meantime, while that was doing the rounds, he wrote Consider
Phlebas.
Once
Macmillan agreed to buy The Wasp Factory he abandoned Consider
Phlebas and wrote, first, Walking on Glass, then a 180,000-word
novel called Q which Macmillan rejected, and then he cannibalised bits
of Q to form The Bridge.
Around
the time that Walking on Glass came out, acting on behalf of a science
fiction convention called Mexicon, I invited Banks to be our guest of honour at
the convention. As a result of that experience, he completed Consider
Phlebas and persuaded Macmillan to take the book even though they had never
published science fiction before. And the rest, as they say, is history.
John Grayshaw: What was it about the Culture Universe that Banks found
so interesting that he kept returning to it?
I
suppose the simple answer is the scale. Any story he wanted could find a home
in that universe, and he had at the base of it an ideal society that he found
attractive if, as time went on, steadily more questionable.
Did Banks see transcendence such as the Gzilt deciding to Sublime in The
Hydrogen Sonata as an inevitable part of evolution or just a possible path
for intelligent beings?
I
think “inevitable” may be the wrong word; it’s an option that the Culture
consistently refuses to take. I imagine that in the universe that Banks had
created there must surely be any number of elder races, so what had happened to
them? The choice seems to be to have them die out, or have them go on to some
new form of existence. That obviously offers the more interesting options, so
that’s what he chose.
John Grayshaw: Did Banks believe that a post-scarcity society was
achievable in reality?
I
doubt it, except when you have the full resources of the universe to call upon.
But there’s no reason we shouldn’t all aim for such a society.
John Grayshaw: What are some of Banks’ works that you feel should be
better known than they are?
Curiously,
for an author who has been dead for more than a decade, all of his books seem
to be still in print, all seem to be successful, and there is a very active fan
following. I don’t think anything of his is under-appreciated right now.
John Grayshaw: In the Culture series, do the Minds need humans? And what
is the nature of the relationship? Is it ultimately symbiotic, parasitic,
mutualistic, or something else?
It
is tempting in response to a question like this to come back with a snappy
retort such as: do we need our pets, or, do we need our computers. But that
would be seriously to misread the situation.
Humans
and Minds see each other as independent intelligent entities. We should
remember that the Culture is a society formed by several different races, most
humanoid but not all. In order to exist as the Culture they need to see each
other as equals, regardless of whether they look different, have different
abilities, or what have you. And by the same light, Minds and humans are two of
the entities that, in co-operation, make up the Culture. They are equal members
of the Culture, and that equality is not affected by whether one or the other
has superior abilities. Minds do not see humans as inferior beings, so the
issue of whether they need them or not never arises. In the same way, humans do
not see Minds as supercomputers, as tools, as machines, so the issue of use or
need does not arise.
The
relationship is simply that of two sets of beings who each have their own particular
abilities, their own particular part to play. This vision of how we interact
with the other is surely one of the key messages of Banks’s work.
John Grayshaw: Who are some of the science fiction writers he had
correspondence/friendships with?
Banks
was incredibly convivial in person, he had the ability to make lasting
friendships very quickly. His memoir/travelogue, Raw Spirit, is full of
people he had known since he was at school, and that is not just people like
Ken MacLeod who had any connection with the sf community. Now British science
fiction, at least during the time he was active, is a relatively small, close
community. Since he would have met practically every sf writer in the country
active at the time (with odd possible exceptions such as J.G. Ballard who, by
this time, kept himself apart from the community), it is probably easiest to
say they were all his friends.
As
for correspondence, he was of the generation that corresponded mostly by email,
and that is not exactly the most durable of media. So we’re not likely to know
who he was in regular touch with.
John Grayshaw: Are there stories about Banks at conventions or otherwise
corresponding/meeting with fans?
Once
I introduced Banks to conventions by inviting him to Mexicon, he became an habitué,
turning up at just about every convention going. Now there are well known
writers who turn up at fan gatherings like that but keep to themselves or
mingle only with fellow writers or publishers. I know, I’ve met a few of them.
But Banks was never like that. Most of the time you could find him simply by
looking for the biggest crowd at the bar, and he’d usually be in the middle of
it, drinking and joking. I remember once sitting in a circle with Iain, and one
of my friends suddenly stood up and declared: “Iain, you’re my favourite writer
and I’ve never read a word you’ve written.” Then he raced off to the bookroom
to buy a book, any book. There are authors who would have been offended by
that, but Iain thought it was wonderful.
One
of the stories about him that followed him throughout his career is actually,
in part at least, my fault. At the 1987 Worldcon in Brighton he was at a very
crowded room party. He was out on a balcony talking to people and realised that
the crush was so great that he wouldn’t be able to get back inside to refill
his glass. So he simply climbed over to the next balcony and got in that way.
Now at the time my wife was editing the convention newsletter, and I was
helping out by typing up the next edition. Someone came in to tell us, among
other things, about Iain climbing across the balconies. I misheard, and because
I had a bit of space to fill I put in a jokey little snippet about his scaling
the outside of the hotel. By the next morning, the story had grown. I ran into
people who swore they had seen it happen, and then others who said how the
police had been called because he had ended up going into a stranger’s bedroom.
By the end of the convention I was running into people who told me how they had
seen Iain being led away by police. Years later the story was still going
strong, in part, I suspect, because that was exactly what you could imagine
Iain doing.
John Grayshaw: What is Banks’ legacy? Why was his work significant at
the time? And why is it still important today?
Why
was his work significant? Simply because he was a very good writer. His work
was engaging, funny and relevant all at the same time. There was a clear moral
imperative behind what he wrote that spoke to his readers. When you read his
books you were laughing and nodding at the same time. And his work was so
varied, from the family saga of The Crow Road to extraordinary outer
space adventures like Excession with hardly any human characters. He
could write a straightforward crime story like Complicity or a
contemporary drama like Stonemouth one minute, and the next produce
dazzling experimental fictions like Feersum Endjinn or Transition.
So in a sense he was a writer for everyone.
Why
is it important today? For pretty much the same reason. No one has really
stepped in to fill the space that Banks created, no one moves as fluently
between science fiction and the mainstream. There is a sense when you read his
books that here is someone saying something important and entertaining at the
same time, and it is still relevant and entertaining today. When I wrote my
book ten years ago I guessed his work would last, but I couldn’t be sure. Ten
years later it seems as if it is lasting, and due to last for a good while to
come.
And
what is his legacy? Most obviously, it is the books that are still being read and
enjoyed today. But more than that, within science fiction he changed the genre.
For instance, if you read a space opera today that doesn’t incorporate some of
the bravura invention of Banks, it feels staid and old fashioned. You have got
to be aware of what Banks did if you are going to write space opera that feels
relevant and alive. And it is the fact that he moved so fluently between genres.
Who today would say that a science fiction writer cannot write a serious
mainstream novel, or that a mainstream novelist cannot write serious and
innovative science fiction?
You
look at most contemporary science fiction writers, particularly in Britain, and
they are carrying the legacy of Iain Banks forward.
