The late, great Iain Banks did for sci-fi what George RR Martin did for fantasy, argues Tom Chivers.
In Iain M Banks's finest creation, the universe of the Culture, death is
largely optional. It's an option most people take in the end: they take it after
three or four centuries, after living on a suitably wide variety of planets and
in a suitably wide variety of bodies, and after a life of hedonism appropriate
to the anarcho-communist Age of Plenty galactic civilisation in which they live;
they take it in partial, reversible forms. But they take it. It's an option.
Sadly, and obviously, that's not true for us, nor for Banks, who has died
two months after releasing a statement on his
website, announcing that he had terminal cancer. When Banks
revealed his illness, he did so with his usual eye for technical detail and
stark impact:
"I have cancer. It started in my gall bladder, has infected both lobes of my
liver and probably also my pancreas and some lymph nodes, plus one tumour is
massed around a group of major blood vessels in the same volume, effectively
ruling out any chance of surgery to remove the tumours… The bottom line, now,
I'm afraid, is that as a late stage gall bladder cancer patient, I'm expected to
live for 'several months' and it’s extremely unlikely I'll live beyond a year."
Anything I now write about Banks and his work, both as Iain Banks and Iain M
Banks (for the uninitiated, Iain Banks is the name he publishes his non-genre
novels under; Iain M Banks is for his sci-fi stuff), will ultimately be about
me, I realise. I can't pretend to say What His Work Meant for Literature or for
Sci-Fi, because I don't know what it meant; I can't speak about him as a human
being, beyond what I thought I could detect of his personality through his work
(humane and witty and fascinated by the new, for the record), because I haven't
met him.
With that in mind, I just wanted to talk a bit about why I love his books,
why I think he was one – or two, really – of our finest living writers, and how
his work has had probably more impact on me than any other fiction writer.
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