Monday, June 10, 2013

Iain Banks was two of our finest writers

The late, great Iain Banks did for sci-fi what George RR Martin did for fantasy, argues Tom Chivers.

Novelist Iain Banks, who also wrote as Iain M Banks, has died aged 59
Novelist Iain Banks, who also wrote as Iain M Banks, has died aged 59 Photo: Chris Watt
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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