One of my favourite authors died yesterday. Iain Banks, or Iain M Banks (the name he used for his sci-fi books) took his leave of us too soon, too young, with too many great ideas left unwritten.
He had a way of examining human issues by constructing stories like spectrum analyzers. Plots built to flay characters and force them to give up some very poignant truths. He once said that the genre of sci-fi examined how humans cope with change. And his particular brand of sci-fi often took humans to the outer reaches of change and beyond, to where they stopped being human as we know it and became something new.
I often think that writers either have your number or they don’t. At a certain level of proficiency, it becomes a matter of whether their voice has a timbre that reverberates for you or not. There are a lot of writers I respect, but few I love. Banks just always had the right frequency for me. Always sneaked through my critical barriers and buried himself in my brain.
The Wasp Factory, a literary novel, is probably his most famous book, but I always felt and he sometimes hinted that his sci-fi novels were really where he got to do what he wanted to do. If you’ve never read Banks, your missing out.
The Use of Weapons is probably the most eloquent interrogation of the ‘desire to win’ ever written. It examines violence and its insane escalation and takes it to a wry and absurd end. All violence is ultimately personal.
The Algebraist has probably haunted me the most vividly, just for lushness of imagery. Imagine existence as a member of a species that lives for eons swimming through the atmosphere of a gas giant? How does lifespan change the things we think are important to communicate with each other? What is existence if not the ability to communicate?
More recently, Surface Detail offers a phenomenal examination of the horror of the virtual.
I could mention The Culture, or the shipminds… a million other things…. there are too many things that Banks gave me, gave us, to list. But throughout everything he wrote, woven in, floating beneath the surface was always a fierce humanism. It was a rare and special type of mind: intensely kind and yet one that recognized and repeatedly condemned the evil of ignorance and stupidity.
I had drinks last night with someone who’d met up with Banks only last week. Said he was thinner and pale, but seemed in very good spirits and had a lot of energy. I know Banks wanted to see his last book published (it comes out very soon) and I’m so sorry that didn’t happen.
I’ve never cried at the death of a writer before. Perhaps because, somehow, I never felt the author’s company so abidingly and vividly as I read their books. But when you read a Banks novel, he’s always there, just at the corner of your reader’s eye. He never abandoned his readers to the void of the story. So, I have to believe that he’ll still be there, regardless of his death, when I go back to read his work again.
Perhaps, like some of the marvelous ship-minds he invented, Iain M. Banks will always be there for me, sending messages through the vastness of the universe, arriving on the shore of my mind, carrying insights to both the great and the small things about who we are, each time I open one of his works. I know he was an atheist who didn’t believe in an afterlife, but if anyone’s carbon atoms deserve to traverse the immensity of space, Iain Bank’s do.
Dear Mr. Banks, I will miss greatly and for a long, long time.
Shit, shit, shit, SHIT! I wanted to meet him. (me moment)
Long live Iain M Banks. As great a loss as Bob Marley. But sooo different. RG, I’m also sad.
It isn’t fair! Why couldn’t it have been Dan Brown? (just joking…well, not really)
RG,
seconded!
Paul.
I loved the work of Iain Banks, though if I were honest I think his “straight” novels had been stagnating somewhat for some time, whereas his Sci-Fi books were getting stronger and more haunting.
There are a couple of things that to me made him stand out amongst his contemporaries. Firstly, he wrote just as many strong female characters as male ones, and often had them as the central protagonists in his books. Women like Diziet Sma in “Use of Weapons” (a favourite of mine) or Whit are just two of his outstanding female characters, never supernumeries in his complex stories.
Secondly, Banks’ humour: it was never there just to be funny (which it was) but to add light and shade to his characters. So the jokey names of the spaceships to which you allude in your title give character to the Ship Minds, allow them to be more than just hyper-computers, let’s us see how true artificial intelligence would have to work for a society like the Culture to operate–in other words makes this highly evolved society feel as though it might just be real.