Iain Banks

Iain Banks, writer, born 16 February 1954; died 9 June 2013

Iain Banks in Edinburgh in 2007. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

This article was amended on 10 June 2013. The novel Stonemouth does not open on the Forth road bridge, but on a fictional bridge resembling it. This has been corrected.

The writer Iain Banks, who has died aged 59, had already prepared his many admirers for his death. On 3 April he announced on his website that he had inoperable gall bladder cancer, giving him, at most, a year to live. The announcement was typically candid and rueful. It was also characteristic in another way: Banks had a large web-attentive readership who liked to follow his latest reflections as well as his writings. Particularly in his later years, he frequently projected his thoughts via the internet. There can have been few novelists of recent years who were more aware of what their readers thought of their books; there is a frequent sense in his novels of an author teasing, testing and replying to a readership with which he was pretty familiar.

His first published novel, The Wasp Factory, appeared in 1984, when he was 30 years old, though it had been rejected by six publishers before being accepted by Macmillan. It was an immediate succès de scandale. The narrator is the 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, who lives with his taciturn father in an isolated house on the north-east coast of Scotland. Frank lives in a world of private rituals, some of which involve torturing animals, and has committed several murders. The explanation of his isolation and his obsessiveness is shockingly revealed in one of the culminating plot twists for which Banks was to become renowned.

It was followed by Walking on Glass (1985), composed of three separate narratives whose connections are deliberately made obscure until near the end of the novel. One of these seems to be a science fiction narrative and points the way to Banks's strong interest in this genre. Equally, multiple narration would continue to feature in his work.

The next year's novel, The Bridge, featured three separate stories told in different styles: one a realist narrative about Alex, a manager in an engineering company, who crashes his car on the Forth road bridge; another the story of John Orr, an amnesiac living on a city-sized version of the bridge; and a third, the first-person narrative of the Barbarian, retelling myths and legends in colloquial Scots. In combining fantasy and allegory with minutely located naturalistic narrative, it was clearly influenced by Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981). It remained the author's own avowed favourite.

His first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas, was published in 1987, though he had drafted it soon after completing The Wasp Factory. In it he created The Culture, a galaxy-hopping society run by powerful but benevolent machines and possessed of what its inventor called "well-armed liberal niceness". It would feature in most of his subsequent sci-fi novels. Its enemies are the Idirans, a religious, humanoid race who resent the benign powers of the Culture. In this conflict, good and ill are not simply apportioned. Banks provided a heady mix of, on the one hand, action and intrigue on a cosmic scale (his books were often called "space operas"), and, on the other, ruminations on the clash of ideas and ideologies.

For the rest of his career literary novels would alternate with works of science fiction, the latter appearing under the name "Iain M Banks" (the "M" standing for Menzies). Banks sometimes spoke of his science fiction books as a writerly vacation from the demands of literary fiction, where he could "pull out the stops", as he himself put it. Player of Games (1988) was followed by Use of Weapons (1990). The science fiction employed some of the narrative trickery that characterised his literary fiction: Use of Weapons, for instance, featured two interleaved narratives, one of which moved forward in time and the other backwards. Their connectedness only became clear with a final, somewhat outrageous, twist of the narrative. His many fans came to relish these tricks.

In 1991 Banks moved from England to Scotland, settling in North Queensferry, Fife, very close to his childhood home. He had remained close to his parents, who in their old age moved to live next to him.

Scottish settings now became important to many of his novels. The Crow Road (1992) is a Scottish family saga, though its traditional form is disguised by narrative time shifts and witty references to popular culture. Banks's abiding love of cars is encoded in the book, many of whose key events – including birth, copulation and death – occur in cars. The protagonist loses his virginity on the back seat of a Lagonda Rapide Saloon. In 2006, finally conceding to the force of green politics, Banks sold his two Porsches, his BMW and his Land Rover in favour of a Lexus hybrid.

The Crow Road, with its cast of eccentrics and its exactly observed local detail, was successfully serialised for BBC television in 1996 by the screenwriter Bryan Elsley. The production was directed by Gavin Millar, who several years later also directed a TV version of Banks's next novel, Complicity (1993). This was a less buoyant and formally more restive work. Its protagonist, a Scottish journalist called Colley, finds himself implicated in the crimes of a serial killer. The novel alternates the narration of the journalist, written in the first person, with the narrative of the murderer, told in the second person.

By the time that Banks was duly named as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists in 1993 (aged then 39) he was an established name with a strong and often youthful following.

In 1997 he produced A Song of Stone, a bleak political fable set in some unnamed land where civilisation has collapsed. Always a man of the left, Banks was animated by political causes and his pronouncements began to attract journalistic attention. The Iraq war made him a loud critic of Tony Blair. The impress of his political views was increasingly evident in his fiction and it seemed to some of his admirers that they were exerting too strong an influence. Dead Air (2002), featured a narrator, Ken Nott, whose views seem little distanced from his author's and who is licensed to berate the reader about political morality, American imperialism, the Royal family and the like.

Banks's next work of literary fiction was The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007), a return to the territory of The Crow Road. Banks's protagonist, Alban McGill, struggles to prevent his family's company from being taken over by a US giant, occasioning diatribes against American capitalism and American foreign policy that seem straightforwardly authorial.

His science fiction works, meanwhile, seemed liberated from some of his grimmer certainties and were notably even-handed in their treatment of moral and ideological dispute. From Excession (1996) to The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), he produced a sequence of seven science-fiction novels, all but one of which, The Algebraist (2004), belonged to the Culture series. Agents of The Culture are on a mission to spread democracy, secularism and social justice throughout the universe. It might be thought that they represent Banks's own values. Yet, as a novelist, he had considerable sympathy for those who resist this imposition of contentment.

Banks was born in Dunfermline, the only child of an admiralty officer and a former professional ice skater. As a boy, following his father's postings, he lived first in North Queensferry and later in Gourock, Inverclyde. He was educated at Gourock and Greenock high schools before attending the University of Stirling, where he read English, philosophy and psychology. (He would later teach creative writing at the university, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1997.)

After graduating in 1975 he took a series of jobs, including working as technician at the Nigg Bay oil platform construction site and at the IBM computer plant at Greenock. He visited the US and then moved to London, where he worked as a clerk in a Chancery Lane law firm. Here he met his partner, later to become his first wife, Annie.

While he worked he was writing. In the late 1970s he completed three science fiction novels that failed to find publishers, though all three would later be reworked and published successfully. Then followed one of the more remarkable literary debuts.

In 2010 Banks publicly joined the cultural boycott of Israel, refusing to allow his novels to be sold in the country. He was a frequent signatory of letters of protest to the Guardian and a name recruited to causes of which he approved, from secular humanism to the legalising of assisted suicide to the preservation of public libraries. Banks himself was a self-declared "evangelical atheist" and a man of decided political views, often expressed with humorous exasperation and sometimes requiring ripe language. He relished his public status as no-nonsense voice of a common-sense socialism that had an increasingly nationalistic tint.

An expert on Scottish whisky (when he won TV's Celebrity Mastermind, his specialist subject was Scottish whiskies and distilleries), Banks enjoyed the conviviality of a shared drink. In 2003 he published Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram, an account of his travels through the highlands and islands of Scotland in pursuit of the history and the special pleasures of malt whisky. He confessed to over-indulgence in this pleasure at some stages of his life, and to the recreational use of drugs. It was characteristic of him to state the fact in interviews with journalists.

In 2010 he gave an interview to BBC Radio Scotland in which he spoke with painful frankness about the breakdown of his relationship with his first wife. But then the media interview seemed his natural forum: it is difficult to think of a more frequently interviewed British novelist.

While his science fiction spanned inter-stellar spaces, his literary fiction kept its highly specific sense of place. The place that gives the title to his 2012 novel Stonemouth is fictional, but, like other fictional places in earlier Banks novels, it is a highly specific Scottish town. Like The Crow Road and The Steep Approach to Garbadale –it is the story of a man coming back to his family home, and it is difficult not to think that this is Banks's story of himself.

It even opens, like The Bridge, with an evocation of the Forth road bridge, the building of which Banks had watched as a boy from his bedroom window – or at least in this case, of a fictional bridge resembling it. For all their formal inventiveness and play of ideas, his novels remain memorable for the sense they give of their author's personal memories and passions.

His announcement of his terminal illness provoked an outpouring of dismay and affection from his readers – not least on this newspaper's website. It was striking how many of those who responded to the news spoke of having encountered him in person, often after a reading or public interview. A significant number recalled sharing not just a conversation but also a drink with him: he was an author whose readers felt in close touch with him. He clearly relished this closeness, regarding the round of literary festivals and speaking engagements, often a chore for contemporary authors, with undisguised pleasure.

Shortly after the announcement, Banks married his partner, Adele Hartley, and she survives him.

Iain M. Banks, The Culture Series

A Few Notes On The Culture, by Iain M Banks

Iain Banks, in conversation with The Open University (full)

He catapulted to fame with depraved, funny novel The Wasp Factory in 1984, but the much-loved Scottish writer had a parallel career as an influential sci-fi writer

This month marks 10 years since the award-winning novelist Iain Banks died aged 59. The beloved Scottish writer, who wrote literary fiction as Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M Banks, began his writing career with the hit novel The Wasp Factory in 1984. He went on to write more than 30 books, including novels, short story collections and Raw Spirit, a travelogue of Scotland and its whisky distilleries. (In 2006 the author won Celebrity Mastermind, his specialist subject being malt whiskies.) In celebration of Banks’ rich and varied work, Steven Poole picks out some good ways in to his world.

The entry point
Iain Banks’s debut novel, The Wasp Factory, granted him instant fame if not unanimous praise. The Evening Standard recoiled at “a repulsive piece of work”, while the Irish Times called it “a work of unparalleled depravity”, which no doubt made the Marquis de Sade feel unfairly forgotten. Repulsive and depraved it certainly is, of course, but it is also poetic and horribly funny: its narrator, 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, comes over as a cross between Holden Caulfield and American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. Banks sketches the changing light and skyscapes over the remote Scottish island where the teenager lives with his father with as much care as Frank himself slowly reveals to the reader the disgusting answers to our pressing questions. What exactly are the Sacrifice Poles and the Skull Grounds, not to mention the titular Factory itself? You don’t want to know, but you do.

The odd one out
A tight murder mystery, Complicity stands out stylistically with its alternating sections of first- and second-person singular narration. The use of “you” instead of “I” or the third person (Complicity begins with the line: “You hear the car after an hour and a half”) can be an effective way of sucking the reader into the fictional world. It also engineers the reader’s complicity in the events of the novel, perhaps, which works well for a story about a series of gruesome vigilante murders. Complicity, Banks once explained, is a bit like The Wasp Factory, “only without the happy ending and redeeming air of cheerfulness”.

The billionaires’ favourite
Banks originally wanted to be a science-fiction author, but after several unsuccessful drafts in the 1970s decided to write something “normal” instead, thus rocket-boosting his literary career with The Wasp Factory. He then started publishing science fiction as Iain M Banks, beginning with Consider Phlebas, a phrase taken from Eliot’s The Waste Land. It’s a cosmos-spanning romp that introduces the Culture, a post-human galactic civilisation in which AI does all the work and no one wants for food or other resources. (Fully automated luxury communism – in space.)

In this first story, the smug liberal Culture is at war with the Idirans – AI refuseniks who are waging a jihad against them. Through this backdrop wanders sympathetic mercenary Bora Horza Gobuchul, a Mandalorian-style drifter with a very particular set of skills. Banks’s vision of a starfaring, post-scarcity civilisation run by AIs, in which people can change their DNA at will and live for 400 years, is publicly admired by tech giants such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – even as they toil along with us in the capitalist present. Unfortunately for Bezos, a planned Amazon TV series based on the novel was cancelled in 2020 after Banks’s estate withdrew permission.

The author’s choice
In 2008, Banks said that his own best book was The Bridge, a phantasmagorical story of love and coma over which looms the Forth Bridge in both real and spectacularly imaginary versions. Three narrators present different aspects of the same character in a highly allusive patchwork that was inspired by Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and in some respects also recalls early JM Coetzee. Culture nerds get very excited about a brief mention of a “knife-missile” in the novel – a kind of autonomous drone weapon – which to them proves that it is somehow part of the same science-fiction universe as Consider Phlebas and the other novels in the Culture series. Definitely maybe.

The underrated one
If Game of Thrones were set in the modern post-apocalyptic wasteland of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, you might get something like A Song of Stone, a claustrophobic absinthe shot of a chamber novel. Our unreliable narrator is an aristocrat holed up with his Lady in their castle, prisoners of a troop of anarchic guerrillas while the great senseless conflict sweeps by outside. It’s a very European book, written against the historical backdrop of a Europe once again at war.

Excession by Iain M Banks.
All Banks’s Culture novels feature Minds, hyperintelligent mirror-surfaced ellipsoids that run starships and other large engineering structures. But in Excession, the Minds become the primary protagonists, as they debate what to do about the titular phenomenon – an inscrutable alien artefact that seems to be older than the universe itself – and about a barbarous competing civilisation that glories in the name “the Affront”. As Minds are persons, they are not obliged to be open and honest with one another or anyone else, and some conspire to allow “gigadeathcrimes” on utilitarian principles, rather like crazed effective altruists.

Banks always uses the names of his sapient spaceships – chosen by the Minds themselves – as ironic commentary, and this novel contains some of his best, such as the Ethics Gradient, the Not Invented Here, the Frank Exchange of Views, and the Zero Gravitas. Excession is the favourite of many Culture fans, though Look to Windward (hello again, TS Eliot) and the extremely dark and brilliant Use of Weapons are also deservedly revered.

The surprisingly nice one
Banks is no slouch with openings at the worst of times, but the first line of The Crow Road has become justly famous: “It was the day my grandmother exploded.” This, a comic bildungsroman and sweeping tale of family secrets, is perhaps the most warm-hearted of all Banks’s books, suffused with love for the quotidian particularities of place (Argyll and Glasgow), conversation, and character, and containing almost no sadistic violence at all. With this novel, Banks rebooted the 19th-century domestic saga long before Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections; it’s probably the masterpiece of his Earthbound output.

Iain Banks - Raw Spirit (BBC Scotland interview)