Iain Banks died yesterday. He was 59. He announced in April that he was suffering from terminal cancer and expected to live less than a year. The announcement was made with all the grace and black humour that you may have expected from the author of The Wasp Factory and The Crow Road. And less than three months later he is gone.
Damn.
There is no point in saying what a fantastic writer he was, or how crazy and inventive his stories were. The work (and the numbers) speak for themselves. If you have never read Iain Banks go and buy his books. Then you will know too.
I first came to know his work under the name Iain M. Banks (the slight variation of his name was insisted on by his publishers for his science fiction books). I picked up an end-of-run copy of Use of Weapons from a little bookstore in Bristol back in the early 1990’s. To be honest, I didn’t expect much from a cheap hardback from a backstreet store, especially one that I bought for it’s cool title. I was totally wrong. Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games followed. I was hooked.
What was special about Iain M. Banks was the politics of his work – the class politics, the gender politics, the race politics – and the way he set those agendas to work. Other writers set up dystopian futures, where powerful corporations dominate, abusive oligarchs terrorise and fascist regimes suppress their heroes. If they are political, it is the politics of the struggle, dramas set against the hero’s journey, points made in the language of adversity and resistance. Iain M. Banks took a different tack. By juxtaposing such systems against The Culture (the civilisational background of the majority of his sci-fi), a transgender, transhuman and ulta-liberal normality, he allowed those abusive structures to ridicule themselves.
Time and time again his stories tore aware our everyday worldview, and set the evils of class systems, racial hatred, and prejudice against the wonder and terror of a vast Universe, and a solidarity in being sentient to see it. Being evil has never been so silly, or so pointless.
Of course, Social Science fiction is as established as Space Opera, and famous authors such as Ray Bradbury, George Orwell and Ursula Le Guin have all used the fantastic to make points about our reality. But never has it been done with such a black-humoured twinkle.
Iain Banks was an atheist and he was a socialist, and while he never hid those views, he never sank to argument in his novels, he simply showed us.
There are some authors who write mainstream fiction and let of steam with genre stories. Science fiction for kicks if you will. But I get the feeling that Iain Banks was the other way around. His mainstream works were the ones for fun, playful and usually a bit twisted – he played with the form of narrative, the voice of his protagonists, and the morals of his readers – ever experimental. But it’s in his science fiction that I think we see the real Iain M. Banks. The Culture seems deeply personal to me, as is the continual subtext to take joy from life because all else is folly.
Goodbye Iain M. Banks. Perhaps you sublimed yesterday. You certainly seemed ready.