Ed Champion reviews Iain M Banks:
In an Iain M. Banks novel, you will find sour antiheroes sweet-talking corpulent cannibal kings, erratic robot drones so caught up in lending a helping hand that they overlook the telltale traces of emotional breakdown within those they serve, and a febrile zeal for blowing things up which suggests that Banks isn’t so much an author of bawdy and exciting adventures as he is a giddy eight-year-old with an elaborate train set scattered across a football field.
When not committing his considerable energies to such intense Bildungsromans as The Wasp Factory or bleak-humored narratives like The Crow Road, Banks inserts an M into “Iain Banks” and writes science fiction novels. Most of these speculative volumes concern the Culture, a utopian-anarchist society that extends across a sizable cluster of the universe. These Culture vultures gambol across the galaxy in ships with such eccentric names as Don’t Try This at Home and Serious Callers Only. Culture citizens live for centuries, and can even change their appearances if they grow discontent with their corpora. These conditions encourage these civilized sybarites to have more fun than a flighty Dalmatian discovering a chiaroscuro sea of spotty companions. Never mind that there’s always an intergalactic war going on.
Banks spoke to Calum Waddell at the Edinburgh Book Festival:
Science fiction doesn’t get a lot of respect in UK literary culture. Why do you think that is?
Well I think standard technophobia plays a part in it, but there is a persistent current in intellectual discourse that devalues, and indeed denigrates, any genre or method that actually reminds us of our own basic humanity. According to this view, we are not supposed to laugh or cry or wince or become sexually aroused when we read a book or experience any other creative work; we are meant only to appreciate it with our higher functions. You know, with our intellect alone. I think science fiction is too much fun to be taken seriously - and we all want to be taken seriously, don’t we? Especially writers and critics - so we all pretend that any stuff which is a total slog to get through is somehow more worthy than works we actually enjoy. “Go,” as our American cousins would say, “figure.”
[..]
Is it true that a sequel to The Wasp Factory is in the works?
I have been mentioning the title of The Lost Wax Method as a possible sequel to The Wasp Factory, but it’s a bit of a joke to be honest. In theory, if I came up with a totally spiffing plot, which would only work as a sequel to one of my past novels, then I would certainly consider it - but my general, and fairly strong, feeling is that it is always better to go onto something new rather than revisit old stuff. This is partly professional pride, I guess.
First posted: Friday, September 5th, 2008.
