Talk:Iain Banks

Civilization Addiction

Shacknews on his troubles with Civ IV.

Wasp Factory Spoilers

Hm, it's incredibly difficult to write about The Wasp Factory without inadvertently giving away information that the reader should discover by himself. --Pinkunicorn

Precisely why I left it alone! --sjc

(much later) I think I will put a Wikipedia contains spoilers sign above this and do it properly. This is a deeply unsatisfactory article as is. --sjc

Banks Attitude vis-a-vis the Culture

From the article:

...The Culture, which he describes in intricate (and sceptical) detail...

How is he sceptical of the Culture? I've read all of them and this is not something that has struck me. --Tarquin

Banks spends a lot of time Culture-bashing. Let's consider the first real reference to the Culture and its emissaries in Consider Phlebas: he positions it as an intellectual-military fascist complex hiding behind the cuddly facade of anarchic liberalism (kind of prophetic of Blair and New Labour really). It is an indictment spoken by the imprisoned changer Horza: "You want to know who the real representative of the Culture is on this planet? It's not her" [..] "it's that powered flesh-slicer she has following her everywhere, her knife missile. [..] it's the real emissary." Virtually the entirety of his Culture work is an indictment of the Culture, he has very little to say in their favour, and, well, I certainly wouldn't vote for 'em on the basis of his few recommendations which are a form of damnation by the faintest of praises... The whole thing about it is that it's not really science fiction. It is a fairly agile and thinly-veiled socio-political polemic on technological and corporate society... --User:Sjc

That's a very different inerpretation to mine. Have you read Banks' notes at http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~stefan/culture.html ? I think he's being Utopic in the classical vein, but exploring the real consequences of that. Horza's opinions toward the Culture are not Bank's, I think; it's part of theme of Phlebas of portraying the Culture from the outside. Gurgeh in Player is clearly a misfit, his isolation is accepted in the Culture, but as Chamlis points out, he needs risk, which the Culture can't provide in the way he wants (until, of course, it does...). It's a realistic Utopia: death, tragedy and melancholy still exist because they're an inherent part of the human condition. The theme of Phlebas is: "under what circumstances might a pacifist society be moved to war?" The Culture's desire to do "good works" through the Contact and SC sections is analogous to past philathropists moved by Christian guilt. --Tarquin

Yes, I did: they are a kind of very useful anodyne for the uninitiated, and I can just picture Banks in his local in Fife working on them with a sardonic smirk writ large across his face. I agree that Horza's perspective is not Banks. But. And the but is that it is very significant in that this is precisely how Banks chooses to introduce the Culture. (In all of Banks' work there are these onion-like layers at play: e.g. the various deceptions perpetrated in The Wasp Factory, Complicity, Crow Road, Whit. Nothing in a Banks novel is ever what it seems.) The Culture is fundamentally decadent and post-modern in its self-absorption. Or so it likes to present itself. The reality is that it is a military machine with a mission: galactic domination on its terms and its terms alone (consider the mission in Player of Games). The evidence however is not just Horza. It comes from virtually every point of view: the Minds who consider humans an irrelevance, from Special Circumstance who argue that the means justifies the means, and from the 3rd person omniscient of Banks himself: the misdirection of virtually every position in the Culture (e.g. the question of who the narrator in Use of Weapons will be), the sardonic names for the Minds, etc. etc. etc. Banks is talking both critically and sceptically all the time in his work; what on earth makes you think he isn't sceptical of the Culture? --sjc

Jumping in a couple of months late ... I think Banks has an ambiguous attitude towards the Culture, seeing both the good and bad sides. I would say he's sceptical in the "questioning everything" sense of sceptical. But for the average Culture citizen, it's essentially a very good place to live (and Banks is on record as saying he would like to live there): humans may (or may not, it's arguable) be irrelevant to the Minds' larger concerns, but the Minds have still taken the time to make life extremely comfortable for them, and humans who don't like it can always leave if they want to. It does have its bad sides, but I think you may be reading too much into the fact that he often portrays the Culture from the outside (or the outer edges) looking in: when it comes down to it, stories set on an Orbital watching people go about their contented lives wouldn't be very interesting. The worst thing about the Culture is that they have no concept of moral relativism: they know what's right, and they are prepared to go and impose it on everyone else by any means necessary (it's interesting to note in this regard the bit in PoG where Flere-Imasho (sp? I haven't got the book on me) takes Gurgeh round the seedier parts of the city, to try and shock him back into a Culture frame of mind after he's started to identify "too much" with the Azadians). As a side note, I don't think you can talk about anyone in the milieu meaningfully seeking "galactic domination" - various parts of the sequence (especially the appendices to Phlebas) make it very clear that the galaxy is big. --Bth

The whole ensemble of books struck as very much Culture-positive- just contrast the Affronters in Excession to the Culture. The worst Banks ever really says seems to me to be along the lines of 'the Culture is the worst system, except for all those other empires'. If anything, it is a jab at the US, as presented. -- Maru Dubshinki 12:15 PM Sunday, 03 April 2005

Publication Dates

Anyway, big debates about the Culture aside, are we sure about some of the facts in this article? Publication dates especially: I'm fairly sure that at least some of Walking on Glass, Canal Dreams and Espedair Street were published pre-1990. (I don't have the books to hand but will check as soon as I have a chance.) Also, I'm confused about this "Complicity"/"Retribution" name change; I rented it as "Complicity", is this a US thing? (Was it ever released there?) --Bth

This is what I have:

Science Fiction

Consider Phlebas (1987)

The Player of Games (1988)

The State of the Art (1989)

Use of Weapons (1990)

Against a Dark Background (1993)

Feersum Endjinn (1994)

Excession (1996)

Inversions (1998)

Look to Windward (2000)

Novels

The Wasp Factory (1984)

Walking on Glass (1985)

The Bridge (1986)

Espedair Street (1987)

Canal Dreams (1989)

The Crow Road (1992)

Complicity (1993)

Whit (1995)

A Song of Stone (1997)

The Business (1999)

Dead Air (2002)

And Raw Spirit will be out in November 2003. --sugarfish 06:50 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Pen Names

It seems to me that this article should mention somewhere the fact that his books are published under two "pen names": Iain Banks for the novels; and Iain M. Banks for the science fiction. --Bovlb 23:11, 2004 Mar 8 (UTC)

It does, in the first sentence! --Sam Francis

Doh! That could hardly be more obvious, could it? Arguably, it should also be on the list of books. --Bovlb 15:25, 2004 Mar 9 (UTC)

Not a bad idea. Anyone have any further thoughts, a mere 1.25 years later? Alai 07:48, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

New Culture?

Is there any information whether Banks will write new Cuture novels? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus ^Talk 00:40, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

See TF Article, under Miscellany. Although no source is attributed... Excession 22:20, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Inversions as a Culture novel?

I'd like to dispute Inversions being a Culture novel. As far as I'm concerned, the vague assertion that the Culture may be involved in the storyline doesn't make it a Culture novel, any more than references to death make one of Shakespeare's comedies into a tragedy... Excession 22:20, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

To quote Banks, "Inversions was an attempt to write a Culture novel that wasn't." [1] This is unlike Feersum Endjinn which Banks confirmed being entirely unrelated to Culture, after some people had interpreted it otherwise. Aapo Laitinen 12:39, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Publication date of Use of Weapons?

I have it as 1991. Can anyone provide a reference to it being 1990? Guinnog 00:15, 28 February 2006 (UTC)

• The Orbit Books edition has a 1990 copyright. Justin Bacon 04:02, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

New book; title?

I changed the title to reflect an anon edit. Now I feel nervous in case it was just a joke. Can anyone help provide a ref? --Guinnog 15:53, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

If you want a reference then try his publishers :http://www.littlebrown.co.uk/search/bookdetails.asp?isbn=0316731056&Source=3

Thanks. Amazon also lists it. Getting the ISBN was a big help; I wonder who that anon actually is? --Guinnog 08:22, 3 July 2006 (UTC)