audition

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Never read anything by Banks, but I've heard a lot about him. That's a shame to hear though. Must be horrible to know you don't have much time left.

And definitely agree with you, we need a book section here.

Not familiar with Banks either, so I'll have to pick up The Wasp Factory. Got a few Waterstones gift cards left that I might use.

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Erica Ambler wrote:

You could always join the local library.

I still haven't returned my pocket score of Beethoven's Symphony No. 6. It's due date was May 21st 2009.

Haven't been in since.

I've only read some of Banks' sci-fi Culture novels, which are spectacularly imaginative.

Moore wrote:

Never read anything by Banks, but I've heard a lot about him. That's a shame to hear though. Must be horrible to know you don't have much time left.

And definitely agree with you, we need a book section here.

Give The Algebraist a read. I think you'll like it.


Really sad news, though.

Sad news indeed. If you're not into SF I recommend Walking on Glass and The Bridge for a taste of his mainstream-fantastic mix, quite extraordinary. Though his Culture books often seem to have some black-ops or intelligence theme with "Contact" and "Special Circumstances" I wasn't able to get warm with them. Perhaps they are really too imaginative for my tastes.

Banks on his fiction:

" . . . an ex-neighbour of ours recalled (in an otherwise entirely kind and welcome comment) me telling him, years ago, that my SF novels effectively subsidised the mainstream works. I think he’s just misremembered, as this has never been the case. Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn’t letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can’t imagine that I’d have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round."

The Culture works - and in fact most of Banks' SF as it seems - is truly heavy stuff that you won't find in the hands of those merely looking for space action in Star Wars tradition. The Culture society is utopian post scarcity and developed to the point of not just granting 'minds' citizen status but actually being for much of the time governed by these minds. Well, such government as there can be in an anarchist society. The Culture books also deal with traditional ethics questions and problems of moral philosophy in various different contexts. All of that against the counterpoint of often hilarious ship names (Prosthetic Conscience, What Are The Civilian Applications?, Size Isn't Everything, No More Mr Nice Guy, I Blame My Mother, I Blame Your Mother [sic!]) and conversations between these as well as a fair amount of action. That's somewhat off the beaten path of mainstream SF fanbase. Sith against Jedi and Cumberbatch against Pine, Urban and Quinto is a little easier to swallow, I suppose. So I'm not at all surprised Banks' SF is somewhat behind in sales to his "ordinary" mainstream fiction (not that books like Walking on Glass are any "lighter").

My problem with the Culture books is that I find it difficult to relate to the characters. Their motivations and concerns to me seem very far removed from our reality, all the more so as they live in what would probably be considered 'Paradise' by people thinking in religious terms. Having shed almost all of humanoid ailments (the Culture consists of far more than just the human race and its sentient technology, isn't even the origin of it IIRC) there is not a lot I can identify with personally. but that isn't to say I can't enjoy reading Culture books, I just need to be in a very specific mood for it.

Banks' 'mainstream' works to me are more accessible and I can really recommend Walking on Glass and The Bridge. In fact I see I already did so.

The Culture novels have never resonated with me because of their characters (I find this less because they are hard to identify with but more because Banks tends to draw them in broad strokes). What sets them apart is their sci-fi world-building and philosophical bent. It's quite a colorful, fascinating world that Banks develops (and I daresay there is often enough good ol' fashioned excitement in Banks' Culture novels to appeal to the STAR TREK/STAR WARS crowd).

I've only read three of Banks' Culture books, so I'm not really qualified to comment on more than these. My problem is perhaps that recently I prefer stories with 'ordinary' characters in extraordinary circumstances rather than the other way round. The Culture seems such a fantastic concept that I have difficulty imagining what would qualify as 'ordinary' character in that society, much less how they would behave under extraordinary (special?) circumstances. Perhaps my imagination struggles with the concept because it's really not developed enough for this utopian vision. It's funny because I usually have no problem with 'strange' and unusual tales.

And, sadly, he didn't last that long.

RIP Iain Banks

Sad news. His family and friends have my condolences at this difficult time.

RIP

A colleague pointed me to this. Grauniad will forgive me for putting the entire profile here, worth a read and a chuckle or two. Stolen from here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/1999/aug/07/fiction.iainbanks

Quote :

Doing the Business
Profile: Iain Banks

• The Guardian, Saturday 7 August 1999 18.22 BST
  
  

For nine months of the year this Porsche-driving old leftie lives a life of pure hedonism. Then, every September, he knuckles down to write one darkly hilarious book that invariably becomes a best-seller. Colin Hughes on the latest from the champion of sci-fi

Iain Banks is the kind of man who makes many feel ill with envy. He works three, maybe four months a year, but his annual novel invariably hits the bestseller list at launch, making him wealthy enough to spend the rest of the year doing what the hell he wants. And what hell that is: driving his convertible black Porsche 911 top down along winding Scottish roads, zipping across country to meet up with his large circle of pals (it's a word Scots still use without feeling embarrassed), to drink gut-stretching quantities of beer, eat curries and gas about politics, sci-fi, old times. In this circle, Banks is feted for being witty, generous, self-deprecating, and otherwise wonderful company.

In the middle of last September Banks came back from holiday and settled down in front of his Mac to write his next novel, The Business. He says he didn't start thinking about the book, which is out on Wednesday, till he repaired to his study. He wrote, as he always does when working, roughly 3,000 words a day, eight hours a day, five days a week, till the book was finished which had to be by December 23, because otherwise Annie, his wife, would be grumpy about his failure to help with Christmas.

For the next two weeks he celebrated in Banksian style (lots of drinking and giggling), then sat down again after Hogmanay to do a final revision. He packed the book off to his editor in London and at the beginning of February, popped down to the old smoke for a two-day run through with said editor and there you are, job done. The rest of his year was spent hanging out with friends, messing with his music-making software, doing the odd publicity book-signing spin, and helping his elderly parents to move into an old farmhouse on the opposite side of the courtyard where he lives in North Queensferry, just over the Forth bridge from Edinburgh.

The maddening thing is, this new book is one of his most assured performances yet. Not as startlingly original as The Wasp Factory, nor so ingeniously artful as The Bridge (by common consent, his best); but certainly The Business is the most accessible, straightforward book he's written, and one of the least dark (the most ouch-inducing scene is right at the beginning, when a minor character has teeth methodically extracted, but even that turns out to be laugh-out-loud funny).

Ask someone who has only read Banks' books what they make of them, and like as not they'll remember him as the young writer who had one character murdering his/her cousins and another setting fire to dogs in his first novel, and who, in Complicity, eventually graduated to dreaming up some of the most bizarre and grisly descriptions of sado-masochism and ritualised slaughter anywhere in mainstream fiction. Some passages in his books are so horrid his wife won't read them. No wonder that people assume there must be a dark unsavoury core behind Banks' cheerful exterior.

If there is, he doesn't recognise it. He insists that these gruesome images are not part of his nature. 'It's in your head, and that's it, it's nowhere else. The whole point for me of being a writer is that nothing's bad, no matter what you think up. There's a mad bit in my brain that comes up with these ridiculous ideas, and the rational bit of me is saying 'that's horrible, disgusting', and then there's a bit of my brain that thinks 'ah, I've got this great idea'. They're just ideas they're utterly amoral.'

In person, Banks shows no trace of this other self. He has been described, accurately, as looking like a polytechnic lecturer: dark-bearded (he had ginger hair in his youth), 1970s-style specs, slightly preoccupied, no lofty airs, no haughty superiority.

But and it's a big but it's no good pretending that Iain Banks is just a sweet and beguiling chap who happens to be able to turn out richly inventive novels at the rate of one a year. Look more closely: his small, intent and usually half-closed eyes, creased around with laughter lines, betray an acute and active watcher. He doesn't miss a trick. And his life, never mind his demeanour, shows a man with extraordinary self-belief and single-minded determination. Ken Macleod, an old friend, says: 'Iain's always been very self-confident, though not full of himself. He used to say it was a joke with him that he was trying to expand his accomplishments to occupy the space that his ego already filled.'

The affable Banksie is no disingenuous illusion: it's his real personality. But behind it there are other equally potent personalities. There is the Iain Banks who drives his car so precariously that he rolled it off the road to Glenfinnan last year and damn near killed himself. Typically, he emerged from the wreckage beaming, with cuts and bruises, to tell a horrified Italian couple who had stopped to help: 'Thank God for airbags!' And there is the Iain Banks, the steely one, who decided at 14 he was going to write novels, concentrated on that end, and kept driving on, oblivious to the siren calls of ordinary life, until he hit the big time. Then, having scored success, he opted to go home and live among his friends and family in Scotland, well away from London's flitterati.

His mother and father met on an ice rink in Dunfermline where she was an instructress. Both parents came from large families, so although Iain was an only child he grew up among crowds of cousins and second cousins, many of whom lived on and off abroad as naval pilots and the like more exotic than a conventional quiet Scottish town upbringing might normally suggest. 'I felt very loved, and special,' he says. 'And it's very difficult to have an only child and love them like that, and not spoil them. I think back and remember I always used to be given the best cuts of meat and so on. I got used to being treated as the most important person in the household, which can be very dangerous.' He grins: 'I mean, luckily I turned out to be a wonderful human being, but a lesser person could have had their head turned by that.'

Until '63 they lived in North Queensferry because his father was working at Rosyth as a civilian docks supervisor, but then the navy moved him to Greenock at the mouth of the Clyde. The family lived in Gourock, just up the road: Iain went to school, first there, and then to Greenock High.

It would be perfectly possible to paint a portrait of Banks solely from the anecdotes told by his adolescent friends, with whom he has grown up and shared most of his life. As teenagers they watched Monty Python and went drinking together; some went to the same universities and walked the hills together; later they worked at the same jobs, trooped off on demos together, did drugs, lived in squats and shared houses. Banks keeps a diary, rather like the one a character in Crow Road keeps, with its own private shorthand. But it's not a writers' diary: that would be too posterity-pretentious and too much like hard work. 'It's just so that when someone says, 'na na Banksie, that happened in '73', I can say 'well no, actually', and then I can show them chapter and verse.'
He first knew he wanted to be a writer when he was 11 and wrote his first novel aged 16, in pencil in a larger-than-foolscap log book. Called The Hungarian Lift-Jet, it was a sort of Alistair Maclean madness with international arms dealers for baddies rather than commies, and a lot more sex and violence.

Ken Macleod, now a rising star on the science fiction scene himself, remembers: 'My first encounter with Iain's writing was these collages that he produced, where he wrote these crackpot texts, rather obviously derived from Terry Gilliam films, illustrated with cuttings from Sunday supplements. They were quite funny, politically provocative, with tanks and guns and sex all juxtaposed in alarming ways but the stories were just ludicrous handwritten exercises in puns.'

Banks went to Stirling to read English, philosophy and psychology, a choice of subjects which he confesses was a bit sad really, in that he really thought that 'a novelist should read novels, philosophy cos you've got to have philosophy in your novels, haven't you? And psychology because you'll be using characters. It was all tosh,' he admits with a wince.' Complete nonsense'.

When Banks returned to the university recently to deliver a talk, Rory Watson, a poet and professor of English, had to introduce his former student: 'I went back into the files and found his Ucca form. Normally where it asks students to list their interests people would put things like 'hillwalking' and 'reading', but not Iain. On his Ucca form there was just one interest listed: 'Explosives'. You can't say we weren't warned!'

At school Banks was obsessed with making bombs out of sugar and weedkiller. Mostly he and his pals detonated them in the hills above Greenock, but Les Macfarlane, a childhood friend, tells how they gathered a gang of kids for a demonstration on a local reservoir, where they'd rigged up a six-foot model boat packed with explosives. 'They'd put a pipe bomb in it, but it was fairly primitive, so Iain had to go out in a pair of waders and light the fuse with a match. He lit it, started to walk back, and then you could see the mounting panic on his face thinking he wouldn't get away in time, and then he broke into a run... The damn thing never went off.'

Banks says he was quite a quiet student. 'I took my washing home to mum, went to the pub one night a week when Tomorrow's World and Monty Python were on, went walking in the country around Stirling.' Watson, who ran a small creative writing group at Stirling, says: 'He was always very lively and genial he liked to play the amiable loon. But he worked hard. A lot of people sit and talk about writing, but if you're really going to write you have to do it, not talk about it. Iain was writing all the time.'

In his first year at university he wrote his second novel, a vast sprawling thing called TTR, which Macleod says was 'a sort of blend of Hunter S Thompson and Catch 22'. Really, though, Banks wanted to write science fiction. Many who read his so-called 'mainstream' fiction (published in covers with faintly gothic black and white designs) take the view that his SF, published under the name Iain M Banks, is some sort of aberrant indulgence. In fact, if you read both, it becomes increasingly hard to see where SF leaves off and mainstream begins. Is Song of Stone mainstream? Or The Bridge, for that matter? The truth is, genre distinctions blur all across Banks' work, which has been compared to Robert Louis Stevenson's, and anyone who ducks the sci-fi is missing large tranches of his best stuff (Excession, the last full-blown Culture novel, is one of the funniest and cleverest SF books ever). Moreover, sci-fi is what Banks always cared about most.

'I've nothing against Hampstead novels, as such. But I do have a problem with them being held up as the most important or most respectable genre. It's just a particular way of writing, it's not necessarily the highest, it's just that a way of writing. Elevating it almost becomes bigotry, saying that science fiction must be worse, less important. That really rankles, gets up my nose, both barrels.'

Banks has become science fiction's most prominent British champion. In a BBC web site poll this year, he was named the fifth greatest writer ever, after Shakespeare, Austen, Orwell and Dickens. 'I do want to make the case for science fiction being an important form of literature,' he says, 'because it's the only form of literature that copes with the way technological change might affect people, which is the fundamental quality of our lives now. If you go back a couple of hundred years, the world you were born into wouldn't be that much different from the one you died in. But the one thing you can guarantee for children born now is that the world will be completely, totally different. In fact, it may be so different that they may not die at all.'

After university Banks deliberately took on a succession of jobs for between six months and a year at a time, the one condition being that he never had to think about them after he'd walked out of the door at the end of the day. He was an 'expediter analyser' for IBM in Greenock, ('that's IBM-speak for clerk'), and a testing technician for British Steel at Nigg Bay, Invergordon. The work made him enough money to keep writing right through his twenties, with long gaps in between jobs to travel: he spent three months in 1975 roaming around Europe, and another long stretch driving across America. Every other year he'd be sending off manuscripts and pinning the litter of rejection slips over his bedroom wall.

In time he drifted down to London, where Macleod was living with sundry International Marxist Group friends in a squat opposite the EMI studios in Hayes, Middlesex. 'We had a kind of shared household across several buildings, called The Caff. I was down the pub one night and the others arrived and told me there was this mad guy back at The Caff demonstrating how to fall backwards off a stool without spilling his whisky, who said he was a friend of mine. That was Iain.'

Banks' publisher carries an interview with him on its web site in which he reveals that his numerous nicknames over the years have included Beaver ('not a sexual reference; something to do with my predilection for dam-building'), and El Bonko ('nothing to do with bonking, sadly; it comes from bonkers, though I can't imagine why').

There's no doubt Banks has a lunatic fringe. On publicity tours for his books he has an alarming propensity to get drunk and attempt to return to his room by scaling the outside of the hotel leading, on one occasion in Brighton, to the police being called. Jim Brown, another intimate drinking friend, remembers a night when they'd been to Dingwalls in London: 'We were walking back about 3 o'clock in the morning, both pissed of course. I thought he was walking beside me, but when I turned round he wasn't there. I shouted out. Then this voice came back from above Iain was walking along this wall about ten feet above me. And then it went something like this. Me: 'Banksie, d'ye trust me?' Him: 'Course I do.' Me: 'Well jump then, I'll catch you.' So he did, and I caught him, though it almost broke my leg doing it. Only thing was, he dived off backwards...'

Banks liked hanging out with the Trots 'I had a 2000E Cortina, white with a black vinyl roof, I was going to make a sticker for it: 'Keep your hands off, IMG staff car'.' But, though his broad sympathies are Old Labour, he's never been party political. In the Scottish Assembly elections this year he voted SNP, not because he's pro-independence, but because he's fed up with Blair's student loan and private finance policies.

All the time he was in London, he'd been scribbling, stitching together the sci-fi novels that were later to be published as Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Against a Dark Background, the first two of which created The Culture, his utopian future society in which benevolent artificial intelligences conduct their own affairs while overseeing a blissfully benign human world aboard vast intergalactic spaceships. 'I remember thinking that I saw the future as being more female than male, and more machine than human,' he says, adding that the Culture was created more by accident than design: 'I wanted to write about this person who was a mercenary, a bad guy, but without knowing it he was working for the good guys. And it sort of grew from there.'

Culture humans also have the ability to infuse drugs directly into their system a reflection on Banks' belief that happy people won't misuse dope. 'I think civilisation will look back on our attitude to drugs at present in the same way as we look back on the attitude to witches. They'll say, 'what were you thinking of?' Alcohol is legal, but it's a terrifically dangerous drug, from the cellular level right up to the whole society. Tobacco is even worse. So those are two heavily taxed and completely legal drugs. Cannabis is nowhere near as dangerous.'

But what about the risk of people doing their heads in? 'One faction in my head says that, in a way, drugs make perfect sense when life is shit, or you're shit, or people are being horrible to you, because any change is a good change. If you're in a society where everyone's spending their time zonked in a corner, then you'll know very quickly whether that society's worth living in.'

He ended up working in a Chancery Lane law firm as a costing clerk in 1980, where he met Annie. 'I saw this glorious blonde, round about my age, and it started off in that office way, you know, chatting at the photocopier, or the coffee point. And one day I said 'will you come out for a drink tonight?' and she said 'OK', so we went to The Sun in Lamb's Conduit Street, which to my horror has been turned into an Irish theme pub, but then it used to have at least a dozen real ales. I thought, 'I'll have a pint of Old Peculiar' and I turned to her thinking she'd have a Bacardi and Coke, and she said, 'oh, I'll have a pint of that as well', so I said 'oh... right'. She drank me under the table, and I had to borrow a fiver from her to get home. I got back to where I was staying and said to my pals, 'I've met this really great woman, she's a really great drinker'. That's west coast of Scotland stuff that is, when you meet women who drink, and you go, 'oh yeah!' Every year he and Annie make a little pilgrimage to Masham in Yorkshire, where Old Peculiar is brewed, to have dinner on the anniversary of their first date.

They moved in together a year or so later, separated for a time when Banks moved back to Scotland, but married in '92. They'd been discussing it for a while, but couldn't agree on how big the wedding should be, who should be invited, where it should be held. Then, flying back from the Adelaide literary festival, they stopped off in Hawaii. 'It was the weekend, and we went into the office and we were told we could get married but it had to be in the next hour or so because we were leaving on the Monday and they were about to shut for the weekend. We had a choice of going back to the hotel and wearing something other than T-shirts and shorts and fetching a camera, or we could go for a drink and they'd be ready for us when we came back. Well guess what! No photographs! Just the judge and his secretary to witness it.'

Though patently happy together, the couple have never had children. It's the one subject on which Banks is curiously evasive, saying in one breath that 'Annie knows when I put on a certain gooey expression that it's either a Ferrari or a baby', and in the next saying, absurdly, 'I managed to persuade myself that one good ambition is never to change a nappy'. His friends think he and Annie have probably tried and given up; Banks himself says 'it's something that if it happened it would happen, but it just hasn't happened, so, you know, what the heck... '

Frustrated at the failure to get his sci-fi stories taken up, Banks decided to write a different kind of novel altogether. Mary Pachnos, rights director at Macmillan at the time, recalls: 'Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, who ran our crime list, took the manuscript off reception where Iain had dropped it one day, simply because we were the nearest publishers to where he was working in Chancery Lane.' He read it and handed the book to James Hale, Macmillan's fiction man: 'He said, 'this might be worth having a look at'. I read it on the Sunday morning I was laughing out loud, then turning back a few pages, horrified at what I was laughing at. That day I drove down to see friends for lunch, and I'm told I spent the whole journey in silence. I was thinking, 'I'm going to publish that book'.'

Pachnos and Hale called Banks on the Monday morning, met him for lunch at a local pub, offered world rights and signed the contract a day later. 'We had never read anything like it in our lives before,' says Pachnos. Hale, who still edits Banks' books, says: 'I was wondering if he was going to be as horrifying as the book suggested he might be, but of course he wasn't only his shirt, which had awful long pointy collars.'

No one guessed that The Wasp Factory would go stellar. His advance was £2,500, 'so it wasn't like, instant megabucks'. But then he was given a hefty offer for the paperback rights: 'I think my share came out at about £11,000, and I thought, 'well, I can live off that for a year at least if Annie kept working', so I gave up the day job in order to write.' At that point he remembers Hale telling him not to write too much, a book a year would be just about right: 'So I thought 'well, OK, I won't then'.'

Most of Banks' books have an obvious dramatic, cinematic quality, though he insists that it's usually a bad idea to have film in mind when he's writing. So he was happy to leave Brian Elsley to script Crow Road and Gavin Millar to direct it for television: Banks played no part at all. 'I felt, if it's a triumph, then it's their triumph.' The same team have just finished filming Complicity, due out around the turn of the year.

What Banks really wants is a multi-million blockbuster to be made of one of the sci-fi books: the company that made The Fifth Element has optioned Player of Games. But recently Banks has been helping Roger Gray, a friend he made at the bar of an SF convention, in the scripting of Espedair Street, his novel about a rock superstar. On Gray's birthday four years ago the pair were in a pub: 'I said to him 'you must get someone to film Espedair Street', and he said, 'OK, you write it'. So he gave me the option on the film for a birthday present. We had to do it legally, so I paid him a pound.' The script has now gone to Union Pictures.

Banks had always insisted that he wouldn't let Espedair Street be filmed unless the songs used in the film were his own he's been writing rock songs for as long as he's been writing novels. Enter Gary Lloyd, who Banks also came to know in the 80s, when Lloyd composed a CD of music based on The Bridge.

Lloyd went with some trepidation up to Scotland. 'I was thinking I'd listen to the songs he'd recorded, and I'd find myself having to say, 'look Iain, your books are great, just don't give up the day job'. But no way his songs are fantastic.' Now Lloyd is working with Maxton Walker, a Guardian sub-editor who has written a play (The Curse of Iain Banks, currently being performed at the Edinburgh festival) in which the characters meet a gruesome death every time Banks writes a novel.

Older friends think that Banks is surprisingly unaffected by fame and riches. Macfarlane says: 'The only real difference it's made is material things. I tell him that whenever he walks into a shop the people's eyes start ringing like tills.'

Banks says: 'I buy more than my numerically fair share of curries, but I don't buy as many as I should. It's difficult, very hard to get right. You don't want to insult your old friends by going, 'I'm rich, I'm going to buy all the drinks'. They know, and I know, that the fact that I'm rich is mostly luck, and the fact that the society in which we live values what I do absurdly higher than it deserves. Two of my friends are teachers, and they do a much more valuable job for society than I do. But we live in capitalism, and there's a huge market for escapism, art, entertainment, so I get paid more than I deserve.'

The central character in The Business is a wealthy young woman executive for an ancient company which is planning, very discreetly, to buy a country. But she grew up on a rough Glasgow estate, and still carries a sense of her background about with her. Kate contributes one tenth of her income each year to charity.

So what about Banksie, the old leftie? What does he contribute? A tenth? A fifth? 'Oh no, not 10%. Eventually maybe, yes, when I've got mum and dad's house out of the way. Yeah, I think that's a decent sum. But partly it's conscience money...'

You mean, you feel guilty about being so well off?
'No, I mean for Kate it's conscience money. If I anguished about what I earn I'd stop writing. I write what I write. There's no point in anguishing. It's the way the world works.'

Initially, of course, Banks was the walking definition of a 'cult' novelist (meaning odd subject matter). Perhaps that's why, in spite of a veritable cabinet-load of SF awards, he's never won a straight literary prize. But there's a paradox to the cult image: one of the main reasons Banks has amassed such a devoted following is precisely because, in terms of novelistic structure, he's an out-and-out traditionalist. 'I love plot, I love stories. I hate these novels that just stop. I think, 'Hello? What happened? Did they run out of words?' People seem to think that's the clever way to end novels. Well, I don't think it's good enough. I want closure. I don't want any of this existentialist post-modern sh**e, pal. I want a story, with an ending.'

So it's not really true is it, this stuff about only starting work in September? Surely he spends the rest of the year churning stories over in his mind, patching bits of plot together, noting odd ideas? 'If I was doing that,' Banks insists, 'I might as well write.' What does he do then? Well, he reads more now that he's overcome a debilitating addiction to Civ 2, the computer strategy game. And? 'I just faff around. I'm amazed how little I manage to get done, given the time I've got to do it.'

But really, he must spend some time thinking about the next book (which will be SF: Banks alternates each year, SF, then 'mainstream'? 'Maybe once a week, for about three seconds. But mostly I just think, 'let's get summer out of the way, then I can think about it'. Partly it's laziness, partly I feel as if writing more would seem like showing off. I make a very good living writing one book a year. Why try harder?'