Listen up, Iain Banks, Science Fiction author

I love the Culture thing, Man. And your plots may be Heath Robinson, but your transexualism and politics of surplus rock. 

When we read books, we mustn't separate the author from what he or she writes. Remember Iago is Shakespeare's thought crime. Use of Weapon's was Ian Banks thought crime. If the police had read Use of Weapons before the publishers then Banks would have been sectioned. A forensic linguist would have had him sent him to Broadmoor.

Aha! There you have it. Shakespeare as Iago. The office of devil's advocate. Horror fiction writers imagine terrible things in close detail for the entertainment of their readership, who lap it up. What does that tell you about the people who write and read horror fiction? Look at misery literature. Who reads and writes that? What kind of a species are we? Where's the legislation against the imagination? This is chaos!  The imagination is like the sea. Legislators are King Canute. 


Yes, there is something insipid about the 'advanced' morality of the Culture. You visualise the women wearing shoulder pads. On some of the book covers I think they had them. 

I think many mainstream authors have swallowed a little brain pill that encourages them to project their own quirks and their parochialism onto infinite time and space.

An explicit extreme example of this was a very funny story. It was the High Crusade by Poul Anderson. I think it was referenced in the last Dr Who episode, where a spaceship lands in a small town in England during the middle ages around the time of the crusades and the poor saps on the spaceship assume that the men of the village are well meaning and rather simple, when if fact they are cunning crusading scheming dissembling rouges, and so of course they take over the space ship. Ultimately, because they are such hard and scheming crusader British bastards, they form alliances with different space-faring races and become the dominant force in the galaxy so that when in 1969 the Americans first go into space they find that the whole of space is colonised by medieval Brits who greet the Americans with something along the lines of:

'About bloody time. We've been waiting centuries for you to get here.'

What kind of Science Fiction would a young Arab demonstrator write? What kind of Science Fiction would a Boy going to a prestigious college in Bengal write? What kind of Science Fiction would an Iraqi write? What kind of Science Fiction would a young man playing music in the back of a Johannesburg Shebeen write. A young woman in Juarez. Not Banks kind, that is for sure.

Traditionally SF, for mainstream writers, is a form of displacement activity. Mainstream novelists use it this way. I dislike novelists who use SF to allegorize about trends in society. Burgess's book A Clockwork Orange is as patronising and as irritating as Gulliver's travels. I once teased Doris Lessing about Brian Aldiss. She had just written Shikasta and I had just read Hellicona Spring and I asked her what she thought of it and watched. She started out. 'Oh he's borrowed a lot from me...'  and she began to explain but then she caught me looking at her and understood. Memoirs of a Survivor creates a certain kind of atmosphere that PD James Children of Men live in.

John Wyndham. Now there was a good writer. Don't see his books on the shelves much. Better than Bradbury, though comparisons are odious. Stanislaw Lem was the greatest SF writer, of course.

Now, I would love to write a culture novel. What are the other great places. I always thought that Banks borrowed from Larry Niven - his known space books. But one book I admire, that Banks wrote, and that he doesn't get the credit he deserves is for writing, is Feersum Ennjin. It was brave. Has anyone ever done anything like that before? Long before texting, Banks was there. Joyce used phonetic transliteration a little, but Banks went all the way.

What makes Ian Banks good is his radical idea of surplus. That's the idea we have to explore and when people look back at Banks SF it will not necessarily be because he conceived bigger and better artifacts and worlds and stories than other SF writers and it won't be because he was dystopian or because he created cyberworlds or did destruction well. James Blish and Frank Herbert win there in a Clashing of Symbols and Dune. William Gibson got to cyberspace long before Banks. Larry Niven did big long before Banks. It will be because of this radical vital important incredibly essential notion of surplus that Banks will be valued.

Let's look at the climate change debate. Do you realise that on this paper right now the argument is being made against the exploration of the arctic because it will open up new oil reserves. What in God's name is that for a luddite, crazy nonsensical argument? Climate change is supposed to a bad thing, it has to be evil turtles all the way down because: New sea passages will be opened and new oil reserves and gas reserves will be made available - see Hilary Clinton's comments yesterday

I tell you, the ideologists of capitalism are afraid of surplus. They are shit scared by surplus. Socialists and communists are not. They welcome it.

All of us are writers now. I read your comments and Blogs and Facebook posts, you read mine. My children text and mail and so on. Everyone is writing, writing, writing. And I have been writing a lot too and one of the things I have discovered after about four years of constant writing is that good writing is about creating texture. Alan Moore makes jokes about this.

If you feel the texture of Banks work it varies. His visceral grotesquerie seems to stand up quite well - vorpal drones going snicker snack. But his characterisation is paper thin. His woman have surgically implanted vaginas [literally] his secondary characters have all the believability of characters from a dungeons and dragons game. His protagonists are pretentious rejects from Trainspotting. Banks' female characters are a love composite. Banks seems to idolise a certain kind of woman as a protagonist, but his characterisation is so poor we never get an insight into who this bloody woman actually is.

If Banks had the generosity of a greater writer he would read like Alan Sillitoe, the veins of whiskey would run thicker down his glass, but I think he despises his readership - a little. Alan Sillitoe, because Sillitoe had that sense of social justice. He described the sex act but honestly, not ridiculously. For all Banks 'radical' sex politics he doesn't describe sex well - it all hazes over. Though Sillitoe had fantastic scope he was a provincial boy like Banks and he was a master of detail. His writing had great texture

The sex act well described is just an example of texture. In fact we have a family friend. He writes North European erotic fiction and is famous for it in his country and the countries near his. He used to be a sea captain and now lives in the wild in South Africa. He's just written a magnum opus, not an erotic work, though I am sure there is erotism in it. The idea of texture comes from a discussion with him and with a great painter, for whom texture, he said, was almost everything.

What we should be discussing and what Banks should discuss is not the inanity of other people's plotting - contrasted with his own, but how SF has become a strange sort of reactionary social opiate. At a time when there are fewer and fewer alternatives available to global capitalism, SF goes to Hollywood and gives you Gee and Whizz. and Ghosh. Pan y circo

T. S. Eliot's remarks without the unnecessary religious insertions into them, sum up the mood of Banks novels.

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

[Bla, bla bla]

Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

[bla, bla, bla]

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.