Way back when ('when' being the mid-1980s), a young teenage boy came across a slim novella by a new Scottish writer, with the intriguing title of 'The Wasp Factory'. The writer was Iain Banks, the teen was yours truly, and thereby began a literary love affair that has lasted three decades (awww...).
Iain Banks, or Iain M. Banks to the Sci-Fi fraternity, was a breadth of fresh air and his first book, a disturbing, tongue-'n-cheek, twist-at-the-end chiller with at least one indelible image that this writer still finds upsetting to think about (if you've read the novel you'll probably guess the one), was a deserved best seller. Since then he has gone on to write some 12 novels, of varying success but extravagant ability, and remains one of the most highly regarded 'New Wave' of Scottish writers working today. However, so-called mainstream fiction aside, it his Science-Fiction that remains my greatest passion.
In 1987, in his first Sci-Fi novel 'Consider Phlebas', he introduced us to his greatest creation: the Culture. A peace-loving, galaxy-spanning civilization whose technology is thousands of years in advance of our own, with unlimited resources and an ultra-ultra-liberal society and culture, guided or watched over by sentient machines or 'Minds', it has become the playground for his imagination over the last twenty years.
In many ways the Culture is a sort of high-tech Utopian vision of a typical Scottish, 1970s leftie socialist, and it shows, but Oh My God, what a welcome contrast to the uptight, folksy American Sci-Fi that dominated the shelves of the Forbidden Planet and other purveyors of all things SF in the 1970s and '80s. The Culture is just so damned European, informed by liberal or centre-left European ideals of personal freedom coupled with social responsibility, that it is hardly surprising many American readers found it uncomfortable stuff (as one friend commented to me, 'It's just so damn socialistic...!'). But don't let that make you think Banks' books are some sort of political pamphleteering - there is no hidden agenda here. Far from it. They are invariably big style space operas, with bells and whistles attached, that simply outshine, outdo and out think most other contemporary Science-Fiction.
None of you George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry rehashes in book form here. Banks takes his fiction to the most fantastic places, far away yet always familiar. He works on the grand scale and the entirely human. His Culture books feature stories inspired by topics as diverse as superpower rivalries, terrorism, genocide, racism, socieo-economic struggles, feminism, colonialism. You name it in the real world and Banks has probably addressed it in one of his countless worlds and eerie echoes of our own global history rebound throughout his science-fiction. Yet none of this is at the expense of damn good stories with damn good characters. Everything is grist to the literary mill and it is turned with an expert hand by someone who is a natural proponent of his art.
Iain Banks is not just a great Sci-Fi writer, he is a great writer full stop, and that makes all the difference.
If you want to try his SF then the place to start is of course 'Consider Phlebas', a typical Banksian space opera (with brains and a message), with the best spaceship chase sequence you're ever likely to read in your life. It has all the basic ingredients that come to maturity in his later works and is the perfect place to dive into the Culture universe.
