Banks

[Matt]

So why is Iain Banks impossible to find in the U.S.?




e: split from this thread:
http://www.greatsociety.org/forums/index.php?topic=1499.0

[nacho]

So why is Iain Banks impossible to find in the U.S.?

Not impossible, just not popular.  And I know Dead Air was banned for awhile because -- gasp -- it was set with 9/11 as the backdrop.

The Banks fiction is highly intelligent, in my opinion, and hard to grasp for American readers.  His sci-fi is even more high brow, and loosely linked into one long running series.  Banks suffers from the same thing Murakami does -- you have to dedicate yourself to really settling into a book and exploring what goes on within the pages and yourself as you read it. 

Murakami's starting to catch on, but still sort of fringe.  Banks has never really been pushed in the US...which is a shame.  He's my favorite sci-fi writer, and his fiction is loads of fun.

For the Sci-Fi, start with Against a Dark Background, one of his few non-Culture novels.  Then launch into the Culture with the space opera Consider Phlebas.  It's sort of a bookend for the unofficial first phase of the Culture universe (the latest Culture book, Look to Windward, is set with the far-future after-effects of the action in Consider Phlebas).

Banks suggests an order for the Culture books on his site -- http://www.iainbanks.net/sf.htm  (note that Against a Dark Background, State of the Art -- except for a few stories -- Feersum Endjinn and The Algebraist are not Culture novels).

Of them all, Feersum Endjinn is the hardest to read... It's mostly in a phonetic dialect.  Fascinating and absorbing, really.  Inversions is only nominally a Culture novel.  Besides Look to Windward, it's the only Culture novel that has a connection to a previous novel (there are small, unimportant to the plot hints that suggest one of the characters, and perhaps the setting, might possibly be from Player of Games). 

State of the Art contains a wonderful non-sci-fi story about the Lockerbie crash, since we were just talking about that in the Newsday forum.  It also contained the most Mind-centered Culture story in the series up until Excession.

A wonderful little intro to the Culture that Banks wrote in 94 is right here:
http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

He's evolved the Culture quite a bit since then.

For the Banks fiction, my favorite is Complicity, hands down:
http://www.iainbanks.net/f07.htm

Much hated by his fans, my second fav is Walking on Glass:
http://www.iainbanks.net/f02.htm

This is tied with his spectacular and disturbing debut, The Wasp Factory:
http://www.iainbanks.net/f01.htm

I think The Bridge is, spiritually, a Culture novel.  If you read the Culture novels (and, especially, see how it's handled in Inversions), then you'll know what I mean.
http://www.iainbanks.net/f03.htm

I really enjoyed Dead Air, thanks to the drifting life after 9/11 sort of feel.  YEs, everything's the same.  But it isn't.
http://www.iainbanks.net/f11.htm

The rest of his fiction leaves me warm, but not really excited.  It's all worth your time, though.

[fajwat]

hit me up with some Banks, please?  I see what you mean about them not being readily available in the US.  I will supplement whatever you can buy new (or loan to me) with used mid 90s books.

[nacho]

If you take care of paperbacks, my collection will be on the shelf.  Though it's currently scattered through all these boxes, and I think I might have taken most of them to storage.  But I'll be pulling those out again so the mice don't get 'em!

Complicity and Feersum Endjinn, and maybe a couple others, I loaned out and never got back...because that's what people do these days, apparently.  I must have missed the addendum to Miss Manners.

[Matt]

"It's a gift. Books aren't meant to be lent out."`

[nacho]

"It's a gift. Books aren't meant to be lent out."`

Come on October!

[Matt]

Yeahaaa!

[nacho]

Always space to revive an Iain Banks thread.  Now with the Wikipedia entry on the Culture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture

[Cassander]

so i finished Wasp Factory yesterday and I must admit, I was somewhat dissatisfied, which is odd since everything else you've recommended to me has been great.  I really loved the kid's life, his little ceremonies and constructions because they reminded me a lot of what i did as a kid roaming the woods (only i never really played with dead animals), and it also captured that type of kid who is rarely written about, the shut-off from pop culture, overzealous weirdo pseudo-anarchist misanthrope with a sensitive side.  but the overall plot (his brother's imminent return, drawn out to a retarded length of time) and the every-other-chapter revelation bit just didn't jive with me.  and the ending...well, whatever. 

so does banks' actual writing improve in his other books?  i mean, he's not horrible, but his style is a pretty straightforward one and i usually like a little more gymnastic use of language.  i'll pick up complicity sometime, because wasp factory was just good enough to get me interested, i just don't think it lived up to its "TOP 100 NOVELS OF THE CENTURY IN BRITAIN!!!11!!!1!" honor that's pasted all over my copy.

oh, if anyone wants to borrow/take it off my hands, hit me up and i'll send it to you.

[nacho]

so does banks' actual writing improve in his other books?  i mean, he's not horrible, but his style is a pretty straightforward one and i usually like a little more gymnastic use of language.  i'll pick up complicity sometime, because wasp factory was just good enough to get me interested, i just don't think it lived up to its "TOP 100 NOVELS OF THE CENTURY IN BRITAIN!!!11!!!1!" honor that's pasted all over my copy.

Yes, he does.  Wasp Factory is his first novel, and became huge (making him huge) thanks to the twist.  Which, 20 years ago, in the UK, was somewhat wild.  I read Wasp Factory after plowing through his sci-fi and loved it, but I wonder if that's because it sort of fell into the "origins of the author" category, because you're not the first to say what you're saying to me. 

Complicity is his best fiction, in my opinion.  I'm a larger fan of his sci-fi, where his writing becomes more experimental (Feersum Endjinn is 300 pages of phonetic writing). I've been let down by his fiction a few times, but I'm always enthused by his sci-fi.  The writing style for the two genres are, bizarrely, quite different.  As if we're dealing with two distinct personalities.

You'll see his writing evolve and refine itself as time goes on.  But, in the end, Banks is a love him or hate him author, and his protagonists are all the weird lone wolf type. 

[Cassander]

okay, well, the other day i was at a coffee shop and i saw this girl sit down, tramp stamp, lowrider jeans, perfect hair, baubly earrings, 34-26-36, and a cream-infused coffee.  Then she pulls out Song of Stone.  even if i'm not on the Banks bandwagon yet, the irony seemed incredibly hot. 

[nacho]

With Orbit US opening up in September, we're about to get flooded with Banks.  I think, along with two new releases next year, Orbit plans to dump the entire Banks catalog into the market on a month-by-month basis.

[nacho]

Transition is getting lots of buzz...

Times Online is reporting that the new Iain M. Banks novel, Transition, is being serialized for free on iTunes as an abridged audio book:

    Iain Banks's latest novel, Transition, is to become the first newly published book to be serialised internationally on iTunes.

Publisher Little, Brown Book Group has agreed a deal with Apple to make an abridged audio version of the novel available as a free podcast.

The first podcast will go live on September 3 when the novel is published. A further 22 episodes, each 15 minutes long, will be released on iTunes in Britain and America every Thursday and Saturday for 12 weeks.

It's releasing as regular fiction in the rest of the world and, controversially, as "Iain M" (that is, sci-fi) in the US.  It sounds totally off the wall, and Banks has been dropping hints that it's part of a new ongoing series (like the Culture books):

A world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse, such a world requires a firm hand and a guiding light. But does it need the Concern: an all-powerful organisation with a malevolent presiding genius, pervasive influence and numberless invisible operatives in possession of extraordinary powers?

On the Concern's books are Temudjin Oh, an un-killable assassin who journeys between the peaks of Nepal, a version of Victorian London and the dark palaces of Venice; and a nameless, faceless torturer known only as the Philosopher. And then there's the renegade Mrs Mulverhill, who recruits rebels to her side; and Patient 8262, hiding out from a dirty past in a forgotten hospital ward. As these vivid, strange and sensuous worlds circle and collide, the implications of turning traitor to the Concern become horribly apparent, and an unstable universe is set on a dizzying course.

[nacho]

Long interview from The Guardian --

Dear me, have you noticed how many middle-aged, bearded blokes are around these days? It makes Iain Banks terribly difficult to spot in a crowd. Maybe that 70s polytechnic lecturer look he has assiduously adopted for so many years is finally in fashion. Still, when he strides into Edinburgh's swanky Balmoral Hotel, fresh off the train from his home in North Queensferry, he looks trim and well-groomed – and, slightly surprisingly, orders a mineral water from the bar.

Banks has cut down on drink, he says, and drugs have been banished. At 55, with his divorce a fading memory and now ensconced in a relationship with the film festival curator and novelist Adèle Hartley, his life would appear fairly contented – except for the fact that he's having to take a pay cut. As one of Britain's most consistently successful writers for a quarter of a century, surely this must have come as quite a shock?

Banks shrugs. "I'm getting less money for my next book contract," he says simply. "But I've heard of writers having their advances cut by 80%, and others getting nothing. You know, 'Sorry; we just don't want you any more.'"
Iain Banks speaks to Maxton Walker Link to this audio

In response, he plans to crank out a book a year, rather than his recent rate of one every 18 months. Ironically his new book, Transition, is being talked of as a return to form after what many fans consider a decade of lacklustre mainstream output. His last three non-science-fiction novels, The Business, Dead Air and The Steep Approach to Garbadale, left many wondering if the man who, in the 80s, was hailed as the "great white hope" of British literature was running out of steam. Readers bemoaned the relentless self-indulgence, with characters ranting endlessly about the world's ills in what felt suspiciously like the author's own voice. Fair point? "Dead Air is full of rants; it's a rant-based book," he concedes. "Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa."

Readers of both Banks's mainstream work and his hardcore science fiction (published under the name Iain M Banks) agree that the quality of his science fiction has held up much better over the years; the "M" novels Look to Windward (2000) and Matter (2008) were among his most ambitious and accomplished works in the genre. And, although Banks's publisher wouldn't supply me with sales figures, it's perhaps telling that Transition is being marketed in the US as an Iain M Banks novel. "I sell better as a science-fiction writer over there," he admits.

Attack on US foreign policy

So what does he think has prompted this seeming creative renaissance in his mainstream work? "With Transition, I wanted to prove something. I wanted to show I could do something like The Bridge [his third novel: a brilliant Kafkaesque account of the hallucinations of a man in a coma] again because until now, that has been my favourite. At my age, you realise that technically you are quite old, and you feel you have something to prove; that you can do something that has got energy in it."

The novel does feel akin to his much earlier works: structurally knotty, with multiple (often unreliable) narrators and plotlines. At the book's heart, though, is an exploration of the contradictions involved with a powerful organisation unilaterally adopting the moral high ground and setting out to put the world to rights. It's difficult, given the writer's previous rants on the evils of American imperialism both in and outside his fiction, not to see this as anything other than a veiled attack on US foreign policy.

Banks rejects the notion: "I don't think it's about America per se; it's more about power and the way that it is wielded in general. The Concern [a band of self-appointed metaphysical police officers with the ability to jump between parallel universes] is probably more like the Catholic church; a very, very long-lasting and very rich organisation with tentacles everywhere."

The novel features an alternate version of earth, in which a world ­ dominated by Asian influences is under attack from Christian terrorists. "It's meant to be a similar society to ours," he says, "but with some of the stuff inverted. Christianity would be a great religion for a terrorist; Catholicism especially because nobody's innocent, everybody's guilty. Babies are born guilty. Absolutely sick idea."

Banks's work has always been infused with nastiness; from Frank's macabre rituals in The Wasp Factory to the relentless violence and cruelty of 1997's deeply unsettling A Song of Stone. Transition is no exception, with the author applying his visceral imagination to the subject of torture. One member of the Concern, a psychopath known as The Philosopher, meditates at length – and in excruciating detail – on the uses of pain as an interrogation tool. That, concedes Banks, is an attack on US foreign policy.

"Yes, that all came from Abu Ghraib. Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons. You know: 'Well, there wasn't actually a bomb, but they might have been thinking about making one. . .'"

Misguided zealot or plain evil

As well as the political rants in his novels, Banks has never hesitated to make his own views clear in other ways. In 2004, he tore up his passport and posted the bits to then prime minister Tony Blair, in protest over the Iraq war, only applying for a new one when Gordon Brown (who has a house down the road from him in North Queensferry) assumed the hot seat.

"My girlfriend says we've got to stop describing ourselves as being only a mortar lob from his house . . . I'm only a little disappointed in Brown. I don't regard him as basically a war criminal, which is what Blair is. I think Blair was a misguided zealot, or just plain evil in the way Thatcher was – not in the way Hitler was, but still as evil as you get within the British system. But Blair and Brown have both been very good at standing up to the weak and poor, and utterly pathetic at standing up against the rich and powerful; they roll over every single time."

In January, Banks penned a rather gnomic two-sentence missive to the Guardian letters page: "We let the fat boys take over the tuck shop. We shouldn't be too surprised when we turn up only to discover that the shelves are bare," it simply said. What was that all about? "I'd had that phrase in my head for ages and I guess it was always destined to turn up in a book. I just thought I'd get it out there."

With book publishers now facing the same potentially ruinous challenges of the digital era as newspapers, Banks has gamely agreed to act as guinea pig for his own publisher, Little Brown, which is releasing an abridged audio version of Transition free on iTunes (the first instalment went online last week, on the same day the print version was published). Is he really reduced to giving away his work? Banks seems sanguine – perhaps even a little resigned – about the whole thing: "I think [the podcast] is quite brave of my publishers. I hope they're getting it right. My agent said to me: 'What do you think about this?' I said: 'I don't know.' We've got our fingers crossed."

What would he do if his work did stop selling? Could he contemplate retirement? "Even if I had enough money to live off the interest – and I certainly don't – I don't think I would. The way I imagine it happening is that the intervals between novels will just get longer again. I enjoy it too much – even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework. And apart from anything else, I've just gone through an expensive divorce so I couldn't retire."

It seems pretty depressing, though, for any aspiring writers if somebody of Banks's track record is having it rough. What next for him and his kind? "There will still be writers around, although I don't know how we'll get paid. Well over a century after the invention of motion pictures, we still have stage plays. The novel's not going to go away and I don't think the book will either."

[monkey!]

I noticed that this thread had been started by Matt.