Iain Banks - ‘Troubled teens, turbulent atheists and really, really big guns’

It's been a year since Ian Banks passed.

Did he not get the memo?  His job was to turn out two books a year, one science fiction, the other of a genre of his choosing, until further notice.  Unfortunately it would appear that the universe had other ideas.

I bloody loved his books.  How does one judge what one’s favourite book is?  How about the number of times tou have re-read it?  Or how much you identify with it?  Or maybe you just happened to read it at a special or important moment in your life?  Or maybe reading the book was the special or important moment in your life.  Certainly, my copy of ‘Espedair Street’ looks well loved, as does my copy of ‘The Crow Road’.  Knowing that there are not going to be any new novels published, I’m going to have to slow down on the re-reading.

And god how I loved the sci-fi stuff.  Science fiction as it should be, with spaceships the size of, well, huge space ships, sardonic robots with loads of ordinance packed away in them, and proper aliens, and cool weapons and robots too.  There was probably some stuff in there about using the art form to examine the human condition but fuck that, I’ll save the introspection for the re-read.

I even loved ‘Raw Spirit’, where Banks essentially drives around distilleries, takes the tour, loads up his boot with scotch and, as far as I can work out, bills the lot to his publisher and writes it off against tax as ‘research’.  Cheers!  There’s probably more to it than that  but I’ll save it for the re-read.

I’ll miss Iain Banks.  I met him a couple of times at book signings and, despite the fact he was hugely popular and had probably been signing books for sweating fanboys like myself for days if not weeks, he had great charm and always seemed flattered that somebody was interested in his writing, and wanted a book signed.  And a hardback at that!