Iain Banks
Iain Banks
Iain Bankswas a Scottish author. He wrote mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 February 1954
wall eye survival
Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza. "Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. "My survival." "So... your religion dies with you. How sad," Dorolow said, looking back from Horza to the screen. The Changer let the remark pass.
possibility-of-change development definitions
Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances — and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse — then you don't have life after death; you just have death.
time auras sides
Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.
mistake patterns should
One should never mistake pattern for meaning.
enemy answers knows
He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.
immediacy scholar
Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.
awards facts believer
I'm not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I've never won one has nothing to do with it at all!
lonely night car
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.
fun writing effort
There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.
falling-in-love character female
Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.
player years gentleman
Even in my side of the world, I've been in publishing for what, 25 or 26 years, and it's gone from being a gentlemen's club to being a few big players, and it's very corporatised.
salvation my-own
There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
cities scotland want
I've always loved Scotland, and I'm not a huge fan of big cities, to be honest. I like them to dip into for a bit, but I'm not sure I would want to live in one again.
machines arguing consciousness
I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.