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
war anarchist utopia
Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.
book long people
As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.
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!
book years drawing
I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.
heart thinking people
Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed, and I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.
superstitions shapes reason
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.
achievement
What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?
civilization might emptiness
It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.
husband strikes deviants
I'm a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.
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.
grandmother my-grandmother
It was the day my grandmother exploded.
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.
jobs teaching mean
In theory, I work an eight-hour day and a five-day week which means I can socialise with my pals who mostly have normal jobs like teaching and computer programming.