Iain M. Banks has died, of the cancer he’d revealed earlier this year he had. Though the news doesn’t come as a surprise, it’s still a shock. He was only fiftynine, far too young. It’s hard to say how much he meant to me personally. I’ve never met him, or had any contact with him, but his novels, especially his science fiction were –are– incredibly important to me.
More objectively, Banks himself was a paradigm breaker, somebody who could write both science fiction and “literary” fiction and be taken seriously with both, who kept writing both and who liberally mixed in his sf with his mainstream stories. There had been other science fiction writers who went in for more mainstream literature, not to mention an army of properly literary writers dabbling in science fiction, but I think he was to first to keep consistently writing sf and literary fiction, therefore helping open up space for science fiction to be taken serious as literature.
Not to mention of course the huge influence he has had on other writers. Entire generations of British sf writers grew up in his shadow. Many of my favourite writers owe a debt to him: Charlie Stross, Ken MacLeod, Jon Courtnay Grimwood, Liz Williams, Justina Robson, China Mieville, Richard Morgan, these are all writers in which I recognise Banks’ influence.
But there’s more. He was also a principled leftist, something he showed not only through his writing –the Culture as the ultimate communist post-scarity paradise– but also in his actions. He was vehemently opposed to the War on Iraq, to the point that he tore up his passport when the invasion started as a protest. As his obituary at the Stop the war Coalition website makes clear, he was also a supporter of the cultural boycott of Israel as a way to pressure the country into giving up its apartheid regime.
“We continue in our children, and in our works and in the memories of others; we continue in our dust and ash.” — Iain Banks, The Crow Road.
No Comments