Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Iain (M.) Banks has cancer and is not expected to live out the year:
“I have cancer. It started in my gall bladder, has infected both lobes of my liver and probably also my pancreas and some lymph nodes, plus one tumour is massed around a group of major blood vessels in the same volume, effectively ruling out any chance of surgery to remove the tumours either in the short or long term.”
He continued: “The bottom line, now, I’m afraid, is that as a late stage gall bladder cancer patient, I’m expected to live for ‘several months’ and it’s extremely unlikely I’ll live beyond a year. So it looks like my latest novel, The Quarry, will be my last.
“As a result, I’ve withdrawn from all planned public engagements and I’ve asked my partner Adele if she will do me the honour of becoming my widow (sorry – but we find ghoulish humour helps). By the time this goes out we’ll be married and on a short honeymoon. We intend to spend however much quality time I have left seeing friends and relations and visiting places that have meant a lot to us. Meanwhile my heroic publishers are doing all they can to bring the publication date of my new novel forward by as much as four months, to give me a better chance of being around when it hits the shelves.”
Damn, this is not good news to hear from one of your favourite novelists. I never met him, but his books had a huge impact on me, discovering them at a time when there were only three Culture books and before anybody I knew had ever heard of him. He has had a huge impact on the shape of UK science fiction in the nineties and noughties and without him, it’s hard to see how writers like Ken MacLeod, Richard Morgan, Neal Asher, Charlie Stross, Liz Williams or Justina Robson would’ve developed.
And of course he also wrote more general fiction, under his Iain Banks pseudonym. That too, is as good as anything I’ve ever read, The Bridge, Complicity and The Crow Road especially.
Good luck to him and his family.
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