Iain Banks Reading group webchat: Ken MacLeod as it happened

The science fiction writer was with us to discuss his late friend Iain Banks The Bridge, as well as his own work. Here are his fascinating answers to your questions

Iain Banks: A science-fiction star first and foremost
Iain Banks The Bridge: the link between his mainstream and SF work

Its a great pleasure to say that the writer Ken MacLeod was with us for a webchat about Iain Banks. Ken and Iain were friends from their mid-teens onwards and this is a superb opportunity to ask about the life, works and enduring legacy of one our greatest literary stars.

Ken has also promised to re-read this months reading group title, The Bridge, so if you have any lingering questions about this fascinating, complex book this is a good opportunity to air them. Also, as a primer, and since weve been discussing how The Bridge straddles Banks mainstream fiction and his SF output, you might want to look at MacLeods lovely tribute to his friends talent, the way he smuggled truck-loads of science fiction past the border guards of the literary establishment and the mark he is going to leave on posterity:

The reputation and reception of Iain Banks as a mainstream author may fluctuate in the future. His verve and talent will always be recognised, and his work will always find and enthrall new readers, but tastes change unpredictably as decades pass. But the place of Iain M Banks in science fiction is already assured, and permanent. He was one of our very best, a star whose light will travel a long way, and fall on places not yet built.

Firstly, Id like to say that rereading The Bridge has brought home to me how much we have lost with the passing of Iain Banks. His talent for combining complex ideas with humour and readable narratives is going to be sorely missed.

I noticed, on a quick trawl through the Internet, that Iain Banks had a background in Arts subjects while you are a Science graduate, having studied Zoology. I was wondering if you think that gives you a different approach to writing Science Fiction and perhaps life in general?

Well, Iain was always as interested in science as I was, and I was almost as interested in literature and philosophy - it's just that he had the sense to study what he was actually good at, while I had this fixed idea about being a scientist for reasons that now escape me. I think his writing shows a greater literary range than mine.

If you haven't SF in a while, start with my more recent novels such as Intrusion or The Night Sessions.

Hello Ken. Thank you for joining us to discuss Iain and his work.

The following post to your Guardian article on Iain Banks from June last year was made by spacedone had 187 likes. He/She quoted first from your piece -

A source of enduring irritation to him and to his indefatigable literary agent Mic Cheetham, who became a beloved friend was the tendency of some critics who admired his mainstream work to treat his SF as a potboiling sideline best passed over in silence, like some embarrassing and disreputable, but otherwise harmless quirk.

I caught the tribute to Iain on R4 Today programme this morning where his entire body of science fiction work was essentially dismissed as unimportant by the guests. Half of his lifes work dismissed with a Um... I tried reading one once, I didnt like it. Bloody snobs.

People who read SF just for pleasure are the only credible judges of merit.

I don't want to get into the literary v genre argument here, and I don't think any literary fiction critics bother reading SF fans' intemperate comments under articles, so damage in that quarter isn't a worry.

It isn't hard to find readers and reviewers who liked Iain Banks and ignored Iain M. Banks, however, and Iain did meet quite a few: 'Yes, but when are you going to write your next novel, Mr Banks?'

Dear Ken,

A question.

Untold stories ... he told me after his diagnosis that he had an idea for a Culture novel that if he didn't live to write he'd leave the notes and outline to me to write in my own way (not a pastiche of his style or anything). Sadly he didn't live long enough even to leave notes, beyond one basic idea which I can't do anything with.

Fave Culture ship name ... mind's gone blank. Oh wait, GSV Mind's Gone Blank sounds plausible, doesn't it?

Hello Ken. Weve been talking a lot about the influence of Alasdair Grey on Iain Banks - the other writer he often cited as a huge influence and one very relevant to the discussion about science fiction was M John Harrison. (Who is amazing and who I discovered thanks to Iain Banks referencing him...). Do you think MJHs influence is apparent in The Bridge? What ideas do you think Iain took from MJHs work? (And is it true that MJH was inspired to write the Light trilogy after a conversation with Iain?).

Second question: One thing thats very refreshing in Iains sci-fi is the exuberant humour . Do you think there was suddenly a watershed in sci-fi in general when it developed a kind of self-aware humour? (Was it all Douglas Adamss fault?!). Or has it always been there? Do you think that perhaps saved the genre from itself to a degree? (Much like This Is Spinal Tap made heavy metal bands aware of and able to laugh at their own excesses - though importantly, unlike the Tap, neither Adams nor Banks are laughing at science-fiction when they use it as a fertile ground for humour).

I think what Iain took from Mike Harrison's work wasn't so much ideas as ambition, and a sense of what could be done with apparently clapped-out forms (sword-and-sorcery, post-apocalypse, space opera ...) if you faced head-on what real issues they were evading. Harrison's 1970s critical essays and reviews in New Worlds Quarterly were a big influence, and his stories a big inspiration in that respect.

There's always been a strand of humour in SF, as well as parody, and Iain had already written the first drafts of several novels a few years before Hithchiker came on the radio. Catch-22 and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas were more direct influences on Iain.

Ken, you are acknowledged by Iain himself in Use of Weapons for arguing the old warrior out of retirement. To what extent did you influence Use of Weapons? Could you see something worth persevering that Iain couldnt?

All I did for Use of Weapons was to ask Iain if I could re-read the MS and see if something could be done with it, and then to point out that its original highly artificial structure placed the climactic revelation in the middle, making everything after it an anti-climax. I also suggested the structure of one set of chapters (the flashbacks) going backward in time and the other (the narrative present) going forward, so they both arrived at their respective (and linked) revelations together.

Hi Ken, I have not read any Iain M. Banks as I am not a lover of sci-fi novels but I enjoyed The Bridge so much, and others on here have been linking it to The Culture that I am ready to try - can you recommend a good starting point?

If you enjoyed The Bridge, you'd probably like Use of Weapons.

Just to jump in, I read Consider Phlebas straight after The Bridge, and although it's supposed to be one of the weaker Culture novels, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Interesting to see lots of the ideas from the Bridge reappearing in new contexts too...

Hi Ken. I have a read quite a few of Iains books, including a couple of the Culture series, but have still a long way to go before I finish them all (lucky me!). One theme in his SF work that stands out for me so far is his treatment of what happens when we die, and in particular the choices available to both individuals and civilisations in his books. From sublimation and personality back-ups to artificial heavens and hells.

Everything I have read has been characterised by his astonishing imagination, but these themes do seem to be among the more thoughtfully explored concepts in the series.

Iain was a hard-line materialist, and had little interest in religion as such. However, his understanding of materialism held open the possibility of an actual afterlife becoming technically possible through (handwave) copying brain-states into machines, and the copies living in a virtual reality or a robot body. That opened all sorts of possibilities, grim as well as good. But the idea that we now have after-lives of whatever sort struck him as implausible as well as self-centred.

Ken, were the oblique references to The Culture in The Bridge just for those of you who had read the drafts of the early Culture novels?

Yes - and also just for his own amusement, I suspect.

Hello Ken,

It was obvious from Walking On Glass that the author was familiar with a lot of different types of fabulism. In the Culture books we saw a lot of small variations but really within whats often called wide-screen baroque, with hints of Charles Harness and Barrington J Bayley in the early ones then a more developed Iain M Banks idiom. Apart from Feersum Enjinn and a couple of shorter piece it was exploring this one set-up in different ways.

To the best of my knowledge Iain never had so much as an idea for a near-future SF novel, and certainly never showed any interest in writing one. The closest he comes to that is Transition. He explored other sub-genres of SF and fantasy in the short stories collected in The State of the Art, but I don't recall any that were straight extrapolation of near-future possibilities. He liked reading that kind of SF, but wasn't inclined to write it.

Hey Ken and hey Reading Group,

Just finished The Bridge, I thought it was totally awesome, but Im still sort of processing it, feel very similar to how I did when I finished The Magus actually, but not ready to ask a question about that book yet (hopefully will be tomorrow though)

Iain certainly saw the Culture as an optimistic vision, though his view of its darker side (the manipulations of the Minds, the problems of meaning that you suggest, etc) darkened as time went on.

In terms of nationality, I suppose more Scottish than British ... again, increasingly as time went on. He was definitely a supporter of Scottish independence, for the non-nationalist reason that he thought a more left-wing country would result.

Ken and All,

Given that all political parties (SNP included) are happy with TTIP, and the weak is confused and directionless, is the future more Transcapital-Techno than Techno-Socialist that you write?

Thanks!

The only one of my books that has a socialist techno-utopia is The Cassini Division, and it all runs on nanotech which is at least as indistinguishable from magic as the Culture Minds are. Most of my books are pretty much techno-capitalist futures. I don't think population growth or climate change are insurmountable problems for capitalism or socialism but that's too long an argument for here. In terms of SF outlook I think Iain and I were at least looking at the same stars, though from different windows.

Okay came up with a question about the Bridge, one that after reading the excellent comments on Sams articles that I dont think has actually been asked:

1. Should we actually like or sympathise with Mr. Lennox?

Hmm ... the first is a good question that I don't have an immediate answer to.

The second, about the violence (human and natural) - I think that concretises something Alex thinks on at one point: that any tendency to self-pity is torn apart by the reflection that most people in the world have much worse things to deal with, and that he is lucky. It's his awareness of natural disasters, wars, exploitation and misery coming out of the shadows of his mind.

Hi Ken,

Huge fan of Iains work and discovered your own work through him. I a sadly woefully behind (having only read the star fraction) but an observation I would make based on that book is the difference between you two. Iain postulates a (mostly) benevolant social utopia. Your future, while strongly socialist in tone, seems rather my dystopia. I see them as two (equally valid) sides of the same coin, just wondering about your thoughts on this?

Yes, the world in The Star Fraction is one in which a utopia is possible but we're not getting to it any time soon. (Some readers see the fragmented Britian in that world as a libertarian utopia (or 'Libertaria') already, and who am I to argue?) In its sort-of sequels, The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division, we see one version of the socialist utopia come about centuries after the Fall Revolution, and in The Sky Road we see a different (and possibly better) outcome of the same events

Hello, Mr. MacLeod.

In an effort to be brief: I like your writing, and if you write more, Ill read more. I am, however, incredibly anxious to learn the answers to the following questions about Iains writing. Would you please live a bit longer, so I can ask you some questions about you later?

1. No ideas that can be developed, sadly.

2. I don't know, but I seem to recall reading the MS and it was pretty much as published, give or take maybe some purple passages.

As I read your account of reading New Worlds magazines and talking SF with Iain Banks while you were growing up, I wondered if you both knew then that you wanted to be writers? And if so, did you know what kind of writers you wanted to be? Was it surprising, for instance, that Iain Banks first published The Wasp Factory instead of SF?

Iain wanted to be a writer from the age of about ten or so, and I wanted to be a scientist (though I did want to write SF, and wrote very bad SF stories every so often from my teens to my thirties). Iain wanted to write mainstream and SF, I think, but SF was his first choice. According to David Haddock one of Iain's SF novels (The Player of Games, I think) nearly got accepted.

But after lots of rejections of first TTR ( a sprawling near-future pun-riddled satire) then his space operas, Iain rather shame-facedly admitted to his friends that he was going to try something else. He really was a little worried that we'd think he was selling out and letting the side down by writing such a mainstream and middle-of-the-road and respectable novel as The Wasp Factory.

He really was a little worried that we'd think he was selling out and letting the side down by writing such a mainstream and middle-of-the-road and respectable novel as The Wasp Factory.

haha!

I know that youve been re-reading The Bridge prior to this webchat (which is much appreciated!) and am wondering if your take on the book has changed since you first read it? It struck me that it would be the kind of book that seems very different every time you go through it - although since Ive only read it once, Im not really in a position to say....

I also wonder about how interpretations of the book could change given Iain Banks changing politics. Am I right in thinking that when he was writing The Bridge he was pretty firmly a Labour supporter, but later went over to the SNP thanks to Tony Blair? I kept wondering if it was possible to see something about Scottish nationalism in the depictions of this grand national monument, decaying industry and the conflicts with Thatcherite materialism...

Well, having just finished the re-read this morning ... The Bridge is actually better than I remember it, in that I can see more of the thought that went into it and the allusions in the characters' names (Cramond, Arroll, and no doubt more that I've still missed). In some ways, as Stuart Kelly has pointed out, it didn't just take inspiration from Lanark but foreshadowed some later Scottish fiction: the use of phonetic demotic, and the attention to the 70s and 80s as a turning point for Scotland. The shift from the post-war settlement to neoliberalism is lived by the character and strongly evoked.

On the politics - Iain's politics didn't really change, as I argued here: he supported Labour when it was still Labour, as he put it in his final interview in the Guardian, and then the SNP as a party that (as he saw it) was closer to what Labour used to stand for than any other mainstream party.

Hey thanks - that article was fascinating. And yes, take the point that although he remained constant, Labour changed... (more's the pity!)

Ken,

When I was fortunate to meet Iain at a public reading, I asked him to comment on , what I see as, his essentially positive and exhilarating view of a potential future, in the The Culture, in contrast to the overwhelming body of dystopian futures that are often SFs stock in trade.

Yes, I'd say it emerged from his character in that he had a great exuberance and optimism about the potential of science and technology, combined with (and here's where the dark stuff came from) a fairly disillusioned view of how we actually are and how likely we are to do good stuff with all our shiny tech.

I have a difficult easy question: Which is your favourite Iain Banks book and why.

Also, since lots of people this month seem to have become interested in SF after reading The Bridge, are there any books youd recommend for beginners? (Goes without saying they should read yours too!)

Same answer to both questions: Use of Weapons. But if you mean my favourite of his mainstream work, The Crow Road. It's also a lot less grim than The Bridge.

Would just like to say thank you for some wonderful writing and ask , in the space opera genre for want of a better word who else would you recommend?

Peter Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds, Justina Robson. I haven't yet read Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie but it's getting rave reviews, won every major SF award in 2014 and is often said to be like Banks's SF.

Did Iain have a favourite whiskey? Or a number of favourite whiskies? Apologies if this is revealed in Raw Spirit ...

Laphroig and Macallan, at opposite poles more or less in terms of taste, were among them. Much more detail in Raw Spirit, q.v..

Excellent! If I ever come across some I'll raise a toast to his genius.

Surely Ursula K LeGuin was a big influence on Banks SF writing? Reading The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed recently it was clear that they had greatly influenced the Culture novels.

Hard to say - I'm fairly sure he came up with the idea of the Culture before he'd read The Dispossessed.

Just in case theres time for one more question: What are you working on at the moment?

Three short novels scheduled to come out in rapid succession to form a space opera trilogy. Robots and uploaded dead soldiers in conflicts around an extrasolar system.

Thank you for taking time to answer all these questions Im grateful I could read what you had to say. Here is one more.

At what stage is your work on your and Iains joint poetry collection, and how are you feeling working or having worked on it? Could you -- would you like to? -- share anything about your selection criteria, or your decisions on how to structure the collection?

I sent in the corrected proofs yesterday.

Iain selected his own poems, and I selected mine. I don't know what his criteria were: mine for my own were basically anything I thought still seemed all right. I did ask others to give them a critical eye, and of course the editor at Little, Brown too. The structure is Iain's poems, then mine.

Something I always wanted to ask Iain was how much his work was influenced by the T.S. Eliot, having a series of books on the Culture and quotations from The Wasteland within these works, it was always my assumption that Iains Culture novels were derived from Eliots Notes on the definition of Culture.

Would you know if this was in any way true?

Certainly The Waste Land was an influence, but I doubt that the other connection is anything but a coincidence of names.

Thank you Ken, Iain gave me such joy with his Sci Fi books, they will never lose their place on my shelves and I can only hope that one day my son may take them down to read them as I did with my Fathers Sci Fi books 35 years ago.

Thanks, everyone - and apologies to anyone whose questions I missed. Now, back to work.

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