Iain Banks Community

Stonemouth

2012-05-13T20:25:49Z

I enjoyed Stonemouth for many reasons. To begin with, while the location in the book was made up it came across as very real, as did the characters.

In addition, as someone who moved away from my hometown I could relate to Stewart (Stu) Gilmore’s feelings about returning home. (Not that I was run out of my hometown by gangsters.) Iain Banks caught the sense of returning home and finding oneself in familiar surroundings where things appear to have never changed, time never to have moved on, and yet you feel different.

I liked the way facts about Stu’s life in Stonemouth were revealed and Iain’s treatment of Stu’s interaction with old friends and companions wrung true. His treatment of Stu’s conflicting thoughts and internal reasoning about how his former girlfriend would react to him felt realistic.

The first half of the novel moved relatively slowly and I did wonder if I would have read it had it not been an Iain Banks novel. However, about halfway through it picked up the pace and I found myself not wanting to put it down. In fact, I had to force myself to put the book down at 1am on a midweek night so that I could get some sleep. (I only had twenty pages left at the time and so I finished it in Starbucks the following morning before going into work.)

Iain Banks always likes to take a shot at the establishment. The scene at the golf course presents him with this opportunity and his description of the gathering reminded me of all the recent coverage in the UK press about the “Chipping Norton Set” and the environment of collusion between politicians, agents of law and order, and those with a predilection for pursuits beyond those considered strictly legal, but all for the “better good”, of course. This scene could also be taken as a “hats off” salute to the film, “Hot Fuzz”, in which Bill Bailey’s two characters (Sergeants Turner) are seen to be reading Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks novels, and in which a similar approach to peace keeping can be observed.

It is the first book I’ve read in a long time in which the ending was not a foregone conclusion. Right up until the end it could have gone any number of ways and Iain Banks did a great job of laying any number of false trails that the reader could follow. As I approached the end of the book I had at least four possible endings in mind and I was kept guessing to the last few pages.

Many reviewers have considered this book to be a disappointment for a Banks novel. I do not agree with them. While “Stonemouth” is not “The Bridge”, “Walking on Glass”, “The Crow Road”, “Espedair Street”, “Complicity”, or “The Was Factory”, it is still a good read with a lot to offer and a novel that would have been acclaimed had it been written by someone else.

Thank you, Iain, for another enjoyable story.

Transition

2009-09-27T07:32:22Z

I finished Transition by Iain Banks. It's the best SF novel I have read (actually I listened to it on an excellent audio version) this year. It seems to me to be a return to form for Banks. It overlaps in theme with some of his early and most successful novels. Like The Bridge and Walking on Glass everything that happens is or may be a delusion in the mind of a person in a long term hospital. Like Walking on Glass there is a mechanism which allows the protagonist to step into the mind of other people and experience what they experience. Like both these stories, and the more explicitly SF Against a Dark Background the theme of solipsism runs through the novel, and as in that book it is linked to the idea that just as a solipsist seems to be alone, so the human race seems to be alone in the universe.

I think perhaps Iain Banks' experience of being an imaginative person underpins these themes. Being imaginative can 'put you into the shoes' of another person, and hence connect you to them. But, you aren't really in their shoes are you? You are running a model of what it would be like to be them, in your head. You are constructing a world of puppets, in your own mind, just when you are trying hardest to connect to other human beings. And interacting with real people is so frustrating and futile compared to controlling the infinite puppets of the imagination. The people in Walking on Glass stood with their heads in imagination, and couldn't tear themselves away to experience the boring real world. The protagonist of The Bridge had to leave his dream and face the fuck-up he'd made of his life.

The theme of torture also runs through the story, and torture is an example of turning another person into a puppet of your imagination. You expunge their identity and impose your own words onto them. One of the main protagonists is a torturer, and interestingly the voice-actor gave him an accent close to Iain Banks' voice, and he has the nickname 'The Philosopher'. The person he tortures is himself. Another person manipulates puppets and it seems that 'upstairs' real people are doing what he makes the puppets do.

The premise of the story - a secret organisation which sends its agents through a subset of the infinite fractal set of possible worlds - gives vast scope. The plot is a power struggle between two senior women for control of the organisation. Our main p.o.v., a male assassin called O, gets caught up in this, being seduced and used by both ladies. Other voices include the torturer and the only character from our world, a hedge fund dealer called 'Ade' who aids the goodies. I liked Ade, though he eventually gets crushed to death by his own possessions. In the Cayman Islands.

The story works because Banks can describe the far flung scenes and contrasting universes so vividly and economically. He goes a wee bit over the top from time to time, but that's what you expect. The political struggles of the day, I mean of today in this world, are given a suitable trot-through in various allegorical masks. Puppets, torture, terrorism. I think he's teetering on the brink of letting plot go altogether and writing a story that works entirely through metaphor and suggestion. Where he doesn't explain, those are the bits that work best.

What are the flaws of the novel? I think when he does try to explain, some of the interlocking story-lines don't make much sense, and I felt it all wound up in rather a peremptory fashion in the last sliver of the book with a Deus Ex Machina which sort of rebooted everything. The good ended happily and the bad, unhappily - that's what fiction means.

Transition

2009-08-28T21:21:48Z

I know it's not due out until next Thursday, but hey!, some naught bookshops have Transition on their shelves today. I managed to relieve one of said naughty bookshops of a copy and am poised to delve into the prologue.

Iain Banks at Phoenix Convention 7

2009-05-30T22:41:02Z

Iain Banks will be Guest of Honour at Phoenix Convention 7 in Dublin : 5th, 6th & 7th March, 2010.

www.pcon.ie

Iain M. Banks at Satellite 2

2009-05-14T12:44:06Z

Iain M. Banks is going to be the guest of honour at Satellite 2, a two-day SF convention being held in Glasgow on July 25th & 26th this year. More information and a downloadable membership form at the website: http://www.satellite2.org.uk. At the con, he will be reading from his forthcoming Iain Banks novel, Transition, which will be published in September.

Iain Banks Signing in DUBLIN

2009-05-13T23:08:52Z

For those of you in Dublin, Iain Banks will be in Chapters Bookstore at 5pm to 6pm on Friday, 15th May. He will be signing books in advance of attending a meeting of the Trinity College Literary Society.

The State of the Art, Radio 4

2009-03-23T19:35:45Z

Bit of a long shot, but did anyone here manage to record the BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Iain M Banks' The State of the Art? Originally broadcast 5 March 2009.

It's no longer available on the BBC website, but I'd love to hear it if anyone was able to get a recording.

Thanks!

Edit: Found an mp3 of the radio show, thanks to doire. Thanks for reading!

The State of the Art on BBC Radio 4

2009-03-06T10:25:23Z

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_play.shtml

It was Thursday's "play" this week and should be available for 7 (6 now) days.

I haven't listened yet, just trying to decide if hearing real people will sound wrong to me.

ETA: It wasn't bad at all really, and has allowed me to show some friends a glimpse of The Culture.

Special Circumstances Steampunk

2009-02-27T10:33:46Z

Steampunk-like rendering of a classic pair: SC agent and a drone.

From here.

Random thought

2009-02-10T15:15:32Z

I was clearing snow off the decks with my 13yo daughter the other day, and something she said made me think, "You know, All Done With Walking Softly would be a great name for a Culture ROU/GOU."

Just musing

2008-10-07T16:36:56Z

Potential Culture (or Culture-ish) ship names:

ROU Sharp Difference of Opinion
ROU Excessive Force
ROU Necessary Violence
ROU I Don't Recall Asking Your Opinion
GCU Smash & Grab Artist
GSV That Isn't Exactly What I Said
GSV Inevitable What, Again?
GSV For Unusually Large Values Of One
VFP See That? That's Dust.

(Crossposted to unixronin)

iain_banks @ 2008-10-01T13:39:00

2008-10-01T12:39:37Z

'The State Of The Art' to be adapted as part of a major BBC radio cross-station science fiction drama season.

Drone auras?

2008-09-01T11:46:04Z

Hey folks,

I've recently started reading books about The Culture and find them facinating.

I've read Consider Phlebas and am reading The Player of Games.

I'm really impressed.

...

The reason I'm posting, is that I'm looking for further info about Drones in The Culture.

Specifically about inbuilt technology, sensors, abilities and what mood each aura colour dictates.

The idea of machine body language gives me wood.

...

Purple - Confused
Rosey red - Annoyed/angry

What else?

Double Acts

2008-08-21T11:50:00Z

Inspired by this review of Matter:

View Poll: #1245729

iain_banks @ 2008-07-23T15:20:00

2008-07-23T14:22:12Z

Iain Bansk internet Q&A.

I noticed the excerpt posted on BoingBoing:

The one thing that won't be enough [to become like the Culture] is getting to a post-scarcity society; a statistically valid number of us have lived in something very like that for the past decade and a bit and we still collectively behaved like slavering morons, so it'll take more than just having more toys than we know what to do with to make us truly civilised.

This seems very dubious to me. Not that we need more than toys to make us civilised but that we have seen anything like a post-scarcity society and that a post-scarcity society is as simple as just stuff.

The Wasp Factory

2008-07-12T12:26:39Z

The Guardian book club is looking at The Wasp Factory this month:

The Wasp Factory represented me admitting partial defeat, heaving a slightly theatrical sigh, stepping reluctantly away from the gaudy, wall-size canvasses of science/space fiction to lay down my oversize set of Rolf Harris paint rollers, pick up a set of brushes thinner than pencils and - jaw set, brows furrowed - lower myself to using a more restricted palette and to producing what felt like a miniature in comparison.

In the end I went for something that kept me closer to my by-then comfort zone: a first-person narrative set on a remote Scottish nearly-island told by a normality-challenged teenager with severe violence issues allowed me to treat my story as something resembling SF. The island could be envisaged as a planet, and Frank, the protagonist, almost as an alien. I gave in to the write-what-you-know school but with a dose of skiffy hyperbole, mining my own past for exaggerateable experiences.

Parts one and two. Reader responses next week.

Shellworlds

2008-05-03T17:24:24Z

It occurs to me that a shellworld should suffer from certain technical issues of heat dissipation. In fact, for a level as low as the Ninth to even have seasons at all would require deliberate selective refrigeration. This makes one wonder. The implication of Chapter 22 is that "winter" is caused by light and heat from the Rollstars being partially blocked by ceiling features, but in such an enclosed environment, it seems somewhat improbable that such obstruction alone could cause "seasons" in this way. In an enclosed layer, one would think the problem not so much one of warming the Layer as of dissipating waste heat from it.

(David Morgan-Mar made a good short analysis of the similar thermal problems of Coruscant as a footnote in Irregular Webcomic.)

Iain Banks – The bridge

2008-04-30T12:49:48Z

Iain Banks – The bridge (08-022)

The first very hard book this year. I started reading it on my way back from Austria in January. Then continued reading it at home. Yet I never really got into it. On the other hand, it was fascinating enough to keep on trying.

Banks is a strange author. I do not know any writer whose books vary so much as his. A song of stone was just crap. The Wasp Factory fascinating. Dead air was funny and brilliant. Canal dreams entertaining. Espedair street simple but good. Walking on glass complicated. Complicity and The Business (sorry, no review, read it too long ago) were both incredibly good, but The Crow Road kept lingering.

So, could be me, but it is always a surprise whenever I start a new Banks novel. Unfortunately The Bridge doesn’t live up to the expectation I had. The Bridge in this novel is the whole world of a man in coma. Time and space do strange things with perception, dreams and reality, fact and fiction, everything seems to be woven into this story. Not until over halfway this book Mr. Orr, as the main character has been named until then, becomes a story. His history becomes known, slowly, gradually.

Certainly not my favorite book, this one, but it certainly won’t stop me from reading more books by Banks. Whit is next, waiting on my shelf already.

Quote: “Things went on; Lennon got shot, Dylan got religion. He could never decide which depressed him most.” (page 328)

Number: 08-022
Title: The Bridge
Author: Iain Banks
Language: English (Scotland)
Year: 1986
# Pages: 386 (4256)
Category: Fiction
ISBN: 0-349-10215-5

Words of Wisdom

2008-04-10T14:50:08Z

In yesterday's "Daily Star of Scotland" Iain Banks (The esteemed GoH for satellite_2) has a quote on Page 2 under thought for the day. "Everything in life gets easier the longer you've been at it."

Locus Review: Matter

2008-03-29T13:53:30Z

I don't have a copy of Matter yet, so I'm glad this review didn't spoil the ending for Banks's latest novel...

...but it does give away the ending for Consider Phlebas, so caveat lector, those who haven't read that first Culture novel.

GoH at con

2008-03-27T14:45:28Z

Iain M Banks will be satellite_2's guest of honour on 25-26th July 2009 in Glasgow, Scotland.

The convention itself is a hard SF/Science type of science fiction convention to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. At satellite_1 (the 40th anniversary of sputnik's launch) our guest was Ken McLeod and we had such a good time we decided to do it again, but for twice as long this time.

If you'd like to join here's our website. Supporting membership is only £10 and this will freeze the full price of your full attending membership at £40.

Banks By Numbers

2008-03-16T16:28:00Z

I've just finished The Steep Approach To Garbadale.

Playing games? Check. Incest? Check. Champagne socialism? Check. Family drama? Check. Drugs? Check. Pub bore speechifying? Check.

View Poll: #1155086

Those are your only two options so no carping.

iain_banks @ 2008-03-14T00:42:00

2008-03-14T00:43:39Z

Matter by Iain M. Banks (Orbit Hardback, 593pp, UK£18.99)

“Matter” is a tale of political intrigue, medieval war, betrayal, injustice, and honour. Oh, and galactic scale.

It tells the tale of three siblings who have taken different paths in life and how they end up, as a result of a family tragedy, struggling for the same thing; the honour of their family name.

In telling this tale Banks has created a new concept in cosmic habitats; the Shellworld. The Shellworld is a planet (in this case, artificial) that has 16 internal levels of which 14 are habitable. I can see the more nerdy among us working out the scale of a Shellworld using the parameters provided sporadically throughout the text; each level 1,400km high, 2million towers on each of the 14 habitable levels to support the level above. (Ok! Yes! I did start thinking about sketching out a Shellworld cut-away diagram and estimating the size of the Shellworld. Problem was, I didn’t spot an estimate for the thickness of the ceilings/floors, and there was nothing relating to the density of the material to assist in the calculation of the gravitational strength on each level.)

The Shellworld is likely to generate as much interest as Niven’s Ring World and Shaw’s Orbitsville. Of course, Bank’s Shellworld is much more stable.

Enough of the “nerdy” techno-babble.

The Shellworld is simply one element of “Matter”, and is merely a backdrop to the story, albeit pretty crucial to the ultimate dénouement.

“Matter” takes one of the siblings on a journey of self-discovery involving his being snatched unexpectedly from his privileged lifestyle to a life where he can trust no-one, he is powerless to shape his own destiny, and where he has become a figure of shame.

His brother is unwittingly entrapped and experiences his own growing moments that force him to mature in ways he had not expected.

The third sibling, Djan Seriy Anaplian, has travelled far away as part of, if you would excuse the pun, a cultural exchange. She has been away from her Shellworld home for fifteen years when word reaches her of the family tragedy that is central to the entire book.

As in every IMB novel, there are wonderful alien life forms. Iain has shown great imagination in developing their physiology, environment and technology. In a number of his other novels the aliens have portrayed strongly human personalities, but in “Matter” many of them are very alien. Having said that however, “Matter” is one of Iain’s most human Culture novels.

Other topics dealt with in the book are the morality of killing other people, the sense of matrimonial entrapment, and the whole concept of religion and its role as a useful tool in controlling the populace.

Iain’s ending to “Matter” was somewhat different from what I had expected, but interesting nonetheless, and, as so often is the case in Culture novels, on a grand scale.

On several occasions I have seen Iain say that he has tried, but not succeeded at writing a powerfully political novel. While “Matter” is not powerfully political, it does have many parallels with current world affairs and the role of technologically advanced civilisations involved in warfare with less advanced civilisations.

This was one of those books I was really sorry to finish. I relished the opportunities to sit down and surround myself with the universe Iain had created. It was a real joy.

Banksoniain #13 - Now Out

2008-02-22T22:40:02Z

The new book, Matter, is out and we have a timeline of its development, and details of the booktour as well as other forthcoming Banks events of 2008.

As there is an upcoming theatre tour of The Wasp Factory we look at the history of the production.

We also look back on Banks appearances at Mecon X, the Cheltenham Literary Festival and a Scottish Government event is Brussels.

Plus the usual roundup of information. Banks Backlist shows what books of his have been published throughout the world recently and are coming in the near future, and Media Scanner examines recent coverage the author has garnered.

STOP PRESS News is that Paul Cornell is writing a radio play for the BBC based on the novella - The State of the Art.

Available from The Banksoniain.

Just When You Think You've Seen It All

2008-02-10T14:13:23Z

Harry Potter/Culture fan fic:

“Tell me again, Skaffen-Amtiskaw,” she said to her companion, “why you had to
drag me out of bed and to this place?”

“Something rather unusual happened late last night, local time,” explained
Skaffen-Amtiskaw, who was trailing behind her.

“Here?” asked Sma, glancing back at the drone. It was slightly smaller than a
small suitcase and had a light-grey casing that seemed to fade into the
background in the early morning light. It was hovering at about her eye-level.

“No,” replied the drone, giving a small shake indicative of a shrug. “The
incident itself occurred several hundred kilometres away, in a small village
called Godric’s Hollow.”