I enjoyed The Hydrogen Sonata but found it was very much a remix of elements from his previous Culture novels without anything really new. I did hope he would write a final Culture novel showing what happens to it in the far future and the effect it has had on the universe. But alas that is never to be.
A very good book but it somewhat tainted the Culture universe for me, through no fault of the author and its premise is a logical extension of Culture level technology but the thought of artificially created hells is just…uggghhh…
And the worst part is that you just know there are plenty of people in our own world who would happily create and populate them if it were possible to do so.
And the main antagonist got off lightly, considering how he made and maintained his fortune.
Sign me up for the ‘War in Heaven’ on the anti-hell side.
Same here, Banks was the only author I would go out and buy hard back editions of his books when they were released.
I highly recommend the documentary that BBC Two (Scotland) just showed called Iain Banks:Raw Spirit. It has a lengthy post-diagnosis interview. It should be iPlayer soon, and I’m sure available through other means shortly after.
Holy shit! I didn’t even hear about the cancer. He signed my copy of Inversions when I was a wee tot and was very nice about it. RIP, Iain.
IMHO, Excession is the easiest way into the Culture novels because it’s quite self-referential. Consider Phlebas is the earliest (both in Banks’ chronology and in terms of the storyline but is much more about people than Minds, and thus has an entirely different feel from his other books.) My favorite is Use of Weapons, though. It’s a Momento-style mindfuck wrapped in sci-fi and a sort of historical fiction.
Just found out–via this thread–that Banks is no longer with us. I’m crushed. I just discovered him about a year and a half ago, and in that span I read almost all of his SF books and one of the others. I was looking forward to many more.
My favorite Banks book? Tough to say since I think, for the SF books anyway, that they work better as a collection than individually (in the way that some music artists’ catalogs are better than individual albums), but the one I mowed down the fastest was probably Excession.
For anyone new to Banks wanting to get into his Culture series, you might actually do well to read them in reverse order. It’s hard to say. Or, even though it’s not a Culture novel, the Algebraist has some of the same ideas, all of the same style, and might be more polished and complete as a story; it’s a superb introduction.
Unusually nowdays where "Space Opera "is peddled as S.F. , he was a genuine S.F. author, with an incredible imagination and a wealth of creative genius.
IMO one of the best authors in this genre for the last several decades.
I’ve got “Against a Dark Background” to read when I’ve finished my present read and I think that I’ll give the non M books a crack afterwards.
Patrick O’Brian died, Terry Pratchetts got alzheimers and now this.
The people who churn out tripe seem to go on forever, but the true story tellers are cut short before their time .
Just finished “The Quarry”, his last novel. It’s very good. Apparently he had written most of it before his diagnosis, but it’s fair to say that there is quite a lot of rage in there that must surely have been written post-diagnosis.
So that’s that. No more Iain (M) Banks.
It’s been a long, strange journey inside Iain’s head - all the way back to “The Wasp Factory” when I was a teenager. I’ll miss him.
Yeah, I thought The Quarry was pretty good, too. Some nice black humour.
You could tell that some of the rants about politics, etc. came from the heart!
I toasted his memory with a Lagavulin.
A couple of times!
"Fans of the late Scottish author, Iain Banks, now only have to look towards the heavens in order to remember the staunch atheist after an asteroid has been named after him.
Asteroid 5099 is now officially known as Iainbanks. Dr Jose Luis Galache of the Minor Planets Centre (MPC), part of the International Astronomical Union in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts applied for the name change after reading of the writer’s battle with gall bladder cancer in April on his own website.
Writing on the MPC blog, Galache said: “When I heard of his sickness I immediately asked myself what I could do for Mr Banks, and the answer was obvious: Give him an asteroid!”"
My favorite Banks novel was “Use of Weapons.” The way the story tightened as it progresses and we learn more and more about the history and nature of its protagonist Zakalwe, just gives it more and more dramatic oomph, so that by the end you’ve entirely revised your opinion of the story and Zakalwe, and the story has a sort of compressed power that’s hard to match anywhere in fiction. So yeah … I liked it!
