Not The Day Job

One of the UK’s most successful writers of the last 15 years is Scottish. Mary Branscombe met him in Edinburgh to find out how SF put the M in Iain M Banks.

Iain Banks shot to fame and controversy in 1979 with The Wasp Factory and has since become infamous for his dark, macabre and bizarrely funny books. Before The Wasp Factory was accepted, he’d already written three SF novels however, and now alternates between SF and more mainstream novels, using the M (for Menzies) to differentiate between them. I talked to him on a grey blustery April day in Edinburgh to find out about his writing and ask how important SF is to him. Even out of season, the festival city is crowded with people and the rows of houses and monuments crouching down and rearing up to form so many layers that you begin to see where he got the inspiration for the labyrinthine levels of The Bridge.

As he talks, he grins engagingly and waves his arms, spreading them wide to make a point. He’s intelligent and funny, enormously articulate and full of life - it’s easy to see where the humour of the books comes from, less easy at first to trace the darker side.

We talked on the top of Colton Hill, in the shadow of the half-built Parthenon known as Edinburgh’s Folly (“somebody heard Edinburgh called the Athens of the North and decided to build this to cement the similarity, but they ran out of money on about the 28th pillar,” he explains deadpan). The wind tugs at his curls and blows his coat open. Tourists flood out from a bus, circulate quickly around us and dash off to another historic site. Dogs sniff around the boulders where we sit, pawing at cigarette stubs and the odd discarded condom, and a lone piper drones and skirls in the background as I try to find out what’s behind this unusual phenomenon, a successful science fiction writer with seven best-selling mainstream books to his credit as well. What does the M mean?

Are you a science fiction writer or a mainstream writer? Did you turn to mainstream novels because it was hard to get SF published?

“I do regard myself very much as a science fiction writer. The books I wrote before The Wasp Factory were three books of what I would call science fiction.

Use of Weapons (the original draft was written in 1974 - very much changed for publication, Against a Dark Background (in 1975 - also much changed) and The Player of Games (1979 - that’s not very much changed; the main changes were adding the drone’s dual identity and the so-surprise ending). I was getting to the stage where I thought “I want to get published by the time I’m 30 or I’m going to head back to Scotland with my tail between my legs!” So I started writing non-science fiction because you can send it to more publishers, because there are more publishers who publish mainstream novels than science fiction and the The Wasp Factory was the result of that. But I had a big internal argument with myself about this; there was a hard-line faction that was saying “how dare you sell out, write something that isn’t science fiction - you’re supposed to be a science fiction writer, how dare you” but the pragmatic side won. But I always wanted to go back to writing science fiction and getting it published.”

Even your mainstream novels often have science fictional elements in. Is there are blurring of the line between the two?

“Well, there is a very definite division; some things are obviously science fiction and others are not but I’m happy for people to read it all as SF, that’s fine by me. It’s very very obvious, the other stuff - the stuff that’s got the M in it - it’s got space ships and laser cannons in it, of course it’s science fiction!” He laughs and shakes his head. “It’s got very strange names. Very long names. It’s in the far future, it’s space fiction.”

But has SF crept into your other work?

“I think the way to look at it is that the first three books got more and more science fictional. I mean there’s no hint of science fiction in The Wasp Factory at all and yet people who read it in proof form, before I was ever heard of as an SF author commented on it having an SF flavour. And of course you could say that Frank’s on a completely different planet! So although there’s no science fiction in it as such, it’s got that quite techie feel. Walking on Glass was hard SF in a way and The Bridge… Well the setting of the bridge itself and the mucking about with time and settings is semi-SF anyway but there is a mention of the knife missile in the last major Barbarian episode and the “flying castle” is of course a space ship. That one knife missile mention has been enough for purists to claim that, technically, The Bridge is a Culture novel. Tenuous, I’d say.

“If you think of it like a letter Y, up to that point it’s like the tail of the Y and after that they go in quite different directions. That’s where I started getting into writing the science fiction, getting the science fiction published. After that, I didn’t put the science fiction into the stuff that was Iain Banks, without the initial.”

What do you call the non-SF books, without the initial? What sort of books are they?

“Well, the non-SF stuff , “not science fiction”. Sometimes I call it mainstream, for want of a better word but I usually have to put “for want of a better word” on the end of it. Bruce Sterling, the science fiction writer and critic, coined the word slipstream which is “stuff that isn’t science fiction that people who like science fiction like to read”, so it’s appropriate. I suppose you could call it that. Although I don’t tend to call it that myself.”

What difference is there between writing the two sorts of book? Do you approach writing the science fiction differently?

“I don’t think so, I hope not. I hope I do it in exactly the same way. I spend the same amount of time on them, although the SF stuff tends to be a bit longer, I don’t know why. Bigger canvas perhaps! Other than that, I try to do them exactly the same way, give each the same amount of care; care and attention as a lawyer would say.”

Is there much difference in what you get paid for them?

“In theory, they’re pretty well at parity. The last deal I has was a four-book deal, two SF and two non-SF and I’ve got the same amount apportioned for each book. Although I don’t know, they might be actually hiding the fact that the non SF gets less and just making it look like it’s the same and it’s actually not.”

And how do the sales compare?

“I think the SF sells less but for longer; it doesn’t tail off so quickly. Although my other stuff’s all in print, still selling. I don’t know, maybe we’re just pretending to ourselves, maybe the non-SF is grossly subsiding the science fiction. I hope not!”

Are there other genres you want to work in or you want your work to be recognised in? Do you see any of your books as horror?

“I like doing different things. There’s probably more uniformity about the SF, even despite the fact that it’s not all to do with the Culture, there’s a greater similarity between the SF stuff than there is between any of the non-SF books. Someone suggested why don’t I adopt different initials for different genres and start doing Westerns under the name of Iain X Banks…

“I sort of wrote a horror novel without meaning to in The Wasp Factory - Complicity was meant to be kind of a horror novel as well. My options are a bit limited with horror really, in that I refuse to write about the supernatural, so I couldn’t do a ghost story or anything. I think Westerns are definitely out and I can’t really see me doing Mills & Boone, that’s a little unlikely. I’m not sure how many genres I’ve got left. Complicity again was meant to be a detective story - I don’t know, I might well have run out of genres, I may have to start repeating myself - if I haven’t already done so.”

As a science fiction writer, you’re best known for the Culture, your utopia, but your last two science fiction books are set outside it. Do you still enjoy writing about the Culture?

“I’m more at home in the Culture, the Culture’s more my baby. I prefer writing about it, I like what’s in the Culture but I also wanted to get away from it to some extent. I didn’t want to pigeonhole myself as purely writing about the Culture so I went away from it for the last SF two books. Against a Dark Background and Feersum Endjinn are deliberately not Culture books.”

The Culture is your utopia - does that make it harder to write stories in this ideal world?

“I think it’s just there’s more limitations. The Culture is well…” He waves his hands and pauses. Post-scarcity, I suggest. “Post-scarcity - good old John Clute [Editor of the Encyclopaedia of SF] coined that and it’s pretty accurate. I’ve kind of adopted that actually. It’s very much my ideal utopia, which gives you less to write about because you can’t” - he smiles broadly and changes his mind - “actually you can write about anything in the Culture because you can just write about primitive societies. It’s easy!”

The Culture isn’t all sweetness and light though. In Player of Games and Use of Weapons there’s a lot of manipulation of people and societies going on.

“Right from the start I was trying not to proselytise. The Culture’s not perfect, but it’s as close to perfection as you can get with anything remotely human (and still probably far better than we can expect). The basic thing about the Culture is, don’t try to fuck with it. You can charm the Culture and you can beguile it and you can even in some sense seduce it but you can’t fuck with it. It’s bigger than you are.”

How much more of the Culture is there?

“Oh, as much as I want really. You see you can do anything in the Culture just by stepping down into a different sort of civilisation, with some sort of link…. until I get bored with it I suppose. I think what I might do in the future is have every second SF book be a Culture novel, though I’m not sure about that.”

Do you start a Culture book with an idea that fits into the Culture or with wanting to write about the Culture?

“I start with wanting to write a Culture novel. I enjoy writing about it. There’s a particular sort of sarcastic wit to the drones in particular that I just can’t seem to get in other characters. I just like using the long starship names as well, I’ve got hundreds of them!”

Do you have a favourite starship name?

“No I’ve got an entire class of starship names - the Gravitas series!. Someone comments on starship names being somewhat lacking in gravitas and suddenly you get all these ships - Stood Rather Far Back When The Gravitas Was Handed Out. Not Very Much Gravitas Here and the Zen one which is called Not Very Much “You Know What”… Definitely a Gravitas name, but it doesn’t mention the word gravitas. They’re building up faster than I can use them.” He laughs. “Gratuitous starship naming - it is a problem, but I’m coping with it.”

In the Culture books particularly you have a lot of strong female characters. Is that deliberate?

“I like strong female characters! With the Culture stuff, because the Culture’s supposed to be a post-sexist society if you like, they’re deliberately and consciously so. I feel that the kind of future the Culture represents is more female than male in its demeanour. It’s got past the need for all that testosterone and aggression and macho bullshit. That’s why it’s quite a deliberate thing that the Culture is usually represented by female characters in the books. I just I like strong female characters and I like writing about them. I suppose I like strong characters anyway, they’re more fun to work with.”

There’s been talk for years of turning your books into films and The Wasp Factory and The Bridge have both been plays. Are you keen for that to happen, or are you worried about how they’d be changed?

“As long as a film stays unmade the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer - as soon as you make it into a film or even a film for TV then suddenly one night more people see it than have ever read the book - and the film is the mental image that they think of, what they’ve seen on screen. That’s a general problem. There are specific problems with making the Culture books into films. I’d love to see them made now that the special effects are up to it, but I’m kind of dreading it as well. I’d love to see them made, I’d love to see Phlebas made particularly, I wouldn’t even mind if they changed the ending, have Arnold Schwartzenegger play Horza - he wins and gets the girl! But what I’m really dreading is they’re going to make the spaceships look all wrong.”

Do you worry that a film would lose some of the message of the books?

“Och yeah. At the moment there’s some interest in Canal Dreams although I think I could only sell it to Oliver Stone, anybody else doesn’t have the clout not to get shoved off the picture and they’d just make it and turn it into American CIA propaganda. Or they’re just lying to you in the first place. That’s what a lot of them tend to do no matter what they say. I think it was Sam Goldwyn who said that a verbal guarantee’s not worth the paper it’s written on. Actually of all the books, Canal Dreams is the one I’m least pleased with. By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films, so going on that it might be quite a good film! Make a film like Die Hard and cut out most of the first half of the book.”

Are there any actors you think would be right for particular roles?

“Hmmm, well I think Arnie would be totally wrong for - well, anybody actually! The last time I thought “that’s the right person to play that part” was Eddie the Ed in Complicity - Richard Wilson, looking as if he’s just sucked on something.”

In general, Banks doesn’t seem to take the idea of his books being filmed very seriously and is very cynical about what Hollywood would make of them. Canal Dreams in particular. “You could have Arnie playing Hisako - you could just change the whole thing around so he’s actually the cello player - he’d probably play the violin because the cello’s a bit too feminine, I’d see him as a sensitive violinist - but actually he’s an undercover CIA agent getting these pesky revolutionary lefties. That’s entirely plausible, it may just well be exactly what happens to it.

“I always worry, with all these things. Canal Dreams was my first attempt at a political thriller - an action book. As a political thriller it’s not very good and a sign that it’s not so good at what it’s supposed to be doing is that it would be so easy to take the politics out and make a pro-CIA propaganda movie. If it’s that easy to strip out, the political element, I haven’t done my job properly. Whereas Complicity I think works much better in that way.”

He hums along with the bagpipes briefly and adds, “one of the reasons I don’t think we’re going to be selling the film rights to Espedair Street for a while is that I’ve got the music! All that music exists. In my sad and anorak moments at university in Stirling I’d write the lyrics which are always the least important part and the weakest part as well and I’d write the music. Well I wouldn’t write the music, I’d whistle it into a tape recorder and pluck out the tune on a guitar one string at a time. But I kind of gave up on it for a while and then” - and here he’s fired with immense enthusiasm.

“Finally, at long last technology’s caught up with my humble ability to play the keyboards and the guitar and so forth. You’ve now got music processing software - I’ve got software and lots of MIDI equipment, two keyboards and five guitars and lots of rack-mounted kit and stuff for effects and a guitar synth - a Roland GR1 for all the techies out there - and this stuff is all eventually going to let me produce music. Although listening to it could actually be a very unsettling and unpleasant experience! But it’s great fun - you can actually change the notes and replay it and play it back perfectly. Quantise! Quantise is a great thing, it means that you can play it hesitantly and quantise it and play it back without any of the hesitation, with the correct time signature and everything. So that music’s all there.”

Music seems to be important in all your non-SF books, like an internal soundtrack.

“In terms of the rest of the non SF books the music helps you place things in context. You can spend a couple of pages saying what’s happening in the world at this time and so and so is president of America and this war’s going on and this is in the newspaper or you can just say what was in the charts. Just mention a song and anyone with remotely the same cultural background knows exactly where you are. It’s a very very quick way of communicating a time.”

“Apart from that, I just like music. I listen to music all the time. I even - I actually came out and said I listen to Radio 1. A lot of people find it quite bizarre that I listen to music and write books at the same time but it’s the way I like to work. But then again I get bored if there’s not lots of things going on at the same time, so if I don’t have something to listen to I can’t write properly. Some people need total silence - I need a lot of music in the background.”

Have you ever considered doing a collaboration?

“No, no, no, no, no, no, ah no, no, no - death first I think”, he says, completely deadpan. “I’m a rotten collaborator. I collaborated once on a film script for The Wasp Factory - I’m just not used to doing that. I’ve had to grit my teeth and accept that my editor’s usually right; I’ve learned over the years that usually if my editor says “this should come out, Iain”, it’s probably right, the proportion when it’s wrong is very small so I’ve kind of given up arguing all the time. But I think basically, I want to be God. My ideas, my book.

If you ever see an Iain Banks collaboration, you’ll know I’ve been replaced by aliens from the planet Tharg or something.”

What sort of books do you read yourself?

“More or less what I write. Almost entirely fiction and about half science fiction and half - not science fiction. At university I was doing a lot of reading and I’m trying to catch up with all the classics; I’ve got a whole shelf of black-spined Penguin Classics. It’s mostly contemporary stuff nowadays, stuff that other people recommend usually, stuff that get good reviews.”

Are you voting in the Hugos?

“No, I don’t, I never do - I’ve never read them all. Also I’m not really a great believer in awards - of course the fact that I’ve never won one has nothing to do with it at all!”

What was the first SF you read?

“I used to read the hardback yellow SF books. I’d go along to Gourock library and look for the yellow spine and if it said SF in purple lettering, it was mine, I’d take it. For years I didn’t even bother to look at who’d even written it - I thought there was a sort of generic SF factory somewhere! I think the very first book I read - I think someone might have given me it as a present - was Kemlo and the Zones of Silence, something like that. There was a whole series of them, by E C Eliot. My pal, a fellow SF writer, Ken MacLeod, takes great delight in digging these up and bringing them round and pointing giggling at the first page. Half a dozen scientific howlers in the first paragraph.”

But do you still enjoy them?

“The first paragraph is all I can stand to read usually! The idea that a generation of adolescents can evolve - humans can evolve within one generation so they can breathe vacuum - there’s an interesting idea! But at the time I thought they were the bees knees, they made me want to write SF!”

“What I enjoyed about science fiction - and you know the cliché about the Golden Age of science fiction is that it’s when you first started reading science fiction - is that you didn’t know what you were going to be reading - you knew it was going to be some sort of science fiction, it might be aliens, or flying around in another galaxy or whatever - you had no idea what you were going to encounter. It was a genre that was incredibly open and free in that sense.”

How much does the technology in your books matter? Could you write fantasy?

“In science fiction one thing is that you’ve got a rough idea of what the ground rules are. I think very basically science fiction is generally about the future and fantasy is about the past, the myth of the way things used to be, whereas science fiction is in a sense trying to construct a myth of the future.”

So do you go to a lot of trouble to get the technology right?

“In a sense it doesn’t matter that much, as long as you ‘re not introducing things too fast and throwing in too many scientific concepts, It’s just getting that feel right and what I’m trying to get at is that technology can go wrong, can be difficult to use and that things are just complicated that way. I was trying to get that sense of complexity across. A lot of Consider Phlebas in a sense is a reaction, my reaction to other SF that I’d read before and much as I loved Dune, especially the first half, one of the things I didn’t like about Dune was that it was too much like chess, it was pre-chaos SF. It was all too predictable, all the mentats knew exactly what everyone else would do. Whereas especially in war, it struck me reading a lot of stuff and seeing stuff about Vietnam in particular, which at the time was by far the most technical conflict we’d been in - although the technology was all on one side - the technology seemed to make the standard just worse - you could kill your own side more efficiently.

“In Phlebas there’s the thing about the guy’s gun barrel crashing. I was imagining if you had explosive bullets and they’re actually detonating on the blast not the target, then eventually it would go right back in the gun. That’s an idea which I was I was professionally pleased with. I never get that pleased with myself for inventing some specific character or a neat plot device - but wee technical things like that, I think “great” that’s one of the things that makes me happy - it’s a bit sad! That’s what I was trying to get across, I was trying to give the impression of what it would really be like to be in the future.”

It seems to be very dangerous, to be a character in an Iain Banks book!

“Yes, it is! I wouldn’t like to be a character in one of my books! I saw a printout of an exchange on the Internet, with some American student saying, “I just finished an Iain Banks book. Do all his books end with all his characters getting killed off at the end except one?” and the reply was “no, sometimes they all get killed off, including everybody!” It’s not technically true, but it feels right.”

At the end of Complicity, even the main character seems about to die

“It’ll stop people saying “are you going to do Complicity 2, when are you doing a sequel?”. I think it’ll be a bad sign if you ever see Wasp Factory 2. Although I had an idea that Frank was going to go in search of his mother - that was the plot. I even had a title, The Lost Wax Method.”

What do you see as the next big development in technology? Will we build the artificial intelligences in your books, or will we upload ourselves into computers?

“Well, it sounds a bit iffy actually, it sounds too good to be true. My take on that sort of thing is the Culture’s really - the Culture doesn’t want to go that way, the Culture actually wants to stick around in person. I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can’t have machines that exhibit consciousness, it’s a weird attitude unless you repeat the superstition that you have to have the soul and matter, machines can’t have that. Saying that the material world is incapable of forming a substrate for sentience or intelligence seems a nonsense to me. We are made up of matter and we exhibit intelligence. I believe matter can provide a home for consciousness - it seems perverse to argue that only biology is capable of this. Maybe biology is on a larger scale than electronics but there’s quantum technology, there’s no reason why you can’t solve the problem through speed. It’s like saying matter can’t be intelligent, I think that’s what it comes down to.

“I absolutely believe that intelligent machines, AIs and all the rest of it is inevitable unless we have a genuine catastrophe. We’ll have AIs, but maybe not in my lifetime though. We’re living on the cusp, we’ll see incontrovertible proofs of AI. I’d be astonished if the next century doesn’t have AIs. A machine could actually be intelligent, be conscious, be self-aware and all the rest of it. It’s the direction that we’re heading in; I find it hard to imagine a future where you won’t have AIs unless you deliberately do it, a Dune sort of thing, with the Mentats; that’s perfectly be possible. But it’s going to happen whether you like it or not.

“But the idea that we’ll transfer human consciousness to a machine - I think that humanity is just too tied up with the physical, tied up with the setting if you like; it’s actually about your entire position within the world you inhabit. Consciousness is like an abstract of that framework, it’s not just entirely in your head. Although you can fake it, you can have someone thinking they are living lives of great luxury and travelling abroad and meeting people, and actually they’re just living off gruel in a little cell and they’re just living in dreams.”

The AIs in the Culture are equal citizens, as is everyone within the Culture. It’s a utopia, there aren’t any governments telling people what to do although there may well be manipulation behind the scenes, but in your non-SF books, there’s plenty of politics and political opinion in your books, most of it disagreeing with the current political system and the government. Does that reflect your views?

“A lot yes, it’s very hard to disguise them! That’s one of the things you get to do as a writer - you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you’d thought of at the time. Also you get to jump on a soapbox - to a certain extent, not too much because it gets boring, people go away.” Questions of morality lead into politics and his disparaging views of Tory politicians, although he feels that Labour and the SDP have shot themselves in the foot recently. His words are blown away by the same wind that snatches my notes from my pocket and blows them down the hill towards the city spread out before us. When I’ve retrieved them, we turn back to SF.

Why is SF looked down on by some people? Why do your mainstream books seem get more respect in some circles?

“I think it’s technophobia. I think that it’s particularly the case in Britain because of the Two Cultures division into arts and sciences and most of the people who are in the media are actually quite frightened by technology, they are technophobes and one of the ways to react- and in what’s still very much a a class-based society like Britain, especially England, especially London, especially literary London, media London - is to make fun of something that you’re frightened of. I think they are frightened of science fiction because it’s something technical.” He’s keen on technology personally - “I like gadgets; I’ve always felt the more buttons a thing’s got the better.”

So you don’t think you’ll end up on the literature syllabus?

“Apparently I am! As Iain Banks of course. I get anguished letters from people wanting to do a dissertation on me. Quite often it’s “my professor doesn’t understand me” “or “my professor doesn’t read your books” or “he thinks you’re shite” (he laughs uproariously) or “my tutor’s never heard of you”.”

Do you think SF is becoming more respectable or are the successful books not counted as SF?

“That’s absolutely, absolutely the way. If it’s good, it can’t be science fiction, therefore 1984 and Brave New World aren’t science fiction. Yeah, that happens quite a lot. The pace of life is getting more and more intense and we had a spaceship blow up, a nuclear power station blew up; people finally recognise they had this world-wide sexual plague - this is real science fiction! It’s happening right in your face. I think people are beginning to realise we’re actually living in a science fiction present. But I’m just a little bit sceptical about science fiction’s respectability - when will we see a science fiction book on the Booker shortlist let alone winning the prize? I think that would be my acid test; do we see science fiction on the Booker prize shortlist? If we do, then I might start thinking that it’s no longer the pariah.” He grimaces thoughtfully and look sceptical.

And finally, where do you get your ideas from?

“Dangerous drugs!” He laughs. “Actually the same as anyone else. It’s just from reality, thinking if that had happened rather than this, or the witty remark you think of five minutes after you could have made it. Everyone does that, they think “why did I say that” and look! there’s an idea. Everyone has sexual fantasies and they’re ideas, they’re plot lines - crude in every sense - every one thinks of what they would do if they won the lottery - that’s a kind of plot line. Or the exact words they would use if they told their boss if they told them they were never ever going to work for them again - that’s a line of dialog.

“That’s where you get ideas from. Then it’s how you organise them into something. If you’ve ever sat and watched a film and imagined what if it didn’t happen the way it happened, imagine if it happened this way - especially if you’re not very happy with the way it’s going and you think “I didn’t like that ending, they could have made it better by doing this or that”. You get other people’s stuff and you change it around - if you do it right and you’re half decent at it people won’t be able to see where you got that idea from.”

Iain Banks (without and without the M) is rather more than half decent at doing this himself, producing books that are funny and horrifying by turns, but never less than impressive.

Find out more about the books…

Originally published in SFX magazine issue 1 - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

Banks is a prolific writer and (at the time of this interview) had produced 13 books in  16 years. We asked him to describe his books for us and he told us “it’s a tired old cliché but books are like children…”

The Wasp Factory

“It was supposed to be a respectable, normal kind of book that went away and came back with a ring through its nose and a safety pin through its cheek, and dressed in black leather.” Bank’s first published novel, though not the first he wrote, this is the macabre and darkly humorous story of Frank, an unusual child growing up on a Scottish island.

Consider Phlebas

“A broth of a book, not particularly bright, but great fun to be with, the life and soul of the party… ho-ho-ho-ho! Rather a Brian Blessed sort of a book.

Consider Phlebas is the first of the Culture books and you actually learn a lot about the Culture. You learn it from an antagonistic standpoint and the main character Horza hates the Culture - that was me trying not to proselytise too much, trying not to make it boring for the reader by saying “hey, here’s the Culture, wouldn’t you like to live there!” By writing from the point of view of someone who despised it, who was fighting against it, I made it more interesting for me and I hope for the reader as well.”

The Bridge

“Definitely the intellectual of the family; it’s the one that went away to University and got a first. I think The Bridge is the best of my books.” The anonymous narrator awakes on an enormous bridge and slowly dreams his past life as he travels around an alien planet, dreaming of a barbarian straight from the pages of a sword and sorcery novel.

Espedair Street

“It’s the child that wanted to be a rock star and got it.” The story of Danny Weir, mega-rock star, and why he didn’t commit suicide…

Walking on Glass

“It doesn’t fit into this category at all! It’s probably schizophrenic, it’s a cluster bomb of a book.” His second published novel, Walking on Glass combines the coming of age of an anguished adolescent, the disturbing fantasies of a paranoiac who’s an outcast from a galactic war and the game-playing exile of two warriors from opposite sides of the conflict.

Complicity

“Definitely a coke addict!” Probably the nearest Iain Banks has come to a straight detective novel, this is the fast-paced story of a computer game-playing substance-abusing Gonzo journalist who’s following up one big story and becoming part of another. It alternates between the disturbingly explicit and blackly ironic humour. “A bit like The Wasp Factory except without the happy ending and redeeming air of cheerfulness.”

The Crow Road

“A family sort of person, an earth mother type.” Another mystery, this is the story of Prentice McHoan’s complex family, including the exploding grandmother.

Feersum Endjinn

His latest book and winner of this year’s BSFA award, it’s set on an Earth of the far far future and a third of the book is told by the child Bascule, in phonetic writing. “I was just getting fed up with writing normally, and I thought would make it feel more childlike, give more of a childlike feel of what it was like to be in this gigantic structure. I’ve always liked gigantic structures - probably because I was brought up near the Forth Bridge! Had a big effect on me.”

State of the Art

A collection of short stories, including the novella in which the Culture discovers Earth.

“I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if the Culture found us. Basically it’s a joke, Earth ends up getting used as a controlled experiment.”

Player of Games

Gurgeh is the Culture’s best Player of Games and he’s sent to play the ultimate game of the Empire of Azad, without realising he’s a pawn of the Culture. “It’s impossible to be that big and that powerful and not to behave like that. By showing that, I was trying to make it a more rounded society.”

Use of Weapons

Zakalwe is a mercenary, working for the Culture and trying to forget his past and ending up reliving it. “It’s more a personal tragedy. Both this and Player of Games are slightly more like mainstream novels, slightly more about the individual characters but whereas there is a kind of redemption at the end of Player, there isn’t at the end of Use of Weapons. Any optimistic note is predicated on the reader believing that the Culture is good. Zakalwe has created another slightly monstrous version of himself, another guy who has a thing about chairs. In the end, I still think the Culture is doing it’s best by all concerned; it’s a dirty job. I think it’s the best of my SF novels, the most complex and the best structured. I think it’s the second best of the novels overall, it’s very psychological, about one person, one obsessive type; it’s a kind of tragedy”

Against a Dark Background

Set outside the Culture, this is the story of the Lady Sharrow’s quest for the last Lazy Gun, a weapon that destroys what you fire it at by poetically appropriate methods. “It’s an SF rendering of a fantasy plot - getting the gifted team together and going in search of things of power. I wanted to have that sort of scale and that breadth of canvas and to do it from a hard SF point of view. It’s all completely relativistic, completely Einsteinian, there’s no breaking of the light speed barrier at all.”

Canal Dreams

As the US government prepares to hand the Panama Canal back to Panama in the year 2000, the Japanese cellist Hisako Onoda travels to down the canal to reach Europe. “My first attempt at a political thriller - an action book. I was quite pleased with the way it escalated gradually so in the first half of the book there’s no violence at all and about halfway through it starts to get quite violent and the rest of it just gets completely over the top. I was quite pleased with that aspect of it but as a political thriller it’s not very good because it would be so easy to take the politics out.”

He also told us about his next two books - one set in the Culture, but the first, Whit, set once again in Scotland. “It’s set in May - there’s a very good technical reason for this but it’s a bit complicated. It’s set largely in a cult, a religious cult. It was going to be called Cult Novel (well it’s a novel and it’s about a cult and I hoped it might become a cult novel…) but that was trying to be a bit too cheeky, a bit too clever, so back to the original title. It’s told from the point of view of a young girl of 18 who’s going to be the next cult leader. It’s about her leaving the ashram - where they live just up-river in Stirling - travelling to Edinburgh, then to London then round England and then back, trying to find her cousin who’s become apostate - she’s hankering to leave the cult and they want her back in. I think it’s a comedy - the jury’s still out on that I think!” He laughs, then grows more serious. “It’s also about power and hate.”

Although it’s mostly finished, he’s still “tinkering” with Whit. “My publishers extended the deadline; they’ve actually got very relaxed about deadlines since Nelson Mandela’s autobiography which came in with about an hour to spare! But it should be out in September.”

After that it’ll be the next Culture novel due next June, Excession. “I’m really looking forward to that, I’ve been thinking about it for the last few months. I think it’s going to be fun -there’ll be lots of starship names of course!”

Where to start?

Where should you start, if you’ve never read an Iain Banks novel before? Although Wasp Factory was published first, its macabre approach may not be the best place to start; The Bridge is our favourite, but not everyone likes it. We aked Iain Banks what would be a suitably gentle introduction. “Espedair Street. It’s so nice, there’s not even any real deaths and murders in it! Not even any violence, it’s very pleasant that way. I would say not The Bridge because although I think The Bridge is the best of my books, it’s also the most complicated. And you don’t want to read the best one first!”

Originally published in SFX magazine issue 1 - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

Iain M Banks’ latest Culture novel is a tale of conspiracy, deception and eccentricity. So Iain, we asked, what’s it all about?

“About 450 pages” he replied, hefting the book and grinning. It is indeed a long and complicated tale of conspiracy that keeps you counting on your fingers to work out who is deceiving who past the last page and when we asked him what really happened to the Ships at the end he protested “I don’t know!”

What Excession is really about is Banks’ beloved Ships. The Minds are in control and although the human characters are interesting enough, many of them are never even named and can be dismissed as “out of the loop”. “It just worked out that way; it was something that was going to happen in the course of the novel anyway but it became more pronounced as the novel went on and I was wondering whether to work against that and make the humans more important but I thought well, as long as it’s still gripping, still interesting. I think that is the upper limit of human non-involvement, I don’t think I’ll write a novel in which humans are less involved. In the next one I think they’ll be more clued up. And probably more drones as well; there’s not enough drone tetchiness - that’s something I think I’ve missed out on.”

The humans who do show up are pretty irritating at times and Ulva, in particular, we have pegged as a spoilt brat. “Well, yes she is a bit, but she does her job, in the end she does what she’s asked to do, which is all that’s really required of her. It’s not her fault that it all goes horribly wrong. I like Ulva a lot. The humans can be a bit more - well, not dysfunctional, but less practical, less perfectly dynamic, they can be a bit more eccentric. Why should the Ships have all the fun?”

Fun for a Ship, it turns out, is spending time in virtual reality. “Well, I thought, what would they do with all this time? Inventing a world where you have different laws of physics, that would be about the ultimate version of Civilisation.” Banks confesses to plenty of time spent playing that game. “That’s part of where the idea of Outside Context Problems came from, you’re getting along really well and then this great battleship comes steaming in and you think, well my wooden sailing ships are never going to be able to deal with that. But when I started Excession I deleted Civilisation off my hard drive.”

Much of Excession is composed of messages and conversations between the Ship Minds, complete with convoluted jargon. This doesn’t mean he’s finally logged on to the Internet though. “It was just me trying to work out how it would actually work, what the Ships would need - it’s a sort of anorackish tendency in myself to want to get all these technical details right. You have to have something at the beginning to tell you who’s talking to whom, so you do need that - a formalisation of the protocol that would have to go on anyway when a Ship talks to another Ship. I just like that stuff! I think it’s neat, which is probably rather sad on my part but there you are!

“In Consider Phlebas there’s a message that the Culture sends out, just a common or garden ‘by the way we’re going to blow up this entire world in a few days’ and that’s got the same sort of thing, it’s just I let rip a bit this time whereas normally I try to keep that sort of thing to a minimum.”

Of course there’s method in his madness. “One message you actually see three times in the course of the book. The first time you see it it’s just as it comes, no explanation whatsoever, but you’re reading it from the point of view of a character who’s got a terrible hangover and says ‘I just don’t know what this means!’ I was trying to point out the importance of that message and say ‘it’s all fairly complicated but, let me take your hand here - I’ll talk you through it as much as possible!’ Doing both at the same time gives you an impression of the complexity of the whole situation but at the same time make it comprehensible.”

He cheerfully confesses that he indulged himself in this book, with “lots of gratuitous ship names, like the Frank Exchange of Views” and he’s as enthusiastic as ever about the Culture. “I always enjoy writing Culture novels, I feel at home; it’s my train set, I built it, I chewed that papier mache! I love writing Culture novels - it’s almost too much of a self-indulgence. That’s why I deliberately took two books away from the Culture to reassure myself that I wasn’t so besotted with it that I couldn’t write science fiction elsewhere.” He doesn’t feel the need to prove himself again though. “I’m not sure what to do next; I’ve just signed another four book contract and there’s two sf novels included in that. One of them will certainly be a Culture novel, if not both.”

This next sf book will be rather different from Excession where (unusually for a Banks novel), hardly anyone dies (permanently). “The next Culture book will definitely have a lot of death in; I wouldn’t want people to think I’d gone all cuddly. It felt the right thing to do in Excession; you shouldn’t force ghastly mayhem onto every book if it doesn’t need it and it’s galloping along quite happily, but certainly the next mainstream novel is very grim - a high percentage body count there. And the next sf novel? I don’t know but I suspect so just in case it might look like a trend and we can’t have that! I’ll probably do something a bit more on the grim side - although I might change my mind!” Mind you, Banks also comments that he tried to keep books like The Crow Road more ‘cuddly’ without much success, although he maintains happily that his last mainstream book, Whit, was rather gentler. “But the next one, it’s about symbolism, death, mystery and death. And death. Oh and did I mention death?”

The provisional title for this next mainstream novel was Feu de Joie (it became Song of Stone). “It’s a technical term for when people fire their guns into the air to celebrate - pretty dangerous thing I’ve always thought.

Unusually for me, it’s a bit timeless and placeless - there’s a castle and an artillery piece. Basically it’s a three-hander, there’s a very minor aristocrat and his sister and there’s a greedy captain from a mercenary band. A lot of symbolism, fire, earth, air, water - bit of a departure for me this one. It should be a wheeze. It should be relatively short, thin but to the point - a bit like a stiletto.”

There’s been a rumour recently that Banks might be dropping the M from his science fiction books and while he dismisses it as just a rumour he didn’t really seem to have made up his mind.

“I’m not, probably, but I might - I’m almost certainly not. I’ve talked to my publishers and there’s no problem about dropping the M - or including the M for everything if I want - but I’m not really intending to do it. I’ve thought about it but - och, I can’t be bothered!” Just a rumour then, Iain? “There is some truth in it but it’s probably not going to happen - but it could if I wanted to! Though again I might change my mind…”

That’s clear then! But remember - you read it here first.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

When you’re rich and powerful and can have almost anything you want, what do you do next? Well, if you’re Iain M Banks ,you write about what interests you, like the secret manoeuvrings of the ship minds that really run the Culture (and you indulge yourself with as many gratuitous Culture ship names as you like). And if you’re one of the ship Minds that manoeuvre around secretly running the Culture, you go looking for the ultimate immortality; another universe to escape to when this one finally implodes.

The Culture may seem like a democratic utopia where you can have, be and do just about anything you want, but there’s always someone in the background pulling the strings. In this book we find out that it is, not surprisingly, the super-intelligent Minds of the Culture ships who decide what’s going on. Some of these are decidedly eccentric, for example the Sleeper Service which stages tableaux of famous battles with the uncomplaining bodies of those who are on board in suspended animation waiting for things to get interesting again, or the Grey Area (more popularly known as the MeatFucker) who breaks every rule of etiquette by rummaging around in people’s brains and dispensing Justice.

Much of the book sets about exposing the less salubrious side of the Culture, from the misfits who don’t want to fit in to a bunch of paranoid intriguers who are convinced the end justifies whatever means they see fit to use. Which is more of a problem when they’re the ship Minds skulking in the corridors of power, setting everyone up.

Since the Idiran war five hundred years before, the Culture has been determined to have things its own way without any of that messy fighting, thank you very much, but it has a new neighbour now, the Affront (a sobriquet coined by one particularly irritated race and adopted with glee by the huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ and just generally killin’ prone Affront who have genetically engineered their entire ecosystem to be as unpleasant as possible - for everyone else). Then an object turns up that is so strange that non-one can decide whether it’s a terrible threat, a never-to-be-repeated opportunity or a figment of the imagination. An Outside Context Problem is what takes you from top of the heap to a footnote in the history books but this perfect black sphere just hanging in space is even worse than that, it’s just too much to deal with - it’s an excession. So naturally no-one can bear not to meddle, and it turns into a race across the Universe between the Affront, the sensation-seeking Elench and half the ships in the Culture, including the revived battleships that everyone has forgotten about. Every new ship that turns up either starts a new investigation or foments a new conspiracy until it starts to look the Scott Report meets The Prisoner; the Minds could certainly teach most politicians something about manipulating the press.

Of course, the drones, the environment modules and even the intelligent protective suits have to get in on the act as well, leaving most of the humans involved knowing rather less than the reader. Not that most of the humans actually want to be involved anyway; they’d much rather get on with their own lives and it’s good to see that the Universe is still populated by the kind of hedonistic, self-centred, obsessive egotists that give humanity such a good name.

Excession is painted large on Banks’ usual mind-boggling vast canvas - genocide on a planetary scale is just a throwaway scene, an entire race subliming (just to get away from those annoying neighbours) is a mere reference in a discussion of why the Culture is still determinedly corporeal. As usual, it’s fast-paced, extravagant and dryly witty - and of course huge fun. The Minds are quite at home with the covert military euphemisms, unintelligible tech-speak, info-babble and acronyms that spatter their messages and it seems even a hyper-intelligent spaceship never gets around to answering all its electronic mail.

The personal narrative keeps it from being overwhelming; for all their size and power, the ship Minds turn out to be just as fallible as the rest of us and if you thought the Culture was an impossibly nice place to live, Excession is enough to convince you to get paranoid. There’s enough gratuitous hardware and enough amazing, barely believable tech to keep it fun (battleships with protective fractal colourations? Identity-swapping twin droids making anti-matter reactors out of their dead brains?). There’s a little more talking and a little less action than usual in a Banks novel, and surprisingly few of the main characters die messily (at least not permanently). For all the secret machinations and betrayals, this doesn’t feel like a dark book - unlike Use of Weapons or Player of Games - although almost everyone gets what they deserve, in a bitterly satisfying way. A somewhat lighter Iain Banks this may be, but it’s still likely one of the best SF novels you’ll read this year.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

Just how do you get elected President of America these days? You can sink a political career on TV in a few minutes if you make enough of fool of yourself; on the other hand if you look and sound good enough you can sway the nation. All you need to know is how well you’re going down with the voters. Take a politician who’s had a biochip implanted into his brain, linked to the computers that analyse the responses of the specially chosen market research volunteers, who represent the heights and depths of the great American people and you can work out exactly what you need to say to get your candidate elected. And then you control the President. Which is handy if you’re a worldwide conspiracy wanting to get a firmer grip on the nation to stop the Treasury reneging on the national debt and undermining all your investments.

Of course the politician and his family may not be that co-operative and the doctors and computer scientists you need to implant the chip and get it working may give the game away. Throw in the pollsters and political fixers, the secret compound under the mountain, the purpose-built hospital in India and the evangelical healer laying hands on a dying politician on live TV and you have a tale that veers from chilling to hysterical and back, via cynicism, technology and the manipulation.

But then what else would you expect from the inventive, twisted and yet ruthlessly logical mind of Neal Stephenson? If the similar cover design doesn’t give it away, the publicity material points out several times - no doubt to cash in on the huge (and completely deserved) success of the superb Snow Crash and the equally delightful Diamond Age - that Stephen Bury is a pseudonym for Stephenson “with another writer”. The other writer is his uncle, a respected University lecturer whose academic publishers would prefer him not to put his name to a big thick airport book. That’s how Stephenson sees Interface; a thick slab of a book that will seize your attention and hold it across the Atlantic. Interface is much better than that. It’s a fast-paced, compellingly believable tale that combines real people and real science with politicians who are so realistic that you’d like to vote them out of office, conspiracies that make sense of everything and sharp black humour that sees modern life through a twisted glass. It’s convincing enough to be scary, scary enough to keep you reading and wonderfully well written. Buy it even if you’re nowhere near an airport.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

If morality is “a work in progress” you can do whatever you want - or whatever you can get away with. That’s the motto of the Strange Magnificence, the black-satin-clad terrorists taking over space station Solitude in the title story of this collection but the idea recurs in nearly all the stories. From the mostly justified violence of the detective trying to defend the station (and the half-wit Barnacle Bill), to the gardener fighting the decadent and sadistic Captains so he can get on with growing the tomatoes that will feed a new world, Shepherd’s characters polarise between desire and obligation, often bloodily, and sometimes with love and lyricism. There’s a fair bit of graphic sex too!

The British flavour of some stories doesn’t work; Shepherd is far better at painting the grimy, hard-edged glitter of an anonymous American city, the desolate beauty of the badlands or a space station in orbit around the Sun, than at any aspect of British life, from geography to accents (for the London accents on Solitude, think Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and shudder). And while most characters are well-drawn, almost to a man the narrators are confused, desolate, nihilistic and uninvolved, but still carry on acting as the plot requires and experience a convenient if cynical redemption.

The stories range from the discomforting magical realism of the purblind boxer gaining a new vision through the horror of re-animated jazz players whose music literally changes your life, to science fiction (complete with faster than light colony ships, transcendent beings living on the Sun, super-evolved humans and the entire human race getting frozen). They all leave you thinking and some leave you shuddering.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

What a world. Once you’re legally dead, they can pump you full of neurochemicals that bring you back to life just long enough to answer a few last questions before the toxins polish you off. If you don’t want to be a typical man, surgery can turn you into an asexual or if you can afford it, you can rewrite your DNA so no virus can ever affect you again. Meanwhile the physicists are well on the way to explaining life, the universe and everything - permanently. It’s something of a brave new world but not everyone is happy; some people want the right to remove the part of their brain that causes the delusion that you can ever understand anyone else and others are coming down with Distress, an inexplicable, incurable mental illness that leaves you thrashing and screaming in agony and despair. Not surprisingly, our hero Andrew Worth has decided to get away from it all, on a blacklisted artificial island built with stolen genetically engineered nanotech where the physicists are battling it out to explain the universe, before it ends. Of course, this isn’t away from it at all and Andrew is soon skulking around interviewing terrorists, getting kidnapped and trying to save the world…

It’s a gripping situation and Distress drags you along from discovery to suspenseful discovery by the scruff of the neck but it’s a shame that Egan can’t resist rubbing our noses in how much he knows about quantum physics, cosmology and post-colonial politics and gender choice along the way. The cynical detached journalist who starts out alienated and aloof from the situation and ends up becoming his own story is something of a cliche and it’s hard to write an enjoyable book based around an unsympathetic (indeed downright irritating) main character - especially when the only vaguely likeable character spends most of the book avoiding everyone.

When he’s talking about the universe and the physics that underlies it, Egan produces writing of great beauty and passion (although far too much of it is mystifying technobabble) and he makes some telling points about our attitude to science and to other people, and how the mystical midnight revelation usually turns out to be rather trite in daylight. Unfortunately he can also be unsubtle and obvious. Any book that sets out to answer all the questions of the universe is bound to turn out something of a disappointment on reflection, but while you’re caught up in the story, it’s a rattling good read despite the jaw-breaking jargon.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

It’s people rather than places, principles or even the ever-present politics that are at the heart of Melanie Rawn’s books and you need to figure out a way of keeping track of them if you’re going to enjoy what is really rather an enjoyable tale of magic, battles, discovery and the very occasional dragon. You can’t rely on names because in order to show the complex inter-relations of the people of her world and how their disagreement in the face of the invading barbarians amounts to bitter internecine civil war (or perhaps because she ran out of ideas for names?), Melanie Rawn often has important characters Name their children after one another. Often this is followed by a change of heart and the children grow up to oppose their near-namesakes, so for the sake of the plot as well as to avoid confusion, it’s important to get clear in your mind the difference between Andry, Andrev and Andrade and between Sioned and Sionell - otherwise you’ll be suspecting some of the characters of incest instead of just adultery.

Ah yes - adultery, deceit, rape, madness, plague, treachery, sorcery and unrighted wrongs from generations long dead, it’s all here, as the barbarians horde advances to destroy the people of the desert and the High Prince and the would-be-Torquemada Lord of Goddess Keep have to decide whether to put aside their differences to fight the invaders or to squabble just long and hard enough to keep the plot going. There’s never a dull moment…

With such a profusion of similar characters, it can be a little hard to care what happens to these people as they play out their epic destiny, because they aren’t always clearly enough differentiated for you to work out who is struggling against which principle at any given moment. If you’ve read the previous two books of the Dragon Star trilogy and the three Sunrunners books already, you may have them clear in your mind by now - this is the last book of six and it doesn’t really stand alone. Although the characters and plot are fascinating once you figure out who they are and what’s going on, the pace is slow and there’s more internal dialogue than action or description.

There are no loose ends left dangling after the last battle either - they’re all either neatly tied up, handily chopped off or conveniently sorted out for the next few books. Although there’s no sign of a new series, there’s plenty of scope for another trilogy following the struggles of the next generation and once you know who they are you really do want to know what happens to all the characters on the next page.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

Legends persist long after the people, even the world that spawned them have died. But with a sufficiently advanced technology (here indistinguishable from magic of the distinctly mystical kind) you can bring anything back to life. All the beings on the artificial planetary system of Chalco-Doror have been reborn from fossilised DNA drifting in the reaches of space, hurled out by the explosion of our solar system billions of years before. Life would be good, if it wasn’t for the zotl, vampiric insect brainsuckers that feed on the tasty chemicals produced by agony, and for the fact that the planets are going to turn back into a spaceship in a few centuries, killing everyone. The Rimstalker has been re-animating the dead of all the centuries to serve as bait, with the help of her three artificial intelligences, in the hope of finding the mysterious O’ode that will kill off all the zotl. Unfortunately, one of the AIs has gone mad, another has joined the zotl and the Rimstalker is trapped underground in her spacesuit so she has to entice the humans she’s doomed to help in her search. Well, otherwise it would be too easy.

What with all the plot devices and the large cast of characters hurtling around through the lynkgates, travelling between different times and alternative histories, Last Legends is a long book, perhaps a little long to sustain its examination of responsibility and freedom. The notion that all life is stored as light, expanding endlessly out to the ends of the universe is worked out logically and gives the proceedings an air of doomed mysticism reminiscent of Moorcock to match the grand epic sweep and the convoluted timelines. The zotl are self-absorbed, malevolent and utterly chilling, giving the book many of its best moments. Although it’s the last book of the Radix series, you don’t need to have read the other three to enjoy this one. A fascinating and intriguing book, but not ultimately as satisfying as it might be.

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996

Spawn is based on one of the most popular comics in America (and comics are hot property for turning in to movies these days). But do stunning special effects, an industrial soundtrack and a creator with complete control make a good movie?

On paper, Spawn sounds great (on paper it is;the best issues have good art and better stories). Take a government agent (Michael Jae White as Al Simmons, an operative for the super-secret A-6 agency) - a trained killer fighting for the forces of democracy but tormented by the wanton destruction and innocent lives this seems to demand. Give him a loyal sidekick and a beautiful yet supportive wife (Theresa Randle) and have his boss (Charlie Sheen) betray him. Sheen’s Jason Wynn has made a pact with the devil to cook up biological weapons to kick off Armageddon and now they want Simmons too - the perfect psychopath to lead Hell’s Army.

Sheen plays Wynn with a combination of bluster and panache that seems occasionally flat and flabby compared to the Clown - John Leguizamo with plenty of padding and a blue face as the devil’s wisecracking, maggot-eating representative on earth - and Priest, the impressively equipped female agent who strides around menacingly in PVC pants. Killing Simmons off and then offering him the chance to see his wife again in return for leading Hell’s Army should set the scene for conflict, temptation and some major fire fights; especially when Simmons discovers that Wynn set him up, but he can’t kill him without setting off bombs primed to release the biological weapons all around the world.

Cue the special effects that took 21 different companies and cost nearly as much as the film’s initial shoot. Apart from the fact that Hell looks just like a level from Quake, they’re generally impressive, particularly the supernatural power of the Spawn suit; “Your armour has trillions of neural connections. It is a living extension of your own instincts, instantly translating your thoughts into physical reality.” Spikes, chains, blades and armoured carapaces spring into being - Simmons obviously has a wicked mind. But when the suit isn’t biting people in the leg or morphing in to a spiky motorbike cover, it’s just another man in a rubber suit - and a bad rubber suit at that.

Worse still, all this never quite gels and the effects that should leave you gasping are lost in the mix. Leguizamo leers and jokes at breakneck speed in a passable Michael Keaton impersonation that’s too often drowned out by the intrusive soundtrack. And for a tormented moralist with the fate of the human race in his hands, Simmons seems just a little too comfortable. Every town should have a huge neglected gothic cathedral for its superheroes to bum around on top of, looking moody and tormented. Unfortunately, while the cathedral looks very moody, for most of the movie Simmons just looks confused and bad tempered. Thanks heavens the voice-over tells us this is due to the pain of coming back from the dead or we might have thought it was bad acting.

The fight scenes are fast and furious but the pace of the film is all wrong, lurching from fights and chases to explanations to unsubtle happy-family scenes with wide-eyed children and dogs to remind us that all this violence isn’t just for the hell of it (so to speak). The film doesn’t flow, the actors don’t set you on fire and the whole thing is just too true to its comic book roots. Spawn could have done with a more experienced director - perhaps James Cameron, who gets a tip of the hat in the credits (along with Timothy Leary). And perhaps it would have been a better film without quite so much input from Todd McFarlane (who makes the obligatory cameo appearance as one of the street bums who shelter Simmons); there are just too many shots that would make great frames in the comic.

Ultimately Spawn’s disappointing, not least because it’s good enough to have been much better. Although it’s decidedly silly and quite good fun, it ends up as a somewhat incoherent movie with the feel of a comic book - just not as slick or subtle. And it’s got sequel written all over it

Secret agents, pacts with the devil and major special effects, this film is True Lies meets Batman in a head on collision with The Crow; unfortunately Spawn comes off worst in the collision

Rating: C (or C+ if you’re 12)Distributor: EntertainmentDirector: Mark DippéStarring: Michael Jae White, John Leguizamo, Martin Sheen, DB Sweeney, Theresa Randle, Mindy Clarke, Nicol Williamson, Todd McFarlaneCertificate: 12 

Originally published in SFX magazine - copyright Mary Branscombe 1996