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