Iain Banks
Iain Banks
Iain Bankswas a Scottish author. He wrote mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 February 1954
writing thinking stories
I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.
book self air
Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.
reading culture fiction
A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.
machines arguing consciousness
I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.
fun writing effort
There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.
player years gentleman
Even in my side of the world, I've been in publishing for what, 25 or 26 years, and it's gone from being a gentlemen's club to being a few big players, and it's very corporatised.
fun writing people
Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.
voice remuneration approach
Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
possibility-of-change development definitions
Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances — and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse — then you don't have life after death; you just have death.
sorry feel-better people
People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.
book writing trying
I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.
book usual film
By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.
important fiction revolution
My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.
research drink malt
After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.