We can't disguise it as movie news, but here at **Empire **we're all deeply saddened by the loss of Iain Banks, who died today from the cancer he first revealed was making him "officially very poorly" in April. The author of 27 novels (roughly half of them sci-fi written as Iain M. Banks), plus a short story collection and a whisky travelogue, he was 59.
Banks was born in Fife, to a professional ice skater mother and a father in the British Admiralty. He attributed his early creative spark to being one of the earliest households in the country with a television: his mother had insisted on a set to fill the void left by his father's frequent navy-dictated absences. He completed his first novel at the age of 16 and his second during his time at Stirling University, but wouldn't be published until The Wasp Factory garnered him instant notoriety at the age of 30. Prior to that watershed moment he'd worked for IBM and British Steel, but The Wasp Factory opened the doors to his career as an author. He averaged a book a year from that point on.
Walking On Glass and The Bridge followed, before Banks added the M (for Menzies) for the first of his sci-fi doorstops, Consider Phlebas, which debuted his unique socialist-anarchist-imperialist utopia The Culture. Henceforward, he would alternate between sci-fi and mainstream novels (although as a description, "mainstream" hardly cuts it for his more surreal and violent works). He likened writing as Iain and writing as Iain M. to the distinction between playing a piano and playing a pipe organ. A piano, he said, can produce something beautiful and elegant. But a pipe organ has multiple keyboards and stops you can pull out.
Sadly, for our own usual agenda, his novels were rarely adapted for the screen. There was a great version of The Crow Road for the BBC during the 1990s, and a middling film of Complicity, starring Johnny Lee Miller, in 2000. The second Culture novel , The Player Of Games, gained some traction for a film adaptation at Pathe a decade or so ago, but was eventually cancelled. "It wasn't even a nibble, it was a proper bite," Banks told us in 2009, "but we couldn't reel it in: couldn't land the blighter!" Most recently there was some talk of a film version of the short story A Gift From The Culture, to be directed by White Lightnin's Dominic Murphy, although it's unclear where that project currently stands.
Banks' final novel, The Quarry, will be published on June 20: its publication date brought forward at Banks' request to allow him to see its release. Tragically, that wasn't to be, although he did get to hold a finished copy and attend a recent launch party. He is survived by his partner of seven years Adele Hartley, whom he married in March having asked her to "do me the honour of becoming my widow". Gallows humour, the couple said, was part of their coping strategy.
"What Iain brought to his writing was himself," said Banks' fellow Scottish sci-fi author Ken MacLeod. "He brought a wonderful combination of the dark and the light side of life, and he explored them both without flinching. He left us a very significant body of work both in mainstream literature and in science-fiction. And he left a large gap in the Scottish literary scene as well as that of the wider English-speaking world."
"I'm off out to the pub to toast one of my all-time literary heroes with a malt," said Irvine Welsh.
Cheers, Iain. We'll miss you.