A few weeks before his passing, while discussing The Quarry, the novel that would ultimately see the light of day posthumously despite Little, Brown’s efforts to rush its publication, Iain Banks expressed a certain regret: “If I’d known it was going to be my last book, I’d have been quite disappointed that I’m going out with a relatively minor piece; whereas something like Transition, a wild splurge of fantasy, sci-fi and mad reality frothed up together … now that would have been the kind of book to go out on. I’m still very proud of The Quarry but … let’s face it; in the end the real best way to sign off would have been with a great big rollicking Culture novel” (Kelly 2013, n.p.). Without romanticizing, and without pretending to know what was going on in Banks’ mind at the time, it seems reasonable that, of all the multifariously hued stories he wrote during his life, he would have preferred his last to belong to the Culture’s multi-volume statement of optimism for the future.
This book is about the history of the Culture; it’s about the birth of the idea and its growth from a hopeful conceit into a publishing reality that transferred such hopefulness from its writer to its readers, making it one of the very few literary utopias most of us actually agree would be nice to live in. My argument will explore the gradual process by which Banks developed his space-opera setting over the course of forty years of personal exploration and twenty-six years of published history, and the discourse he built around it on such tropes as utopia and dystopia, including the definitional gap that separates one from the other. Who decides what a utopia is, and who gets to call their own society that? Who gets to point their finger at other societies—or even at their own—and decide that they are dystopias instead? Most importantly, when does one decide that one’s self-described utopia has not just the means, but also the right to intervene in the affairs of dystopias? The Culture stories exist within the gray area established when the boundaries of those definitions touch and interact, and the characters in them are citizens of a liminal country, a place where The Right Thing to Do, whatever that is, becomes the result of a on.Introduction-time situational calculation. And yet, at the end of every story, the Culture does remain a utopia, still viable as a concept and inviting as a place to live in. Banks created a lay heaven whose heart and soul reside in constant self-questioning, because such questioning enables the Culture to endure. The first civilization it puts to the question is its own.
But here, at the beginning of the book, we have to start at the end, as is only proper. It would be nearly impossible, and arguably disrespectful, to write it as if the death of the man whose imagination provided it with its subject matter were a simple chronological occurrence to be dealt with when appropriate—for any given value of the word “appropriate” in this context. It’s still near enough to hurt a lot, that moment in time when Iain Banks’ announcement of his terminal illness and his passing a mere two months thereafter devastated fans across the world and suddenly turned his Culture series, until that moment a work in progress, into a closed opus. To all of us remain, here and now on the other side, nine novels, a novella, and two short stories. This is no small stash, and it gives us reason to be happy. Banks was a prolific writer, and in the twenty-six years of the Culture’s existence as a published entity he wrote well; at his worst he was entertaining, thought-provoking, and worth reading no matter what. At his best, he was superb.
But the feeling that we have been cheated out of at least twenty more years’ worth of stories, and that Banks deserved to live those years to the fullest, is hard to dispel, and maybe it is necessary to keep it in the back of the mind, like a small, prim voice reminding us that yelling at the universe is occasionally good and proper. That is, after all, what Banks’ last interviewer, The Guardian’s Stuart Kelly,1 does in the article’s introductory paragraph:
“You know, this might be my last public statement,” Iain Banks said to me on the phone when I was setting up this interview, and at the time that simply didn’t seem likely: he was too full of ideas and opinions and schemes. He emailed me a fortnight ago, saying that he was hoping to be out walking around the village again by the end of the week. In fact, he died on 9 June. Nevertheless, the plans and hopes he had capture his quicksilver, optimistic personality, regardless of what transpired. To be robbed of 30 years he thought he might have had is one thing: to lose the few months he was cautiously anticipating seems especially cruel [2013].
The circumstances surrounding Banks’ April 3, 2013, announcement that he was “officially Very Poorly” have since become famous, not least because of an entirely accidental correspondence between art and life: The Quarry, nin.Introduction-tenths of which were already finished when he found out about his condition, featured a character—Guy, the protagonist’s father—who is dying of cancer.2 But it was mostly the voice we heard in our heads that made the difference, and the poised, peaceful tone with which that voice delivered the news. “It looks like my latest novel, The Quarry, will be my last,” Banks wrote. “As a result, I’ve withdrawn from all planned public engagements and I’ve asked my partner Adele if she will do me the honour of becoming my widow (sorry—but we find ghoulish humour helps)” (2013a, n.p.). In the event, Adele Hartley, his partner since 2006 and founder of the Dead by Dawn horror film festival, transitioned from wife to widow even more rapidly than expected; the doctors had originally given Banks a prognosis of several months’ worth of life, and it is a safe bet to say that, had he been granted those extra months, he and his new bride would have lived them as richly as the circumstances would have permitted.
As was typical of him, and fundamentally for the purposes of this work, Banks approached the sudden news with the same humorous detachment that infused the basic philosophy underpinning the Culture’s worldview. In the Culture, the basic attitude toward Life’s Great Questions (Why are we here? Where are we going? Why do we have to die?) is that asking such things of an essentially mechanistic universe is meaningless, which in turn leads to the most basic and most important tenet informing the Culture’s morals—in Banks’ own words, that “we make our own meanings, whether we like it or not”:
To live in the Culture is to live in a fundamentally rational civilisation…. The Culture is quite self-consciously rational, sceptical, and materialist. Everything matters, and nothing does. Vast though the Culture may be … it is thinly spread, exists for now solely in this one galaxy, and has only been around for an eyeblink, compared to the life of the universe. There is life, and enjoyment, but what of it? Most matter is not animate, most that is animate is not sentient, and the ferocity of evolution pre-sentience (and, too often, post-sentience) has filled uncountable lives with pain and suffering…. In the midst of this, the average Culture person—human or machine—knows that they are lucky to be where they are when they are [2004b, 172–173].
Banks wrote these words in 1994, ten years after bursting onto the British literary scene with The Wasp Factory and seven years after the publication of the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas. Back then, in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War, the millennium was around the corner, the towers still presided over the New York skyline, and the terrors of the 21st century seemed improbable; the world may have felt newer than it does today. Within the ranks of SF’s sub-genres, space opera had only recently begun its resurgence from distan.Introduction-granduncle-hanged-for-horse-theft status to that of meaningful artistic form, and that largely thanks to a relatively small group of writers among whom Banks featured prominently. Only four of the major Culture stories had been published at that time.
Nearly twenty years later, when Stuart Kelly asked him to comment on his state of mind in the wake of the diagnosis, this is what Banks said:
I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you’re just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies … really, it’s not about you. It’s what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. “Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs”—oh, please [2013, n.p.].3
So we make our own meaning as we go, until we don’t go anymore because we all have to die, and our fury at the waning of the light ends in silence like everything else; everything matters, and nothing does. There is a consistency of transference to Banks’ worldview, and a coherency of vision that moves effortlessly and sincerely from the pages of his fiction to his statements as a human being. He spoke and wrote what he thought, irrespective of whether what he thought represented an opinion given during an interview, an analysis in a nonfiction piece, a direct mimetic observation in his mainstream writing, or a statement issued out the corner of the mouth, obliquely, through the harlequin mask of space opera. And Iain Banks thought a lot of things and shared those thoughts with us in his works; soon enough, we were thinking them too, which was good. It still is.
Read any one essay on Banks’ overall body of work, any one attempt at summing it up as a whole, and you may find a restlessness in the author’s voice, a sense of occasionally awed frustration at the resistance it offers to categorization. In a recent collection of essays, Martyn Colebrook, Katharine Cox, and David Haddock make this resistance the central notion of their assessment of Banks’ achievement. “Banks’ fiction,” they write, “represents a continued fascination with the transgression of borders and limits, whether technical, cultural, corporeal, national or otherwise,” and this penchant for transgression, in their opinion, is chiefly responsible for keeping away from it the critical attention it deserves:
Over the course of his career, Banks’ work has been traditionally marginalized for a variety of reasons: these include the prominence of his early fiction (especially his debut novel), which has tended to overshadow his later work; his decision to write and maintain himself as a science fiction writer, which has drawn an uncertain response from literary critics; his geographical and political focus on “niche” Scottish concerns or, ironically, that his writing is too removed from such concerns [2013, 1].
Banks’ dual publishing personas—Iain Banks for his mainstream fiction and Iain M. Banks for his science fiction—have also conspired to further complicate the picture, especially considering that this distinction was not always observed to the letter (pun intended): one of his novels, Transition (2009), was published in the UK by Livingstone under Iain Banks, whereas in the United states it was classified as a SF novel by Iain M. Banks and came out under Little, Brown’s science fiction and fantasy imprint, Orbit. And when we actually take the trouble to read the books, many of them display a pervasive cross-pollination of themes, political views, narrative styles, and genres; in particular, Banks’ first three novels, which remain grouped under the “mainstream” label, contain heavy doses of horror, fantasy, and SF. The Wasp Factory (1984) reads very much like a blend of supernatural horror and Gothic, especially in the parts that focus on Frank Cauldhame’s grisly rituals of totemization and immolation. The three intertwined narrative paths of Walking on Glass (1985), on the other hand, weave generous helpings of science fiction into the plotline and refuse to completely dispel them at the end of the story, thus leaving readers in the grip of a dilemma. And finally, The Bridge (1986), one of Banks’ best and most famous novels, splits its attention between its protagonist’s recollections of a life spent in mimetic Scotland/England and his existence in a fantastical shadow-world into which he entered in the aftermath of a car accident that left him comatose. Once again, the narrative refuses to fully account for its estranged elements, so that, by the time the protagonist awakens in his hospital bed, the question of whether He’d Dreamed It All remains ultimately unanswerable.
It was only in the wake of Consider Phlebas’ publication in 1987, and the opening up of the second main strand in Banks’ writing, that his mimetic and non-mimetic work began to diverge. Iain Banks’ novels started hugging reality a little more closely, whereas his science fiction seemed to become more estranged and complex with every installment. When Against a Dark Background, the first M-Banks novel not set in the Culture universe, appeared in 1993, yet another facet presented itself to further complicate the process of categorizing his works. Now there were three strands in Banks’ literary production: mainstream/mimetic, Culture SF, and non–Culture SF.4 And every now and again—for example, in The Crow Road, Whit (1995), and A Song of Stone (1997)—Banks would infuse some of his mainstream work with non-mimetic elements, just to remind us that we shouldn’t relax no matter which of his books we were reading. We were always in for a strange ride on a Möbius-strip circuit.
If Banks’ fiction is protean in nature, resistant to easy negotiation between boundaries, so was his personality. He was witty, silly, and deadly serious, deeply engaged with politics and ethics at the same time as he enjoyed living a life of guilt-free hedonism. He was a lifelong atheist, and therefore dedicated to living a moral life outside the eternal-reward framework of organized religion,5 but he held no contempt for those who did have faith, as long as they didn’t set about fixing non-believers. He was passionate about Scottish independence, but suspicious of any attempt to describe him as a writer preoccupied with the Matter of Scotland.6 He loved the classic plotting of romance genres like science fiction and thriller (Alistair MacLean was an early influence), but also the inner-space complexities and narrative tricks of writers like John Brunner, Alasdair Gray, and Günter Grass. He would spend most of his year “driving his convertible black Porsche 911 top down along winding Scottish roads, zipping across country to meet up with his large circle of pals … to drink gut-stretching quantities of beer, eat curries and gas about politics, sci-fi, old times” (Hughes 1999, n.p.), and then, over the last three or four months preceding Christmas, he’d sit down to write non-stop. The end result would be a novel—either mainstream or SF—that immediately hit the UK’s bestseller lists. Banks grew to enjoy writing his “Hampstead novels,” as he once called the mainstream side of his work, but he loved science fiction with a vengeance, and always indicated it as his favorite genre. “I do have a problem with [mainstream writing] being held up as the most important or most respectable genre,” he told Colin Hughes in 1999. “It’s just a particular way of writing, it’s not necessarily the highest, it’s just that: a way of writing. Elevating it almost becomes bigotry, saying that science fiction must be worse, less important. That really rankles, gets up my nose, both barrels” (n.p.).
The view from outside, that of Banks’ friends, family, and fellow writers, reinforced this sense of dealing with a multi-faceted personality. There was the mad Iain Banks who, as a child, enjoyed hanging out with friends and displayed an unhealthy propensity for blowing stuff up with bombs made of sugar and weedkiller (Hughes 1999, n.p.; Garnett 1989, 52). Les MacFarlane, a childhood friend, once recalled an occasion when he, Banks, and a few other kids decided to build a six-foot model boat, filled it with explosives, and put a rudimentary pipe bomb in it. Of course, Banks was the one who stayed next to the boat to light the fuse with a match: “He lit it, started to walk back, and then you could see the mounting panic on his face thinking he wouldn’t get away in time, and then he broke into a run…. The damn thing never went off” (Hughes 1999, n.p.). All those childhood years spent trying to inadvertently detonate himself didn’t lessen Banks’ passion for real-life pyrotechnics, though: in his university application form, when asked about his interests, he simply wrote “Explosives” (Hoggard 2007, n.p.).7
Nor were those the only instances in which Mad Iain popped out of the box. Once, at the age of seven, he came fairly close to falling to his death after a boulder he was climbing with his friends came loose and fell fifty feet to the ground; luckily for him, a bush a few feet below caught him, after which his friends made a human chain and brought him to safety. He went home shaken and slightly bruised, didn’t tell his parents word one about the accident, and returned to doing the exact same thing the next day, and the next, and the one after that (Cabell 2014, Kindle locations 308–316). This pattern of life-threatening stunts continued well into his adult years: for example, once he got to London Banks started the practice Craig Cabell calls “Drunken Urban Climbing”:
First he found the route home along Grand Union Canal east of the Angel a more interesting route home than the surrounding roads, especially if he had to relieve himself of the remnants of recently consumed alcohol; but the real birth of the climbing escapades occurred when he found that a favourite towpath had been closed off because some work was being done on a bridge. Wooden boards had been erected across the pathway, making a wooden wall, which Banks decided he would climb and skirt along the bridge, hand over hand, legs dangling over the canal until he reached the other side [2014, Kindle locations 381–390].
Eventually, Banks’ then-girlfriend Annie Blackburn8 made him promise to stop his Drunken Urban Climbing practice, which he did until, in 1987, he found himself at Brighton’s WorldCon. Neil Gaiman, who was present at the scene, recalled: “I was at a small party at the Brighton WorldCon in the wee hours, at which it was discovered that some jewelry belonging to the sleeping owner of the suite had been stolen. The police were called. A few minutes after the police arrived, so did Iain, on the balcony of the Metropole hotel: he’d been climbing the building from the outside. The police had to be persuaded that this was a respectable author who liked climbing things from the outside and not an inept cat burglar returning to the scene of his crime” (2013, n.p.).
Then there was the driving. By general agreement, Banks was something of a speed demon behind the wheel, which went well in hand with his longtime passion for cars, and there were consequences: he had his license suspended for twenty months in the late 1980s for hurtling into a brick wall with his Volvo. “I’d been drinking rather heavily for the past fourteen hours,” Banks told Journal Wired’s David Garnett in 1989. “I put it down to the fact that it was only six days after the last general election, so I was a bit pissed off. Not much of an excuse, but it seemed like a good idea at the time” (59). About ten years later, in 1998, Banks ran his car off the road again—sober, this time—and upon emerging cut, bruised, and seemingly happy from the wreckage, said, “Thank God for airbags!” to a couple of tourists who had stopped to see if they could help. We should say, at this point, that one of Banks’ lifelong nicknames was El Bonko—“nothing to do with bonking, sadly; it comes from bonkers, though I can’t imagine why” (Hughes 1999, n.p.).9
There are many funny, astonishing, or ex-post-facto terrifying stories of Iain Banks, and many of those he happily told himself. His friends—among them Les MacFarlane, Jim Brown, Craig Cabell, and fellow SF writer Ken MacLeod—provided others. The picture emerges of a man untroubled by fear of public shame or of other people’s opinions, slightly Frankensteinian and utterly gleeful in his penchant for left-field experimentation, and undaunted by the future, even when the planet didn’t seem to be spinning in the direction he’d have liked (over the years, as the political landscape in the UK and the rest of the world darkened from his point of view, Banks would find this quality useful in keeping him rooted to a sense that things could, in fact, get better). This picture is entirely true.
It’s not the only true picture, though. Next to Mad Iain, there’s the man Hughes called “the affable Banksie.” Aside from never being boring, Banks was a devoted friend; his childhood friendships lasted throughout his entire life, as did many of his high school and college acquaintances (as we shall see, the one with Ken MacLeod would prove to be particularly important for Banks’ development as a writer and thinker). He was generous with his time, and money never warped him:
I buy more than my numerically fair share of curries, but I don’t buy as many as I should. It’s difficult, very hard to get right. You don’t want to insult your old friends by going, “I’m rich, I’m going to buy all the drinks.” They know, and I know, that the fact that I’m rich is mostly luck, and the fact that the society in which we live values what I do absurdly higher than it deserves. Two of my friends are teachers, and they do a much more valuable job for society than I do. But we live in capitalism, and there’s a huge market for escapism, art, entertainment, so I get paid more than I deserve [Hughes 1999, n.p.].
This way of caring for—and about—those people who comprised the flesh-an.Introduction-blood connection to his roots was also part of another facet of Banks’ personality: his sense of place. In the wake of graduation from the University of Stirling in 1979, he had moved to London, where he’d worked a number of jobs while he was writing. Soon after The Wasp Factory made him famous, however, he and Annie moved first to Kent and then, in 1988, back to North Queensferry, where Banks would spend the remainder of his life (Cobley 1990, 28). There, at the heart of his beloved Scotland, Banks kept hanging out with friends and family, driving his fast cars, drinking, eating spicy food, having fun, and writing one or two novels every year that would immediately top the charts. His very presence as a writing and publishing phenomenon contributed to the increased relevance of Scotland’s literary scene, which Banks saw as a necessary counterbalance to London’s dominance of the market. Immediately after returning, in fact, he began leveraging his influence into getting his publisher, Macmillan, to organize local book-launch parties (Garnett 1989, 57).
While Banks was able to relevantly influence Scotland’s cultural affairs, the political landscape proved less easily negotiable and far more toxic for his tastes—and here, yet another aspect of his character comes to light. A lifelong friend of left-wing political causes and supporter of Scotland’s full independence from the UK, he found England in the Thatcher years a hard place to like, an impossible place to live in, and a dark place to observe from next door, having to witness its influence on Scottish life. In his youth, two years before Thatcher took power, Banks was already personally involved in the political struggles of the time. Ken MacLeod recalls:
He was quite willing to stick his neck out when necessary: he came down to London in 1977 to join the mobilization against the fascist National Front’s attempt to march through Lewisham, took his place in a small squad of comrades none of whom he knew but me, and thoroughly enjoyed the fight that ensued. On a later visit he joined me when it was my turn to guard our group’s bookshop and offices, which had recently been targeted in an amateurish arson attempt by the fascists. As Iain and I checked the locks on the building’s back door, two policemen loomed behind us and tapped our shoulders. It took us some minutes to convince the coppers that we really were there to protect rather than attack the shop. Iain ribbed me about it afterwards: “I bet that’s the first time you’ve ever had to say, ‘Honestly, officer, I really am a left-wing extremist…’’’ [2013b, n.p.].
Over the years, Banks became less physically involved in political action just as his intellectual engagement with it ramped up considerably. He always made it a point to be well informed on the issues of the day—he read The Guardian every day, first to last page (2013b, n.p.)—and continued developing his political views (Noam Chomsky was a lifelong influence on his thinking, and on the formation of the Culture as well). In a 1990 interview for Science Fiction Eye, Michael Cobley asked Banks whether “although there’s no overtly political stance in your novels … you had an overtly political opinion.” In reply, Banks didn’t mince words: “Fucking right, I hate Thatcher and detest the Tories. The Tories are in fact the hyena party, if you’ve ever noticed the behavior of hyenas; they tend to go for the young and the weak, the sick and the old, which the Tories seem to do as well” (Cobley 1990, 28). Banks’ opinion of both Margaret Thatcher and her party didn’t change with time. In that last interview in 2013, Banks and Kelly, reflecting on the circumstances surrounding Banks’ announcement of his illness, discussed Thatcher’s own death, which had trailed the news by just five days:
[Banks’] political zeal burns … ardently. He confesses that “for half a second,” as he and Adele travelled across the Alps from Venice to Paris on honeymoon, he was “elated” when he heard that Thatcher had died. “Then I realised I was celebrating the death of a human being, no matter how vile she was. And there was nothing symbolic about her death, because her baleful influence on British politics remains undiminished. Squeeze practically any Tory, any Blairite and any Lib Dem of the Orange Book persuasion, and it’s the same poisonous Thatcherite pus that comes oozing out of all of them” [n.p.].
As the quote above intimates, the post–Thatcher years were not always positive from Banks’ viewpoint, and they got worse in the aftermath of September 11. Famously, he cut up his passport in 2003 and sent it to 10 Downing Street as a form of protest against Britain’s intervention in Iraq, and the following year he signed a petition urging Tony Blair’s impeachment. “I know it was self-harming, but what else could I do?” Banks told The Guardian’s Stuart Jeffries in 2007. “I was so angry about the illegality and immorality of the war. And this was me—a comfortably off, white Caucasian atheist from a vaguely Protestant background. If I thought it was disgusting, what would Muslims think about how their co-religionists were being treated?” (n.p.). Then, in the aftermath of the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid incident, he came out in support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campaign against Israel, and announced that he had “instructed my agent not to sell the rights to my novels to Israeli publishers” (2013b, n.p.).
It seems contradictory to think that the man who, in his more mature years, would not step beyond the remit of civil political protest should also be the writer who had his protagonist blow up rabbits and set dogs on fire in The Wasp Factory, began The Crow Road (1992) with the sentence “It was the day my grandmother exploded,” and narrated the grisly, sadistically funny deaths of several corrupt politicians in Complicity (1993). Banks himself, however, saw the violence in his writing as an extension of his civic concerns, not as their contradiction or as an imaginative escape hatch from the restrictions they imposed:
People usually just ask me “What are you on?” You can’t be too prescriptive about what a writer does, but it’s important to me to get these ideas into the books, just for my own peace of mind, so that I feel I’m not just doing this to make money, I’m not just writing pageturners for people to skim through, put aside and forget. Like anybody else, I want to make the world a little more like the world I’d like to live in, sad though that is. So I put forward these ideas however subtly or cack-handedly to the extent that I can get away with it. The good thing about writing is that you can do this in a non-invasive, non-penetrative way, you’re not telling people this is what they should do, you’re just presenting ideas [Mitchell 1996, n.p.].
This way of casting the writing of fiction more as a thought experiment than as a platform for advocacy informed Banks’ defense of the violence pervading novels like The Wasp Factory and Complicity. This, for example, is how he responded to the outrage attending the latter’s publication: “In principle, anything’s OK, as long as I’ve got an excuse to put it in—which is a more honest way of saying, ‘Is it artistically justified?’ You shouldn’t self-censor yourself just because you have a gut reaction that an idea is too horrible. If there’s a reason for it, it has to be done. There’s a moral point to that ghastliness, pain and anguish. Which is why I would absolutely defend Complicity’s extreme violence, because it was supposed to be a metaphor for what the Tories have done to this country” (Mitchell 1996, n.p.).10 Over the course of his career, Banks was the recipient of plenty of outrage for this kind of choice, although it is important to note that the majority of this outrage came from readers of the mainstream side of his work. SF audiences,11 when confronted with similarly brutal passages in his non-mimetic writing, were consistently more capable of contextualizing it within that larger moral point Banks was providing, as he always did.
Thus far, we have discussed the facets of Banks’ character as a series of items on a list, and while that is a useful strategy for illustrating the range of a person’s character, the fact remains that this listing obscures precisely the element that made him the writer he was: that those multifarious, supposedly contradictory aspects coexisted inside him all at once, in the same moment and in the same thought. Often in his work, they appeared in the same paragraph, or even in the same line. He was Mad Iain, The Affable Banksie, the philosophical and political thinker, the student protester, the driven practitioner of literature, the SF writer, the mainstream writer, the moral atheist, the lover of whisky and curry and driving fast and sensationalist plots and intricate literary techniques and horrible people doing horrible things and good people doing good things—all of it. He was also, in Neil Gaiman’s estimate, “a brilliant and an honest writer, and much more importantly, because I’ve known lots of brilliant writers who were absolute arses … a really good bloke” (2013, n.p.). That was Iain (M.) Banks. Like Janus in a room of mirrors, his many faces appeared together for us to receive and consider. Often, and especially after some of his grislier passages, we might have been doing the considering with green gills, but thoughts lingered no matter what. If part of his literary aims consisted in shocking us so we’d think about the implications that shock carried, then he succeeded, and outraged or not, we should consider ourselves fortunate that we were exposed to it.
And finally, he was Iain M-Culture Banks, the face with which this work is most concerned. He was the writer who, in Tom Chivers’ words, “takes the same simple but vital skills—well-drawn characters, clever writing, believable dialogue—from his non-genre novels and applies them to his sci-fi, allied to dizzying imagination and serious knowledge” to conjure in the mind’s eye of his readers “[his] finest creation, the universe of the Culture” (2013a, n.p.). As Ken MacLeod pointed out in a recent interview, this transfer of skills from the mainstream to the non-mimetic resulted in a movement from the act of narrating the dynamics of contemporary life to the act of imagining a social context within which those dynamics would not turn harmful or deadly, either for those living inside that social context or for those living outside of it:
Iain’s most direct engagement with the present was in his so-called mainstream novels…. They became I think more conjunctural as he developed as a writer: you can imagine the stories happening around about the time they were written…. With the Culture books he was trying to do something very different: to imagine a utopia that people would actually like to live in, his starting point very sensibly being to imagine one he’d like to live in himself. The external threats were his answer to the problem that no matter how exciting a utopia might be to live in, it would be very dull to write about [Winter 2014, n.p.].
The galaxy-spanning utopia of the Culture is at once a secret garden and an engine—a secret garden within whose safe embrace one can contemplate the thought-experiment of a society gone right, and an engine for the proactive advocacy of decency, non-violence, equal rights for all, and the chance to live a meaningful life irrespective of the circumstances of one’s birth. Ironically spurred into action by the fruits of its own prosperity, and mindful of the reality that, in a universe without gods, one makes one’s own meaning as one goes along, the Culture finds that meaning in its ecumenism; it meddles. It intervenes in the life of other, less advanced societies in order to improve their living conditions, both materially and spiritually. Its advocacy is outspoken, its collective good works pervasive, and its people cautiously proud of their goodwill toward others. The Culture meddles because, first of all, it can—it has reached a post-human, post-scarcity level of technological advancement, scientific knowledge, and industrial productivity that essentially puts it beyond reach of anything this side of Subliming (more on which in chapters 2, 7, and 8). Second, and most importantly, it meddles because it thinks it should: its ethical, moral, and social training has moved in step with its technological, scientific, and industrial supremacy, to the point that it is impossible to separate one from the other. Therefore, the people of the Culture believe themselves capable of engineering social change without damage to other societies—or at least, with less damage than the amount those societies would incur if the Culture left them to fend for themselves. And so, in story after story, the game of intervention plays out against the backdrop of the galaxy, which in the series is a rich and variegated meta-biosphere for millions of civilizations of varying degrees of cultural and technological advancement. The Culture travels, searches, analyzes, and generally sticks its nose into every interesting situation it encounters, especially those involving societies in need of assistance. Negotiations ensue.
Which, of course, causes trouble. Mary Worth types are usually resented for their penchant to tell others how to improve their own lot, and the Culture knows this. The difficult dialectics of bossing others around in order to make sure they either stop bossing others around or don’t fall prey to those who’d like to boss them around are not lost on the Minds—capital “M” here; they are transcendentally powerful AIs—that comprise the Culture’s even.Introduction-planning committees. Every course of action is carefully weighed in terms of first-principle advisability, logistical practicality, and ethical desirability—otherwise, as the Mind of the General Contact Unit Arbitrary puts it in The State of the Art, “how can we be sure we’re doing the right thing?” (83). But in the process of doing the right thing, the Culture often meets fractious, underdeveloped, violent, chauvinistic societies that either refuse to be altered or, if they are powerful enough to stand a chance, decide that the only solution for dealing with the nosy neighbor is a scrap. Either way, it’s at this point that the ethics of meddling risk becoming fuzzy, problematic, and stained with blood. Does the civilized entity back away from intervention then, leaving the uncivilized to their usual ways, or does it stoop to using at least some of those same underhanded tricks whose employment it had come in to halt in the first place?
Again, the Culture is fully aware of this problem, because Banks was as well. As we will see, a number of critics throughout the years have suggested that the fundamental conundrum at the heart of every Culture story—who or what issues the definition of “civilized,” and how long after getting its hands dirty can this entity claim that definition for itself?—is a sign that Banks’ attitude toward its creation was fundamentally deconstructionist. In other words, the argument goes, the whole notion of the Culture as a utopia is a smokescreen deployed to hide the reality that this utopia is, in fact, every bit as imperialistic as every other society. One of the key contentions this book makes is that such an argument crucially misses the point; Banks was, in fact, dead serious about imagining a society one could genuinely call utopian. That he decided to problematize the existence of this ideal collective, and that every character in the Culture novels therefore is, among other things, a carrier-wave for one of the many viewpoints in this dialectic of problematization, does not indicate lack of faith on his part. Rather, it reveals the attention Banks brought to the creative process of world building, and the degree of awareness he displayed of the moral and ethical dynamics he was handling. Since he believed that, “as the one literature primarily concerned with change and its effects on people and society, SF is—at least potentially—the most important literary form in the world” (SFFWorld 1997, n.p.), Banks treated it as such. He was not a mainstream writer who dabbled in SF; he was a writer who could modulate his voice to tackle both narrative modes, and when his voice operated on SF wavelengths there was no sarcasm in it, no attempt at postmodernizing the basic template of non-mimetic storytelling. Banks took the genre seriously, and argued his position within it honestly. He did his homework, and it showed.
The path to understanding the genesis and development of the Culture series encompasses Banks’ whole life and times, from the moment when, at the age of eleven, he decided that he would become a writer, to the day he died, and all his faces feed into it.
Chapter 1 takes us from the beginning of Banks’ writing days to 1987, the year he published Consider Phlebas. Those were Banks’ formative years, an at times difficult but also enthusiastic period of discovery, self-imposed training, false starts, and rejections until, in 1984, he published The Wasp Factory. The following three years saw him cement his breakthrough reputation with Walking on Glass and The Bridge. Together with Factory, these two novels gave Banks the chance to practice the kind of slipstream skating between the boundaries separating genre from non-genre writing that he had learned from Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981). They also helped him work out some of the ethical and political underpinnings of the Culture stories within a different context, and develop ways of adapting the narrative style he had developed for them to the Culture books.
Chapter 2 begins the close readings of the Culture stories in chronological order, thus providing us with a view of the gradual process of accretion that eventually gave us Banks’ space-opera canon. In it, we will look at Consider Phlebas, which introduced the Culture not as the protagonist of the story, but as the putative antagonist. Banks plays a game of double blind in this novel, leaning on the reader’s assumptions concerning the plot thread of the typical space-opera yarn to first establish the semblance of such a yarn and then gradually removing this semblance to display the real story being told.
Chapter 3 will look at The Player of Games (1988) as the Culture novel that is most representative of Banks’ tendency to wed gameplaying processes to his assessment of moral, ethical, and political trends within a given society. Gaming and playing pervade the story, literalized and made into life by the Empire of Azad’s creation of a game that is the society—that is to say, a set of rules whose complexity purportedly mirrors the complexity and moral order of social relations in the Empire itself.
Chapter 4 is divided into two main sections. The first will analyze the next two installments in the series, The State of the Art (1989) and Use of Weapons (1990), as a two-part narrative of sorts, each part entangled with the other through a sharing of characters (Diziet Sma and the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw), of timelines, and of the central moral dilemma: how can one know one is doing the right thing? The second section will begin examining the slow accretion of scholarship on the Culture, beginning with Lawrence Person’s article on the Culture in issue 6 of Science Fiction Eye (1990) and Colin Greenland’s critical review of Use of Weapons in issue 50 of Foundation (1990).
Chapter 5 is dedicated to “A Few Notes on the Culture,” the 1994 article in which Banks, after completing the publication of all the previously rejected Culture novels, discusses the shape and origin of the Culture as a society, as an idea for a better world, and as a programmatic set of instructions one might care to follow on the way to building such a better world. From there, the discussion moves to identifying the Culture as a “critical utopia” in the mold Tom Moylan established in 1986’s Demand the Impossible and reinforced in the updated 2014 edition of the same book, which came out under the Ralahine Classics line of studies in utopian writing.
Chapter 6 will take a close look at Excession (1996) and Inversions (1998) as another pair: Excession, the first Culture novel in about fifteen years that Banks wrote from scratch, presents us with a view of the Culture from above. The moving forces of its plot are the Minds that control the Culture’s ships and habitats, and the scope of the novel is at once wide and deep; Excession is peripatetic, galaxy-wide, and full of energy, without forgetting to observe, discuss, and practice the brinksmanship of well-intentioned intervention. Inversions, on the other hand, is the exact opposite: it’s the view from below, a look at the Culture’s meddling from the standpoint of those who suffer it without understanding what’s happening—the narrators of the story are two inhabitants of a planet at the medieval/renaissance technological stage, and it’s only through knowledge of previous Culture stories on the part of the reader that we realize the Culture is involved.
Chapter 7 is, like chapter 4, divided into two sections. The first will read Look to Windward in the light of 9/11, presenting the novel as a strangely prophetic work on the looming terrors of the 21st century’s first decade. The second will continue gathering the critical voices on Banks’ work that chapter 4 began, with special attention given to the discourse surrounding the status of the Culture stories as New Space Opera.
Chapter 8 looks at Matter (2008), Surface Detail (2010), and The Hydrogen Sonata as three stories linked by a shared trait—the enrichment of the galactic commonwealth with a host of developed spacefaring races that, for the first time, present the Culture with an environment of equals.
A brief concluding chapter will end the book, presenting a final assessment of Banks’ relevance in today’s SF landscape and attempting to take a look at the Culture’s future in and beyond the field of literary criticism.