The writing career of Iain Menzies Banks—“Ming-iss, you’d pronounce it south of the border”1—did not exactly begin with the Culture, but it was a close thing. Having decided he wanted to be a writer at 11,2 Banks proceeded to compose his first novel in 1970 and his second in 1972 before alighting in 1974–75 on an idea for a third. Entitled The Use of Weapons, it was going to be a space opera, a sub-genre of science fiction Banks liked despite the right-wing ethos most of it propagated. In his 1989 interview with David Garnett, Banks recounted the circumstances of the novel’s inception:
I had this character, a mercenary … a very ultra tough guy. Very successful, very good at waging war and all that. But I thought this was a bit militaristic. Back then, even fifteen years ago, I wasn’t really too happy with the idea. I wanted some reason, some good moral reason, for him to be employed in this way. So I came up with the idea of these galactic good guys who occasionally had to stoop to using this sort of person, usually from outside…. The idea being that people have such a good time in the Culture that it just doesn’t produce maniacal Rambo types. And the Culture, also being very moral, wouldn’t stoop to treating people badly—you know, dirty manipulation or forcing people into some horrible militaristic Spartan type of training or whatever. So, I though, in that case, I’ll have to find this sort of person on some other nasty little planet, take them away from some situation where they’re going to get killed. So [the Culture] can say all right, do you want to work for us? Not that they’d put him back in the same situation, but they do say, “You’re alive, and you can work for us if you like.” And it all sort of mushroomed from that, since way back in ’72 or ’3 or ’4. In fact, I’ve just been working on the ideas behind the Culture ever since [64].
That’s when it began, Banks’ complex, argumentative, funny, constantly self-interrogating, intensely self-aware model for a socio-economic system that could be meaningfully classified as utopian by more than just the person advocating it. Now, in the wake of Banks’ untimely death, we have no other choice but to look at this body of work as a complete set and draw our conclusions from that. And if it is true that the Culture is “obviously your political theory,” as Garnett told him, we must then consider that this political theory also informed his life. Therefore, we must look at its development as an expression of Banks’ own convictions first, and then as a product of the environments—geographic, social, cultural—that he inhabited throughout his life.
Which brings us to its early years. Banks’ childhood was atypical for the kind of personality one usually associates with someone who published the kind of fiction he did. In the wake of The Wasp Factory’s publication in 1984, and for years afterward as Frank Cauldhame’s obsessive, brutally ritualistic psyche seemed to replicate itself in later novels into a host of similarly damaged personalities, several interviewers asked him whether this show of metatextual violence might not have been the result of a difficult childhood. But Banks, ever his disarming self, disappointed those notions:
I felt very loved, and special…. And it’s very difficult to have an only child and love them like that, and not spoil them. I think back and remember I always used to be given the best cuts of meat and so on. I got used to being treated as the most important person in the household, which can be very dangerous…. I mean, luckily I turned out to be a wonderful human being, but a lesser person could have had their head turned by that [Hughes 1999 n.p.].
Indeed, Banks’ childhood was by all accounts a happy one. Born in 1954 in Dunfermline, Fife, he was an only child,3 the son of Tom, an officer in the Admiralty stationed at the naval yards in Rosyth, near the Firth of Forth, and Effie, a professional ice-skater; the two had met at Dunfermline ice rink, where Effie was working as an instructress. Banks consistently ascribed his passion for writing to his father’s influence, while his mother’s seems to have been responsible for the stubborn streak that allowed him to keep trusting himself in the early days of his career, when publishers did not appear to want what he had to offer (Hughes 1999, n.p.; Cabell 2014, Kindle locations 253–270).
Banks spent the pre-university years of his life between North Queensferry and Gourock, following his father’s postings in the Admiralty. His childhood and adolescence were “the standard writer’s cliché, and I had all the classic symptoms—not quite talking to myself but definitely having my own little world, making up my own stories. I always got on well with my parents … and I wasn’t bullied at school or anything” (Cobley 1990, 24). Banks also inherited from both parents large families full of uncles and aunts, cousins and second cousins, among whom he spent his childhood. Some of them also led more interesting lives than might be expected on average in 1950s Scotland—a few were naval pilots, for example (Hughes 1999 n.p.), and the stories they must have told the young Banks probably contributed to first triggering and then fueling a lifelong passion for technological artifacts and high-octane action sequences.4 Early manifestations of this passion prompted Banks to “[lead] his friends in daredevil games from climbing trees to re-enacting battles in the Great War and Second World War pill boxes scattered across the banks of the Firth of Forth,” and to develop an abiding affection for the Forth bridge, under whose titan frame he spent a good deal of his early life. The bridge would return in his fiction under many guises, chief among all the eponymous structure in The Bridge (Cabell 2014, Kindle locations 270–283).
Banks was nine when his family moved from North Queensferry to Gourock, about eighty miles away, and it was perhaps the initial isolation accompanying the move that, combined with his status as an only child and his reflective nature, brought him to “[make] up stories in my head. Rather than novels, they were basically fictitious TV series similar to The Man from UNCLE or Danger Man. For some reason, the secret service would have to employ a young, but very cunning and clever Scots boy, of whatever age I happened to be at the time” (Leith 2003, n.p.). He also discovered the local library, which he began visiting regularly. He read voraciously, and while he happily read in every genre, he did discover in himself a preference for non-mimetic literature and science fiction in particular:
I remember I used to raid Gourock Library every week for three or four books and I always looked for the yellow Gollancz covers, and I’d read them whatever the hell they were. As long as it said SF on the cover I’d read them. Until it was pointed out to me that these books were all written by different authors, I didn’t know I’d read virtually everything Robert Heinlein had done, up to a certain point [Cobley 1990, 23–24].
By the time he started writing his own stories, Banks had already amassed a wide range of literary influences, genre and non-genre, as well as non-literary ones.5 The most lasting among them were the works of Jane Austen,6 Leonard Cohen,7 Alistair MacLean, John Sladek, M. John Harrison and Brian Aldiss, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum (1959). Also, Monty Python and the Marx Brothers’ movies, plus 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Star Wars (1977),8 should be added to this relatively brief list, which is relevant for two main reasons: firstly because it is representative of the eclectic nature of Banks’ overall influences, and secondly because, with the exception of MacLean’s novels, the Marx Brothers’ movies, and Star Wars, the aggregate of the works comprising it features a mixture of byzantine narrative structures, unreliable narrators, a shifting sense of the reality of the situation presented in the story, a strong tendency to play games with the reader’s assumptions, and that uneasy blend of humor and horror that would later characterize a great deal of Banks’ own writing. “Just the wealth of humor in both,” he said of Catch-22 and Fear and Loathing, “and they had a serious point as well. It’s hard enough to do comedy, it’s hard also to do something that makes people laugh and is viciously realistic as well” (Rundle 2010, n.p.). In developing his craft, Banks would take that particular lesson to heart.
So: a happy childhood, devoid of strife or fundamental suffering; a large, loving family full of interesting people; a tendency to make up stories in his head; a seemingly bottomless intellectual curiosity with a distinct literary bent, at once slaked and fueled by the contents of the local library; and a host of influences, ranging from straight adventure/thriller to comedy to involved social commentary to postmodern experimentation. That Banks should conclude he wanted to be a writer by the age of 11 is not surprising; what is remarkable is the determination and self-confidence he displayed in pursuing this vocation far past the age at which most other people decide it was just a phase and they need to move on.9 By his own reckoning, Banks wrote about a million words’ worth of unpublished material before the second draft of The Wasp Factory was accepted for publication (Hunt 1999, n.p.; Rundle 2010, n.p.), and while most of this material was later published as well, albeit in modified form, some of it has, to date, not seen the light of day.
Among those unpublished works are Banks’ two early novels, the ones that preceded the 1974 draft of The Use of Weapons. The first, written in 1970 when Banks was 16, was a spy novel in the vein of one of his early influences, Alistair MacLean, and also based on “a lot of the spy programs that were on television at the time” (Rundle 2010, n.p.). It was entitled The Hungarian Lift-Jet, and it involved Banks’ “very cunning and clever Scots boy” in a sort of Hunt-for-Red-October mission to steal secret technology: “Hungary has invented this radical lift jet and the secret service had nicked it. It was just an excuse for vast amounts of mayhem. It all ended badly. Everybody died” (Leith 2003, n.p.). Banks wrote the novel in longhand in an Admiralty logbook his father had given to him, and it ran to about 140,000 words—“about two average novels. Terrible, but it meant a lot to me at the time” (Cobley 1990, 25). Even at the time of writing Banks must have felt that the novel didn’t measure up, because he never typed it. Instead, he moved on to his next work, The Tashkent Rambler (also known in its abbreviated form, TTR), and his next set of literary influences: Catch-22 and Stand on Zanzibar. He wrote the novel in 1972, and for the first and only time in his career, he did not plan it out. The result was a sprawling, seemingly unending narrative that “lived up to its title by meandering to a length of 400,000 words … he struggled to end the novel and has plotted his work ever since. Banks’ first rejection slip was for this work” (Colebrook, Cox, and Haddock 2013, 4). Set in the near future, The Tashkent Rambler features a non-nuclear Sino-Soviet border war that the Chinese win with the help of the United States, which enters the war only because “they needed to battle-test their weapons and hadn’t had a decent war for a while.” However, China’s war prize, Mongolia, proves unappetizing, so the U.S. takes it over; the narrative itself “takes place in the three weeks before the ceremony in which Mongolia is going to become the fifty-first state of the American Union, renamed Mongoliana, and celebrate their Dependence Day…. It’s full of bad puns and characters with names like Dahommey Brezhnev and Dogghart Jammaharry. Gropius Luckfoot was another one, and his very unpleasant sidekick was called Toss Macabre” (Wilson 1994, n.p.).10 Banks’ passion for puns, a phase he was going through at the time,11 would later resurface in the baroque, comically long, essentially unpronounceable names that became one of the more readily recognizable features of his Culture stories.
By the time Banks came up with the original idea for The Use of Weapons, he seemed to have largely gotten out of his system one of the necessary phases in a writer’s career: the direct emulation of fundamental literary influences. Whatever the failures of that early draft—before he could publish it in 1990 as Use of Weapons (no article), the fourth Culture story, Banks had to rewrite most of it—TUoW was his idea, set within a fictional environment of his own original devising. This environment was the first incarnation of the Culture universe, which was the product of Banks’ rapidly maturing political, artistic, and ethical views. He was twenty at the time, and a student of literature, psychology, and philosophy at the University of Stirling (Hoggard 2007, n.p.). Among his intellectual influences in the realm of non-fiction, the most important were those of Noam Chomsky, whose ideas of free access to information as a prerequisite to a more just society struck a powerful chord within him, and of John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist and diplomat who became one of the pioneers of American liberalism (MacLeod 2013, n.p.).12 Michael Herr, the war correspondent and author of the Vietnam-war memoir Dispatches (1977), also became a prominent influence (SFFWorld 1997, n.p.). Those who came into contact with Banks in those years, faculty and fellow students alike, remember him very much as Colin Hughes’ “affable Banksie”—lively, intense in a fun sort of way, friendly, without pretense, and slightly distracted in the manner of those who seem to be always looking at something not quite on the horizon yet. But they also remember him as a studious young man with a steely determination to become exactly what he’d decided he wanted to become—a writer. Rory Watson, a poet and professor of English at Stirling in Banks’ days, remembered that “he was always very lively and genial; he liked to play the amiable loon. But he worked hard. A lot of people sit and talk about writing, but if you’re really going to write you have to do it, not talk about it. Iain was writing all the time” (Hughes 1999 n.p.).
So it wasn’t enough that he wanted to be a writer; he wanted to be a good one too. He also wanted to say meaningful things through the medium of science fiction, and in that respect he found plenty of inspiration when, sometime in the early ’70s, he began reading New Worlds.13 Since Michael Moorcock had taken over the magazine’s editorial reins about ten years earlier, New Worlds had gradually become the New Wave’s standard bearer and the venue for many of its signature voices—besides the aforementioned Sladek, Aldiss, Brunner, and Harrison, there were also Norman Spinrad, Barrington J. Bayley, Thomas Disch, Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, John Clute, and Moorcock himself. Self-consciously literary, open to the larger world of postmodern experimentation of the 1960s, scornful of the hackneyed starship-and-raygun formulas of 1940s and ’50s American SF, and dedicated to using the tools of the genre for the exploration of “inner space” (as Ballard had famously put it in 1962), New Wave writers gave Banks a fairly precise sense of the possibilities of science fiction as a mature, artistically self-aware, politically and psychologically articulate literary mode. Banks also received from New Worlds a strong grounding in SF criticism, mostly through the reviews and the articles M. John Harrison and John Clute wrote for the magazine. According to Ken MacLeod, Banks’ close friend since high school and now a fellow student at Stirling, those articles and reviews “were, for Iain and for me, always the highlight of every issue of the paperback series of New Worlds. We read them so assiduously and delightedly that we burned entire paragraphs into memory…. Clute and Harrison took a scalpel to the flaws of the science fiction we loved, and we loved them for it … the field as Iain found it presented a dilemma: American SF was optimistic about the human future, but deeply conservative in its politics; British SF was more thoughtful and experimental, but too often depressive” (2013, n.p.).
For these reasons, the composition of The Use of Weapons’ first draft represented something of a flashpoint moment, the nexus at which Banks’ developing skills as a writer, his political and ethical views, and his ability to engage in world-building from within a non-mimetic environment, began to blend. Ken MacLeod became a fundamental part of that process. Banks reminisced to Garnett: “I’ve got a very good friend of mine called Ken MacLeod; we used to get together and set the universe to right, as one does. And out of those conversations a lot of Culture ideas have grown” (1989, 65). More recently, MacLeod himself specified the genesis of those ideas:
When Iain Banks and I were students back in the early 1970s, I was one of the first readers of Use of Weapons…. Iain explained that the Culture was his idea of utopia, in which advanced technology, inexhaustible resources and friendly artificial intelligence made possible a society in which nobody had to work and there was no need for money or a separate state apparatus. At the time I was reading with some excitement … a collection of extracts from Marx’s notebooks, in which he allowed himself some bolder speculations than he ever saw into print. I explained to Iain that the Culture was very similar to Marx’s conception of communism: a stateless and classless society based on automation and abundance…. [But] Iain had little interest in relating the long-range possibility of utopia to radical politics in the here and now. As he saw it, what mattered was to keep the utopian possibility open by continuing technological progress, especially space development, and in the meantime to support whatever policies and politics in the real world were rational and humane [2013, n.p.].
For Banks, MacLeod explains, supporting rational and humane policies in the real world involved voting for the Labour Party. When, in later years, the Labour Party became New Labour, Banks turned to the Scottish National Party and the Scottish Socialists out of the gradually matured conviction that Scotland would remain shackled to toxic Tory governments it hadn’t elected until the day it became independent. Banks was no supporter of any notion of Scottish exceptionalism, however. His championing of separation from England “didn’t come from nationalism but from reformism, and from a life-long, heart-felt hatred for the Conservative and Unionist Party” (2013, n.p.).14
Supporting rational and humane policies in a science fictional world of his own creation, on the other hand, presented Banks with few obstacles besides those he had set for himself. In its basic setup, The Use of Weapons already contained the germ of the dramatic tension that would one day fuel every Culture story: a government-free, labor-free, non-violent, moneyless, humane, technologically advanced, AI-administered utopia possessed of bottomless resources that, in those few instances when it has to “stoop to using this sort of person,” finds it necessary to hire someone to handle the unpleasant aspects of having to deal with barbarians at the gates. And because “people have such a good time in the Culture that it just doesn’t produce maniacal Rambo types,” this someone would have to be from a scarcity-based, heavily hierarchical society from whose crushing embrace they would probably welcome removal. This seemingly unproblematic solution, however, carries inescapable ethical conundrums: the moral standing of outsourcing one’s uncivilized behavior is dubious, as is the notion of violent intervention in the development of other, less powerful societies—purportedly for those societies’ own good; also, such practices threaten to belie the self-ascribed status of utopia that is implicit in choosing to fix others in the first place.
Originally, this built-in dramatic tension may not have mattered much. The Culture, Banks told Science Fiction Chronicle’s Sally Ann Melia in 1994, was supposed to act as nothing more than a background and moral escape hatch for TUoW’s tough mercenary protagonist, Cheradenine Zakalwe—doing bad work for a good cause would speak better of him as a moral being than might otherwise have been the case. In the course of writing that first draft, however, things began changing: “I’d read so much SF which seemed just to assume that our current political-economic systems—and especially U.S.-model Capitalism—would just continue on almost unchanged into the stars and that just seemed blind, blinkered…. So, I came up with the idea of the Culture” (42). And indeed, between 1975 and 1981, the year he wrote the first draft of The Wasp Factory, Banks dedicated most of his energies to two stories set within the Culture universe,15 each of which further developed the shape of his utopia and explored one or more facets of the ecumenical intervention conundrum. The first was The State of the Art, a novella written in 1979 that brought the Culture in direct contact with Earth, circa 1977. The second story, which Banks wrote in 1980, was a novel entitled The Player of Games; its protagonist is a man famous throughout the Culture for his skills at mastering all kinds of games and simulations, and the Culture’s agents persuade him to travel to a distant corner of the galaxy, home to a brutally dictatorial empire, to play the most complex game ever seen.
The State of the Art and The Player of Games were not accepted for publication, however, and neither was the first draft of Consider Phlebas, which Banks composed in 1982. In part, the reason for this string of rejections consisted in Banks’ habit of working exclusively on a first-draft basis. He’d write a story and, if he felt it was worth submitting for publication, do so without revising it (Garnett 1989, 68–69). Invariably, the work would be rejected. And so, confronted with a number of returned manuscripts, Banks decided to branch out into mimetic writing—or, as he put it to Spike Magazine’s Greg Lowe, “widen my circle of rejection” (2008, n.p.). In 1981, the year before composing Phlebas, he’d written the first draft of The Wasp Factory, but unlike his other stories, this one received a second draft. Even then, six publishers rejected it before MacMillan picked it up in 1983 and published it in 1984 (Colebrook, Cox, and Haddock 2013, 3–4; Hunt 1999, n.p.).
So Banks had made it. “I think I’m basically a science-fiction writer, and I always have been,” he said at one point, “but I broke into the mainstream first” (Leith 2003, n.p.). The breakthrough, however, came at the price of a certain feeling of selling out, of trading his faithfulness to his favorite genre for the chance to get published (Rundle 2010, n.p.), and this may be one of the reasons why, over the course of the three years that separated the publication of The Wasp Factory from the appearance of Consider Phlebas, Banks seemed intent on loading into his work as much non-mimetic material as he could get away with and still call it mainstream. In this endeavor, he found inspiration in the last of his great literary influences: the 1981 novel Lanark, written by fellow Scot Alasdair Gray. Banks himself happily acknowledged the depth of influence that Lanark had in shaping The Bridge (see Colebrook 2013, 28), but it is also important to consider that the novel, which Banks read right around the time he decided to try switching to non-genre writing, also influenced The Wasp Factory and Walking on Glass. Among other things, Gray’s work provided Banks with a blueprint for the creation of thinly disguised fantastic narratives, hallucinatory tales giddily poised between nightmare and reality, vision and waking sight. Lanark is an intense metafictional scherzo, a maddened process of constant transition between a reality that feels like a fever dream and a dreamscape that looks altogether too solid for comfort.
By the time Gray published Lanark, he’d been working on the novel for almost thirty years; in fact, he’d started writing it as a teenager in 1954, the year Banks was born (Lanark, 569). When it came out in England, it was an instantaneous success, both artistically and financially,16 and its appearance signaled in Gray’s native Scotland the first stirrings of what would later become known as the Scottish Literary Revival (see Pattie 2013, 9–12). When Banks read Lanark, his reaction to it could hardly be overstated:
I was absolutely knocked out by Lanark. I think it’s the best in Scottish literature this century. It opened my eyes. I had forgotten what you could do—you can be self-referential, you can muck about with different voices, characters, time-streams, whatever [Wilson 1994, n.p.].
This brief list contains all the characteristics in Lanark that so impressed Banks, and which he duly imported into his own work. Subtitled A Life in Four Books, Gray’s novel is the story of two people who are actually the same person: Duncan Thaw, a deeply troubled young man living in contemporary Glasgow and heavily based on Gray himself (568), and the eponymous Lanark, who wakes up one night inside a train carriage in the city of Unthank, one among the many nightmare locations in the shadow-world in which he now finds himself and with which he must come to terms, somehow. Duncan and Lanark are connected to each other through the former’s suicide: a rebellious, fractious artistic personality, Duncan is constantly confronted with rejection and misunderstanding on the part of others, which his mercurial nature does nothing to ameliorate, and when it all gets to be too much, when he concludes that the people in his life seem to be happier without him around, he walks into the ocean and drowns himself—at which point Lanark wakes up in Unthank with grit and seashells in his pockets (17).
This crude synopsis seems simple enough, but the novel’s timeline, scrambled and fractured into an epistemologically opaque alignment, makes things considerably more difficult. The four Books that comprise Lanark begin not with Book One, but with Book Three (3–105), which features Lanark’s awakening in Unthank and his early adventures there. The sequence continues with a Prologue (107–117), and then we have Book One (121–219) and Book Two (221–354), which tell Duncan Thaw’s story from childhood to self-destruction; they are separated from each other by a one-page Interlude (219). Book Four (357–560), which returns us to Lanark and concludes the narrative, contains the Epilogue, but not at its conclusion—the piece is wedged between chapters 40 and 41 (480–499), four chapters away from the book’s end. In it, Lanark meets the author of Lanark, who calls himself Nastler and tells him the story of his own life—and of Duncan’s—in a transfixingly offhand tone. “You are Thaw with the neurotic imagination trimmed off and built into the furniture of the world you occupy,” Nastler/Gray tells Lanark right after confessing that he killed Duncan because “though based on me he was tougher and more honest, so I hated him” (493). He also explains that he structured the novel in such a counterintuitive fashion because “I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another,” and that the Epilogue is where it is because “it’s too important to go [at the end] … it lets me utter some fine sentiments which I could hardly trust to a mere character. And it contains critical notes which will save research scholars years of toil” (483). Those critical notes, which are literally placed on the sides of the Epilogue’s text, amount to a long “Index of Plagiarisms” that Nastler/Gray claims he committed toward a considerable number of disparate sources (485–499).
The Epilogue and the ordering of the Table of Contents are the most evident signs of Lanark’s metafictional playfulness, and of its refusal to remain within the scope of one genre for long enough to allow us to firmly place it there. They are not the only ones, however; everywhere in the novel’s text, allusions and parallels appear not only between Duncan and Lanark’s life, but also between the real-world setting of mid–20th-century Glasgow and the secondary world of Unthank. It gradually becomes evident that one is the shadow of the other, although which one and which other remains open to debate. Nastler/Gray himself tells Lanark that the most profound connection between the two plotlines lies in the representation of the incapacity to care for oneself and for others: “The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by your narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason” (484). Indeed, the fate of individuals trapped inside brutal world-machines constitutes one of the main themes in Gray’s writing:
Throughout his fiction, the truth at which Gray worries is the old one—of exploitation, class brutality, man’s inhumanity to man…. This is the truth which seeks out Gray’s protagonists, and shatters their complacency [qtd. in Pattie 2013, 12].
Banks hadn’t needed Gray’s influence to develop the same set of concerns. His intellectual and political development of the mid-to-late 1970s already showed their presence in his writing. What Gray gave Banks was a template for injecting those concerns into his writing and for making this writing work, both financially and artistically, within an avowedly mainstream environment. So, when Banks began writing The Wasp Factory, the lessons of Lanark were very much present in his mind, and their application continued past that first novel—indeed, they ended up encompassing the rest of his body of work, including the Culture series.
Taken together, the three novels that preceded the first Culture story—The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glass (1985), and The Bridge (1986)—fairly thoroughly showcase the main characteristics of Iain “no–M” Banks’ writing; these characteristics would all reappear in his M-Banks work, appropriately re-morphed to fit its genre-specific environments. In no particular order of importance, they are:
• A tendency to utilize fantastic tropes and narrative techniques to blur and confuse distinctions between mimetic and non-mimetic literature.
• The reliance on untrustworthy narrators, altered mind-states, and uncertain reality frames.
• A strong preference for metafiction and textual playfulness.
• Self-referentiality. Every one of Banks’ first three novels carries, embedded within its structure, tropes, themes, and plot twists borrowed from famous works of fiction—often non-mimetic—that influenced him in one way or another.
• The penchant for foregrounding the storytelling process as a game played between the author, the reader, and the characters in the story.
• A predilection for complicated plot structures, often anticipated in the many moving parts of the novels’ Table of Contents.
A detailed examination of The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glass, and The Bridge is beyond the scope of this work, but a few examples from each will be enough to illustrate Banks’ usage of these techniques. The Wasp Factory, for instance, represents an excellent showcase of the first two items on the list—the blurring of boundaries and the presence of unreliable narrators. The novel features a first-person protagonist/narrator, Frank Cauldhame, who in the aftermath of an accident that left him castrated has erected around himself and the island he lives on a protective system of supernatural totems surmounted by the heads of various animals Frank has killed (7). Those grisly trophies are part of a larger network of Sacrifice Poles spread across the island’s whole perimeter. They are Frank’s “early warning system and deterrent rolled into one; infected, potent things which looked out from the island, warding off” (10). The Bunker, Frank’s temple of dark magic where he prepares the animal carcasses and the heads for his protective spells, complements this sacrificial arrangement. In fact, all of Frank’s actions obey an essentially ritualistic mentality that imbues events in the novel with symbolic meanings connected to practices of premonition and magical control over the territory he has claimed as his own.17
And then there’s the Factory of the title. If the Sacrifice Poles and the Bunker are Frank’s warning beacons of Gondor, the Wasp Factory is his dark version of Galadriel’s mirror—an engine of prophecy powered by the deaths of the wasps he captures and puts into the Factory so they’ll run the gauntlet he has made for them. Frank built the Factory around the face of an old clock he found in the town dump (120–121). Each of the twelve numerals on the clock face leads to a trap, and each trap kills the wasp in a specific way—burning, electrocution, crushing, chopping, drowning, and so on.18 The means by which the workings of the Factory lead the wasp to any one end reveal something about the future, or so Frank believes. His descriptions of the Factory’s meaning-making system and of the rituals he has to perform to activate it (119–125) come across, in their deranged intensity, as at once revelatory of a genuine supernatural agency and, because of Frank’s ultimately unreliable nature, skeptical of that same agency. In this sense, The Wasp Factory reads very much like a psychological Gothic narrative. Trapped as we are inside his first-person narration, and without any form of external referent to contextualize or verify the truthfulness of his tale, we have no way of knowing for sure exactly what, if anything, happened. Not unlike his literary predecessors, Frank speaks in a voice that seems invested in persuading us that its owner’s actions, insane as they may seem, are in fact perfectly natural responses to a set of unfortunate circumstances. “Women and the sea are my enemies” (43), he tells us at one point, and while his hostility toward the sea carries a sense, however gingerly, of being connected to some sort of factual basis (it washes away everything he builds), his hatred for women does not at first seem to have one. Also, insanity run deep in the Cauldhame family: Frank’s father, who refused to have his son’s birth registered, also refused to send him to school, and the education he gave his son was laced with a string of willful lies whose truth Frank found out only when he was old enough to hit the local library on his own. And then there’s Frank’s half-brother Eric. Once a caring, well-adjusted personality in a context where nobody else was, he went mad in the aftermath of a horrifying accident at the hospital where he was stationed as a medical student (139–142). As a result, after he’d become violent and obsessed with decay, he was put into a hospital from which, Frank tells us at the beginning of the novel, he has only just escaped.
This brief look at The Wasp Factory highlights the nature of the novel as a blend of supernatural horror and Poe-esque Gothic tale, a narrative whose suspension between fantasy and realism cannot ultimately be resolved because there’s no exit strategy that can remove us from under Frank Cauldhame’s glare. This is his story, true or not, and we’re prisoners in it. Walking on Glass, for its part, works well as a sample of metafiction and gameplaying at work. The gameplaying aspect becomes apparent upon looking at the plot structure, which is divided into three seemingly separate but ultimately converging plotlines. The first plotline involves Graham Park, an art student in love with a mysterious, sultry woman called Sara ffitch. Graham has a friend and confidant in Richard Slater, who has a habit of launching himself in periodical synopses for science fiction novels he always plans on, but never quite gets around to, writing (9–10; 61–66). It eventually turns out that Slater and Sara are not only lovers, but brother and sister as well, and that they had all along been playing a complicated game of deception with Graham to deter attention from their own illicit relationship.
The second plotline features Steven Grout, a man who believes he is a fallen warrior from a higher plane of reality trapped inside a human body. During the course of his service in the “ultimate war, the final confrontation between good and evil,” he had made a mistake, or been betrayed, or lost an engagement; Steven can’t quite recall what happened, but he knows that his punishment involves exile to the lesser reality of late 20th-century Earth, and he therefore seeks the key to the way out so he can return to the glory of his former existence (26). The only place he acknowledges as safe from the forces of chaos is the rented room in which he lives, a sparsely furnished, small locale forever cluttered with stacks of science fiction and fantasy books. He reads fantasy and SF because “he had long ago realised that if he was going to find any clues to the whereabouts of the Way Out, the location or identity of the Key, there was a good chance he might get some ideas from that type of writing. He knew this from the way he felt attracted to it” (30–31).19 Thus, Steven is playing a game of hunt-the-clue against foes that seem to be playing a game with him, trying to keep him immured in our drab reality.
And then there’s the third plotline: Quiss and Ajayi are guests/prisoners in a castle, which Quiss knows by the name of Castle Doors and Ajayi by that of Castle of Bequest. The castle towers over a snow-covered plain that extends in every direction as far as the eye can see, its location seemingly unknowable, and time passes without any apparent change in landscape, climate, or season (42). Quiss and Ajayi used to be Promotionaries in the Therapeutic Wars, fighting on opposing sides, and like Steven believes of himself, “they had each done something silly, something which called into question their very suitability for exalted rank, and now they were here, in the castle, with a problem to solve and games to play, being given one last chance; a long shot, an unlikely appeal procedure” (43). The two have to play games with strange names and stranger rules—they begin with One-Dimensional Chess—and at the end of every game they will have one chance to answer the question whose correct solution will set them free to return to the Therapeutic Wars. The question is: “What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?” (52). Gameplaying again, then, and some of them are literally games to be played on a board; others are played with the lives of the characters involved, just like in the Park and Grout storylines, so that one of the unifying principles of the novel is that everyone is at once playing and being played upon, at once gamer and gamed.
In the process of finding out how these separate plotlines converge and explain—or fail to explain—one another, we encounter a number of metafictional referents, all connected to the utilization of the colors black and white as signifiers of the storytelling process. As David Leishman argues in a recent article, everything returns us to images of ink on paper:
The games played by Quiss and Ajayii … all feature pieces which are black and white. Their monochrome nature has an evident mimetic function, mirroring the black and white of the type-written page, a link which is made more explicit by Quiss’ Borgesian discovery that the castle in which they are imprisoned is in fact composed of text [Leishman 2009, n.p.].
When Leishman mentions Quiss’ discovery, he is speaking literally. Quiss tears apart a section of the castle walls to discover that “on every surface so exposed a series of cut or engraved figures was revealed, arranged in lines and columns, complete with word breaks and line breaks and what looked like punctuation … the stones, every one of them, all the tens of thousands of cubic metres the castle must be composed of, all those kilotonnes of rock were really saturated, filled full of hidden, indecipherable lettering” (44). Black-and-white imagery replicates itself across the expanse of the castle, where dark shadows and washed-out light spots interpenetrate each other like spilled paint, and on the plain, which the snow has made completely white. It also recurs in the other two plotlines, where a tangle of references to black chalk on white canvas, black and white clothing, and public places with names like “The White Hart” tie each plotline to itself and to the other two (3–4, 63, 67, 147, 155–156).
As we have seen, Walking on Glass—which, like The Wasp Factory, ultimately refuses to resolve the question of whether or not the non-mimetic elements in its plot are the products of feverish imaginations—connects the aspects of gameplaying and metafiction together because, within the novel’s plot structure, one is the other. Ultimately, the gamers/gamed of Walking on Glass are we readers, who have to negotiate the meaning-making engine of the story while Banks’ narrative persona complicates its workings through a constant foregrounding of the ultimate reality of all fiction: that every story is a puzzle because every life is, and that the games we at once play and suffer are the same we play and suffer in our lives. And if things don’t make perfect sense, if the characters’ paths remain impervious to unambiguous resolution, it’s worth considering that these difficulties reflect the reality of our existence more than a clean tie-up of carefully engineered plot-strands would.
The remaining two techniques—the resonance with other stories and the construction of byzantine plot structures—find a good embodiment in The Bridge. Both are connected to the influence that Gray’s Lanark exerted on the novel, an influence immediately apparent when we look at the circumstances of the story’s protagonists: John Orr is a foundling, fished out of the water under the eponymous bridge, a titanic construct spanning the expanse of a great river that separates an unnamed City and an equally nameless Kingdom. The bridge is extremely long, and Orr can’t see where it ends on either side (32). Because he is a foundling, and because he remembers nothing of his life before the bridge, he has been given the name he has—“John” because it’s a very common name, and “Orr” because, so we’re told, it was the first name starting with an O that the nurses at the hospital could think of.20 The letter O comes from “a large, livid, circular bruise on my chest, an almost perfect circle stamped on my chest” (25). Orr lives a comparatively good life on the bridge, although the absence of any recollection of the time before he was found troubles him. And something else haunts his existence: when he goes home to the apartment he has been given by the bridge’s authorities, his television will frequently and without prompting display the black-and-white image of a man lying comatose in bed in a hospital room. At times, people visit this man, and at times nurses walk in to check on him. Otherwise, the man remains immobile, merely breathing through the days of his life (40–41). This man’s name is Alex Lennox, and he is John Orr’s original self in the real world, trapped in a coma in the wake of a terrible accident on the Firth of Forth Bridge (1–3).21
Like Lanark, The Bridge gives us the parallel stories of two lives that are really one, and again like Lanark, it presents them to us in a complicated plot structure—three main parts entitled Coma (1–121), Triassic (125–243), and Eocene (247–376), each further divided into three sets of four chapters, each set of chapters collected under a permutation of the word “metamorphosis.”22 A brief Coda (377–386), in which Alex wakes up from his coma and John Orr vanishes, closes the book. The narrative pits John’s life on the bridge and Alex’s coma-induced recollections of his life in England and Scotland in an alternating rhythm, back to back as the chapters roll by and the two alter-egos of the same man explicate themselves and each other. In 1990, prompted by Ken MacLeod’s advice, Banks would return to this sequence of alternating chapters to trace the two parallel paths of the same person’s life in the rewritten Use of Weapons.
There are a couple of important structural differences between Lanark and The Bridge. The first resides in the generalized sense of hopefulness that, displayed in Banks, was missing in Gray: while Duncan Thaw and Lanark are locked in a connection without hope (Duncan is irredeemably dead by the time Lanark wakes up in Unthank), Alex Lennox and John Orr are linked by an ultimately solvable thread of suspended existence whose connective tissue is the hallucination—or alternate reality—of a deeply estranged place. For Alex, this place is the netherworld of coma, which in turn leads him to the otherworld of the bridge and his doppelganger, John Orr. Both Alex and John work their way through their worlds following plotlines that function as pocket versions of a bildungsroman, and whose ultimate goal is the psychological growth and physical healing of the original personality template, accomplished when, in the novel’s last page, Alex wakes up unified and in full possession of his faculties.
The second difference resides in the figure of the Barbarian, a comedic take on Robert E. Howard’s Conan who speaks in a hilarious Scottish brogue and carries on his shoulder a familiar that simultaneously talks to him in perfectly cultivated English23 and keeps defecating down his back. The Barbarian is one of John Orr’s many dream-selves, the one that comes out at night when John isn’t dreaming of the man on the bed, and his exchanges with the familiar take on a superego-versus-id quality that identifies them as a microcosm of a larger relationship—in other words, the Barbarian behaves very much like a personification of Alex/John’s subconscious. In the coda, he collapses when John Orr disappears, immediately before Alex wakes up.
As we have seen from the brief analysis above, once we begin examining the plot structures, literary borrowings, character profiles, and thematic concerns of Banks’ first three novels it becomes impossible to classify them exclusively as mimetic. Their constant refusal to identify themselves as belonging to any one single mode of writing, as well as the pervasive gameplaying taking place between writer, characters, and reader, rob us of a definitive resolution, and the explicit presence of non-mimetic tropes, both as integral elements of the plot and as metatextual references to other works of fantastic literature, further distance us from pure realism.
Perhaps the most important among Banks’ fantastic infusions concerns his use of doubles, twins, and doppelgangers. Several critics have pointed out the presence of doubles and doubling practices, first in The Wasp Factory (Butler 1999) and then in Banks’ opus as a whole (March 2002; Colebrook 2010; Macdonald 2013; Jones 2013). The double/twin/doppelganger aspect is particularly important because this theme is central to the birth of fantastika, a term coined by John Clute “to describe the armamentarium of the fantastic in literature as a whole, encompassing science fiction, Fantasy, fantastic horror and their various subgenres” (SFE 2014, n.p.). Fantastika, Clute argues, is the mode of writing that came into being when, sometime after 1750, “a new kind of anxiety began to haunt the Western World: a fear that the engines that we made to turn the world might shake us off, that we were both responsible for that engine, and usurped by it, that Progress was not only a Process we might predict, but a Dark Twin grinning at us out of tomorrow” (Clute 2011, 3–4). As literary figures in late 20th-century fantastika, the characters in Banks’ first three novels have plenty of Dark Twins grinning at them from tomorrow—and from right now, and from yesterday, and from other places that may or may not exist exclusively inside their minds. Frank Cauldhame is haunted by his brother Eric (who, like Frank himself, is mentally warped and prone to violence) and by Frances, his true identity—it turns out at the end of Factory that Frank hadn’t lost his manhood in an accident; he’d been born a girl, and his father had decided to improvise a sex-change operation out of sheer misogyny (171–178). Quiss and Ajay in Walking on Glass, on the other hand, find a doppelganger in Steven Grout, whose conviction that he is a fallen warrior from another plane of reality closely mirrors theirs, as does the gameplaying in which he has to engage in order to find the way out. And of course, Alex Lennox and John Orr in The Bridge are mirror versions of each other, their doubling further complicated by the presence of the Barbarian, who rises from the depths to haunt both with gleeful energy.
Another fundamental signifier of doubling is represented by Banks’ ubiquitous metafictional playfulness, which resulted in the metatextual references to other works of fiction—many of which constitute a good cross-section of fantastika over the last one hundred and fifty years—embedded in all three novels. We have already witnessed the doppelganger influence that Lanark exerted on The Bridge. The Wasp Factory, for its part, channels four—The Tin Drum (one of Banks’ early literary influences), Gore Vidal’s 1968 novel Myra Breckinridge, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The first two are explicitly referenced in chapter 3, within which they function as warnings of Frank’s true identity,24 while the other two are buried deep inside the novel’s structure, providing much of its rhythm, its focus, and its preoccupation with altered perceptions. As Andrew Butler points out (1999, 19–20), the homage to Frankenstein involves a doubling between characters: while Victor Frankenstein is at once father and mother to his unnamed creation, Angus has to be at once father and mother to a son and a daughter. Also, like Victor’s child, Frank/Frances is the monstrous result of a procedure poised far on the brink of Gothicism. The connection to The Strange Case, on the other hand, focuses exclusively on Frank/Frances: like Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, Frank and Frances are the two facets of the same character, one of which has been given life through the use of a concoction—Jekyll’s potion in Stevenson, Angus’ male growth hormones in Banks. In Factory, however, the polarity is reversed and the hidden doppelganger is the saner and less violent of the two.
Walking on Glass, on the other hand, references texts that share a common concern with gaming as the Twin of a non-mimetic storytelling process. In the tortuous topography and maddened hierarchy of the Castle of Bequest—mirrored in the other two plotlines by the intricate deception of which Graham is a victim and by the endlessly winding paths of Steven’s room—we find powerful echoes of castle Gormenghast in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan (1946), as well as the analogous structure in Kafka’s The Castle (1926). The three plotlines’ often anguished unspooling and their eventual convergence seems to replicate the structure of Borges’ Labyrinths, and especially of two stories in the collection—“The Garden of Forking Paths” and “The Library of Babel,” the latter perhaps constituting the one symbol representing the novel entire as “a perfectly inescapable heterocosm of text” (Leishman 2009, n.p.). Lastly, the aspects of judgment and condemnation built into the fabric of the novel find a counterpart in Kafka’s The Trial (1925). But it’s not simply by virtue of their thematic and structural similarities to Walking on Glass that these works of fantastika are relevant to it. If Quiss had made a Borgesian discovery at the beginning when he demolished part of the walls and found them made of books, Ajayi experiences another similar epiphany at the end when, looking at the shattered legs of the small table on which she and Quiss had been playing their games, she finds that these are also made of books, and that these books are written in English. Their titles are “Titus Groan … The Castle, Labyrinths, The Trial…. And another book, which had the title page missing.” Ajayi decides to read this nameless book, and the chapter ends with the first sentence: “He walked through the white corridors…” (332–333). This is the sentence that sets into motion Walking on Glass itself when, at the beginning of the first chapter, we are introduced to Graham Park (3). We have come full circle, back to the beginning of every plotline’s quest for knowledge, escape, and meaning, and we have found that everything is story, and that story haunts us. The plotlines, “instead of achieving coalescence … remain an impossible mismatch of parasitical and competing truths” (Leishman 2009 n.p.), but still we have to deal with them somehow. The interpenetration between words, symbols, stories, games, quests, and the judgment that comes with them is complete, constructing an engine of meaning whose every word seems to diffract into a cacophony of mutually exclusive messages. And we still have to deal, because the Twin won’t leave us alone until we have faced it.
If we consider that the doppelganger and the darkened twin “begin to nurse their injuries throughout fantastika … because the Twin is what we leave behind when life moves so fast we cannot remember where we come from” (Clute 2011, 24), then the mimetic content of his first three novels comprises a thin veneer of realism under which the cauldron of the non-mimetic seethes, threatening to overflow like the dams Frank Cauldhame builds on the beach on top of his doomed toy settlements. There are plenty of amnesias in these novel—Frank and Angus’, Quiss and Ajay and Steven’s, Alex Lennox and John Orr’s—and amnesia is what gives birth to the awful secret that is also the buried Twin who glares at us through the mask of the mundane. This is important. Iain Banks did not write exclusively mimetic fiction with The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glass, and The Bridge—he wrote a blend of the mimetic and of fantastika, which is another way of saying that, stifled in his aspiration to bring his SF to the reading public, he went one level deeper, accessing the more inchoate repository of non-mimetic story that fuels the visions of the three main genres of fantastic fiction: fantasy, horror, and SF. Fantastika is what we get when we access non-mimetic writing without genre, before the time the entertainment industry provided the pageantry that obscured the fundamental scaffolding. Banks had wanted to publish science fiction and he’d been rejected, so he wrote a trilogy of brutal, livid, sleek Trojan horses that, like the many Twins that lurk hidden in their pages, wormed their way into Macmillan’s mainstream catalogue and from there, still masked, into the hands of millions of readers.
Even in the thick of his foray into these subversive, fantastika-scarred embodiments of not-wholly-mainstream writing, Banks hadn’t forgotten the Culture. There are moments in The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glass, and The Bridge when the invisible hand of the author plucks at a chord that, in retrospect, one recognizes as echoing something of Banks’ default Culture voice. The Wasp Factory features Frank Cauldhame’s occasional reflections on morality, racism, and personal freedom,25 but while these reflections do carry some weight in general terms, the personality broadcasting them is so warped that it’s all but impossible to take them at face value. More relevantly, the revelation that Frank is Frances and that she became he because of a homegrown science experiment connects us to the practice, widespread in the Culture, of voluntary sex change. The difference in circumstances—in the Culture, the change is always completely successful, entirely reversible, and bioengineered inside the individual from birth—lies at the heart of Banks’ conviction that the ability to switch between genders at will is essential to the creation of a more just society—once one has lived as both man and woman, misogyny becomes substantially more difficult to embrace.
Walking on Glass features clearer borrowings from Banks’ as-yet unpublished body of work, largely thanks to the prominence of its explicitly science fictional elements. Some of the more obvious examples are Slater’s attempts at crafting plots for SF stories strongly echoing the playfulness of the Culture plotlines, while a subtler instance of quasi–Culture talk occurs during a party: at one point, when the discussion drifts in the direction of the upcoming election, Slater explodes in an energetically entertaining leftist rant that lays out some of the basic political ideas around which Banks had decided to shape the Culture’s ethos (208–212). Perhaps the most vivid example, however, comes when Graham reflects on Slater’s expanded views on politics, ethics, and justice:
His philosophy of life, he said, was founded on Ethical Hedonism. This was the moral system virtually every decent, unblinkered, reasonably informed human able to scrape together a quorum of neurons lived by, but they didn’t realise it. Ethical Hedonism recognized that one had to enjoy oneself when one got the chance to these days, but that rather than immerse oneself totally in such diversions, one ought always to behave in a reasonable and reasonably responsible manner, never losing sight of the more general moral issues and their manifestations in society. “Have fun, be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking, is what it boils down to,” Slater had said [269].
Banks is serious here; in Slater’s beliefs, we can recognize some of his own, which would soon appear in the Culture novels. But his tongue is in his cheek, too. While the philosophy of life Slater embraces dovetails fairly well with Banks’, Slater himself is a signally poor embodiment of those beliefs—he’s a dissembler and a liar, happy to play games with someone else’s feelings, and despite his strong leftist arguments, the reason why he plays that game is to protect the reputation and the political career of his Tory father. By putting those views in the mouth of a fundamentally untrustworthy character, Banks problematizes them, placing them under scrutiny as yet another ideological position—worthier than others, maybe, but still imperfect and subject to error, betrayal, and myopia. And Walking on Glass would by no means be the only text in which Banks questioned his own worldview; in fact, such questioning would become one of the key elements in the Culture’s ethos.
The Bridge, on the other hand, features the presence of the Culture’s ethos by the paradoxical virtue of its absence—in other words, the worlds inside which John Orr and Alex Lennox are stuck (and there’s no escape from either) represent instances of those dystopias whose poisonous workings the Culture intends to either alleviate or stop in their tracks. While John finds, in the first half of the novel, that life as a ward of the bridge’s government can be pleasant,26 he discovers soon enough how arbitrarily awarded—and easily revoked—those privileges are (166–185). Even before that time, he is repeatedly made fully aware of the restrictiveness of the bridge’s social mores, most glaringly when he witnesses the reaction of his friend Brooke to the unannounced flyby of three aircraft that scares and outrages many of the bridge’s affluent citizens (52–56). Later in the novel, and in the aftermath of his fall from social grace, John steals away inside one of the trains that repeatedly leave the bridge in either one of two directions—the City or the Kingdom—and embarks in a mock-fantasy quest without grail or destination (233–243). The landscape that reveals itself to him on his journeys is an utter contrast to the world of the bridge: it’s rural and savage, green and lush but oddly depressing, and while the society of the bridge was structured around a totalitarian bureaucracy of Kafkaesque intricacy, this place is given over to chaos and civil war. A particularly chilling figure in this part of John Orr’s world is the Field Marshal, a warlord who rides on a train from battle to battle and who is in the habit of throwing screaming POWs into pools of boiling mud (302–315).
While John negotiates his deadly fantasyland, Alex remains mired in nothing more exotic than Great Britain in the mid–1980s, which is the exact nature of his problem. Two years after The Bridge, upon publication of The Player of Games, Banks would present, with the Empire of Azad, a funhouse-mirror version of the “loadsamoney factory farm solitude that is modern Britain” (Clute 1995c, 99), carefully engineered to be at once too close to the original for comfort and too hateful to be allowed to remain standing (which it doesn’t). But in 1986 he didn’t have the luxury of a fully non-mimetic palette, so he had to make do with what was actually there. It was enough: in witnessing the unspooling of Alex’s comatose remembrances we find out that he, who shares Banks’ left-wing beliefs, is haunted by a nearly unholy ability to make money and prosper in the deadly Thatcherite dream his author so despised, while at the same time he struggles with the open relationship that the love of his life, a woman by the name of Andrea Cramond, insists on living. Alex’s adversary, a Frenchman living in Paris whom he has never met, haunts his memories throughout the novel like the Dark Twin he actually is, a mirror of his own desire for Andrea that, for pretty much the same reasons, he can neither forgive nor blame (252–278). The shadow of the Culture looms large here, in terms of both its economic setup—a moneyless utopia without exploitation—and its social relations—people are free to connect and disconnect as they please without externally imposed guilt, resentment, or shame.
The imagery Banks utilizes in The Bridge, as well as the characters that populate its many environments, would return in the Culture stories. The heavily urbanized, industrial dystopias of the bridge and of contemporary Britain would morph into similarly structured societies in the aforementioned Player of Games, in The State of the Art (1989), in Use of Weapons (1990), Matter (2008), and Surface Detail (2010), while the war-torn chaos of the countryside John Orr visits in the second part of the novel would reappear in Use of Weapons and Matter again, as well as in Look to Windward (2000). Like his mentor Alasdair Gray, Banks was deeply concerned with the fate of people trapped in the workings of the multifarious world machines we have managed to erect here on Earth, which was why he’d created the Culture to begin with. But until 1987, the Culture wasn’t available to him as a public outlet, so he recreated those world machines within a faux-mimetic literary environment for the consumption of readers who might have wrinkled their noses at books explicitly labeled “science fiction,” “fantasy,” or “horror.” But when Consider Phlebas finally saw print, everything changed.