Of all the critical voices this book has echoed, John Clute’s should be the one to provide a succinct definitive statement on the role Banks played in shaping the thoughts of space opera. Clute, as this book has probably demonstrated, is the critic who more than any other has been paying attention to the development of the Culture series, both as a location for the telling of non-mimetic literature and as a viable consensus-reality argument for a better place to live in. As he was present at the beginning, when Consider Phlebas saw print, so he was present at the end. In his review of The Hydrogen Sonata, Clute assessed the relevance of the Culture in the following terms:
[T]wenty-five years ago, Consider Phlebas first introduced into space opera, a form previously dominated by Americans and those who wrote like Americans to pay the rent, the seemingly radical premise that a successful pan-galactic civilization, one able to make low-entropy draws upon the almost infinite energy banks of the universe-as-a-whole, would almost certainly be post-scarcity…. The only scarcity-defined multi-planet civilizations in Banks’s Culture are isolated and pitiable trickle-down tyrannies conspicuously modeled on the conviction-capitalist hegemonies now consuming—because that is what scorpions do—our one and only world. Among the blindnesses of hegemonic American SF … was a double presumption: that the future could be Engineered Like Orlando … and that the world to come would be arranged around the maintenance of scarcity-based guy hierarchies, with an occasional Empress or Lady President to do sin-eater for the real boss, in all its strict denial of a universe of stupefying plenty. Be that as it may, Banks’s Culture was post-scarcity from the get-go … and he has never succumbed to the temptation (again characteristic of American SF) to treat cost-free plenitude as poisonous. Some of the sentient flesh creatures in the Culture do occasionally regret an absence of owners (and the penury they impose, because that is what scorpions do), but they’re a drop in the Culture bucket. The rest make do in their trillions with as much life as they can live, in a universe whose meaning-structure (if there is one) is not ascertainable through meat senses. In other words, they make the meaning they can [2014a, 162–163].
Banks’ take on the manifest-destiny grand narrative of classic space opera remains revolutionary to this day, as much for the joy of watching the post-scarcity people wander the galaxy in their Minded ships as for the skepticism concerning the potential for improvement in our local chapter of the humanoid race. In the Culture stories, Earth-humans do not take part in the formation of the Culture, nor do we join it at any stage in the stories (being contacted and becoming part of the Culture are two very different things), and because of this fundamental violation of the standard space-opera template’s comforting presumptions, several interviewers throughout the years asked Banks whether he thought Earthlings could become grown-up enough to create a civilization like that. In earlier times, Banks was relatively sanguine about our chances (see for example Daoust 1999, n.p.), but as the years went by and the twenty-first century exploded in our faces, his outlook returned to what it had originally been. “I thought long and hard about this long before the books were published,” Banks told Linnie Rawlinson of CNN in 2009, “and decided that the Culture wasn’t going to be us in the future; it would be humanoid, they could kind of pass for us, because I’m not sure that we are. It’s a very pessimistic thing to say that we do seem to be wedded to war and destruction and torture and racism and sexism … we seem to have a xenophobic gene sequence” (n.p.).
This line of reasoning is neither trivial nor fanciful. Once, when asked to comment on the relevance of science fiction, Banks replied: “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.). His genre writing, both Culture and non–Culture, is true to that viewpoint; Banks took his SF seriously, and in his stories one can always hear, besides and beyond the happy clanging of the space-opera stuff—the crazy cosmology, the hyperspace engines, the giant artifacts, the mega-battles, and so on—a quieter voice working its way to us readers through a non-mimetic apprehension of the crucial issues of today, here on Earth. Fantastika is “the planetary form of story” (Clute 2011, 24), and SF is the subset of fantastika designed to worry about writing an Owner’s Manual for Planet Earth; Banks knew that, and wrote SF both because he loved the tech and the pyrotechnics and because he wanted to project humanity’s future against a larger canvas, like a fire in a cave will cast a man’s shadow against the rock, distorting and magnifying it so that features that might have escaped detection before loom large now—Plato’s Cave, reversed to make the shadow into a thing more vivid than the reality that projected it.
For this reason alone, if not for the considerable artistry Banks brought to the writing of space opera, the Culture series deserves continued scrutiny from scholars in the field of literary criticism as well as in those of utopian studies, political science, sociology, and philosophy. We have seen that there already is scholarship addressing the Culture not as a literary creation but as a philosophical position, a political argument, and a recipe for future growth here on Earth (ironically, those writers are altogether more optimistic about us Earthlings’ potential for maturation than Banks was). A future therefore exists for the Culture as a subject of study in those areas of human endeavor, and we can justifiably hope that the course of events will bear that expectation out.
Iain Menzies Banks is gone, but his body of work isn’t. Between his SF, his non-genre novels, and Raw Spirit, we are the lucky heirs to a total of twenty-nine books, all of them worthy of study, discussion, and contextualization. And speaking of contexts, Banks inhabited many in his life—science fiction, mainstream fiction, Scottish culture, left-wing political theory, utopian theory—and all of them interpenetrate each other so that to write about one is to write about the others as well. If I were allowed one wish (small, context-specific genie with a nearly pathological interest in turn-of-the-century Scottish writers), I’d have it be the final breaking down of the largely artificial barriers that separate his SF from his ‘Hampstead novels.’ Banks hated this externally imposed fracturing of his work, and it would be good to posthumously do him the long-overdue honor of treating his writing as the unspooling of one voice across thirty years of life—because this is the truth. Speaking in 2013 about his recently departed friend, Ken MacLeod said:
Farah Mendlesohn recently argued in conversation that they [Banks’ avowedly mimetic novels] were actually SF set in the present, which illuminates something about them that is often missed by mainstream readers and critics but that SF readers caught onto from the start [Winter 2013, n.p.].
And we did. Moira Martingale’s recent Gothic Dimensions does address Banks’ work as one great, undifferentiated voice modulating the Gothic and post–Gothic modes across genre boundaries, and I myself have attempted to argue something along the same lines in chapter 1. I hope more scholars will add their voices to ours. This book is over, but the enterprise should continue. Happily, we have a lot of work left to do.