We are familiar with the celebrated author who uses a pseudonym when writing something low-brow and trashy. But how do we deal with those two identical writers “Iain Banks” and “Iain M. Banks”? As the theme song in the old Patty Duke Show :
They walk alike, they talk alike, sometimes they even dress alike. You could lose your mind . . . When cousins are two of a kind.
The party line states that Iain Banks writes serious fiction and Iain M. Banks writes science fiction. Yet The Wasp Factory , the so-called literary book that raised Mr. Banks into the pantheon of serious writers, is more out there than Dune or Narnia put together. Meanwhile, I take the latter writer’s science fiction pretty seriously . . . So where does that leave me?
In truth, Banks is one of the best prose stylists in sci-fi, and the short stories from The State of the Art could appear in The New Yorker or The Paris Review without any apologies. Indeed, I wish more stores of this sort were in the classy rags.
Banks is best known in science fiction for his writings about The Culture. Already your squirming, I can tell. Your mom wanted to give you a big dose of kultch-uh back in the day, and you still haven’t recovered, huh? Well, Mr. Bank’s Culture with a capital C is even more paternalistic than your parents. Think of it as Collectivism with a smiling face, a type of galactic D rop City that (through the magical powers of Banks’s pen) actually works efficiently and attains technological superiority throughout much of the universe.
Sound too dreary for words? Not at all. Banks delivers the good with his imaginative angles, lively dialogue, great characters and sub-plots and stylish prose. Of course, when he gets on his soapbox and starts with his political rants, I fall asleep. His political views are the opposite of futuristic, and are stuck in some Cold War time warp. But when I wake up a few pages later, we are back to his great story-telling.
This compact collection of tales is the perfect place to begin in appreciating the version of Banks with the middle initial. The title story is brilliant, a classic of the genre, and various other items included here (“Piece,” “Descendant”) are almost as good. The long essay on the Culture will show you that the spirit of Saint- Simon still lives today, in the face of all logic and reason, but it won’t bore you.
After you finish, you may be primed to move on to one of the Culture novels (my recommendation: The Player of Games ). And, yes, you should also check out the author’s identical cousin – the one who writes serious fiction.