In this 1989 interview in the Off the Page series, the novelist and science fiction writer Iain Banks (born 1954) discusses his literary career with Jenny Brown.
Banks was initially brought up in North Queensferry before the family moved west to Gourock. He was a late developer in terms of books: “I don’t think I read properly until I was seven”. His first published novel, The Wasp Factory (1984), was intended as a “totally pro-feminist diatribe against the male macho military machine and against religion”. It was, he says, the “right book at the right time”, and “hit several nerves”.
He writes mainstream novels as Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M Banks. He describes his first science fiction book, Consider Phlebas (1987), as “space opera”, and says “people in science fiction look down on space opera the same way that people outside science fiction often look down on science fiction itself.”
His 1989 novel Canal Dreams is set eleven years in the future, but is not science fiction. The main protagonist is a woman, a Japanese cello player, and asked about this he says: “When you write science fiction you get so used to going into fields you actually don’t know anything about as such, most people would want to do an incredible amount of research to do.”
Banks is prolific in terms of ideas, “still stockpiling them at a faster rate than they’re getting used up […] Getting rid of ideas is the hard bit.” He regards his best work as The Bridge (1986), “definitely the most carefully constructed”.
He lived in London for four years and Kent for another four, so is he a Scottish writer? “Having arguments about what a wonderful person Margaret Thatcher was in pubs in England, God almighty, that was enough to send me back up here anyway,” he says. “Maybe it’s getting older as well. I don’t think of myself as British, Scottish, or anythingelse; I’m just me.”
www.iain-banks.net
