PERSON
Iain Banks
The Scottish author who published literary fiction as Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks—the same political intelligence in two registers, producing both humanist novels of Scottish life and the Culture series, the most sustained argument in any literary form for what human–AI civilisation can become.
Iain Banks—the name on the literary novels, without the initial—was also Iain M. Banks, the name on the Culture series: the same writer, the same political philosophy, two shelves in the bookshop. Born in Dunfermline in 1954 and educated at the University of Stirling, Banks published
The Wasp Factory in 1984 to immediate, scandalous success. He had already been writing the Culture for years;
Consider Phlebas appeared three years later, in 1987, under the M. that he added to distinguish his science fiction from his literary fiction. Across the next twenty-six years he produced nine further
Culture novels—ten in all—alongside his literary work, each stream informing the other. His political anarchism, his irony, his genuine belief that people deserve better than the social arrangements available to them, run equally through
The Crow Road and through
The Player of Games. Banks died in June 2013, having announced his