Transition
By Iain Banks (Little, Brown £18.99)
Plenty of contemporary authors have written both realist fiction and science fiction. Anthony Burgess was a master of historical and present-day narrative, but his greatest work was A Clockwork Orange. Kingsley Amis, the great comic realist, wrote an alternate-universe novel, The Alteration. Then there’s Margaret Atwood, with her disturbing futuristic dystopias; although she famously denies that what she writes is sci-fi, saying that her books don’t contain, for example, “talking squids in space.”
Iain Banks, though, has divided up not only his repertoire but also himself— although neither version of Banks could exactly be said to be a pseudonym. There are the “Iain Banks” novels: books like The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road and Whit that are set in, for want of a better description “our” reality. The characters are often hyper-real, with rich fantasy lives, but they take place in roughly the present day, and there are no rockets, aliens or trips to other planets. Then there are the “Iain M Banks” novels—glorious explorations of a far-future civilisation, “The Culture,” which has developed beyond money and scarcity, converses happily with aliens and whose citizens can change gender on a whim and produce drugs at will from the glands in their heads. These books haven’t yet featured talking squids in space, but it’s probably just a matter of time.
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