Banks

By Russel D McLean

I had several topics to talk about this week, and not enough time to do them justice. Then, just as I was coming to an idea about what to write about this week, someone told me that Iain Banks was gravely ill. It’s a horrifically sad situation; he has less than a year to live after being diagnosed with cancer. It’s the kind of news that knocks you for six, and it threw my attention off the topics I had thought I would write about.

This isn’t an obituary. Banks is still going. But given his announcement, it made me reflect a little on what Banks has meant to me as a reader, a writer and even in my dayjob as a bookseller.

Banks has long been my touchstone when it comes to modern Scottish fiction. He is one of the few modern Scottish authors of general fiction who managed to be both Scottish and relevant to me. He was the first writer I remember who wrote about computer gaming with gleeful abandon, who seemed to talk about things that made sense in the world I knew. On top of that, he wrote some blisteringly good SF novels (even if I stopped reading them for a while when I stopped reading as much SF; I came back to the Culture fold last year with The Hydrogen Sonata.

There’s also this fact:

Banks made me believe I could write, or at least make a damn fine stab at doing so professionally.

He didn’t do it in a way that he would even be aware of that. But he was the first writer I ever saw talk to an audience. It was the Edinburgh Book Festival way back in the mid to late nineties. To give you an idea of how long ago it was, Shots Mag was still in print and not on the web. In fact (and Shots edtor, Mike Stotter won’t remember this) I was trying to cover the Edinburgh Book Festival for them (for one reason or another I don’t think the article got published) on spec. I remember being bitterly disappointed that James Ellroy didn’t show up. But it was fine, because next on the Agenda before I went to see crime authors like Val McDermid and Chris Brookmyre (rising young talents they were back then) talk, there was Iain Banks. I wasn’t covering Iain. I just wanted to see him talk. After all, one of the first truly “adult” novels I had discovered was Complicity, and I just had to see what  the hell kind of man could have written that book (I loved it, by the way: it was dark, perverse and unlike anything else I had read up until that point in my life)

He had two events, from what I recall. One by himself and one with Ken MacLeod (or maybe I’m getting confused and saw them at two separate ed festivals, but this is how I remember it in the jumbled mess I call a memory). The first event I saw was Iain without-the-M, and what I remember clearly (and he’s said this at several other events, so I know for certain he did say it) is that he talked about how he went to university and decided to study the three courses any writer needs:

Philosophy, because a writer needs ideas to explore.

English, because that seemed a given

Philosophy because a writer needs to know how his characters think.

That made up my mind for me, I remember, and that’s exactly what I went on to study at uni (after a brief flirtation with specialising in an AI course).

I also remember thinking that this writing lark could be good because Banks seemed so damn joyful talking about it. He was enthusiastic, he was bursting with things to talk about. And he was honest. Oh, so honest.

I think when I went to get my book signed, I muttered something about “all the best writers come from Fife,” and then looked away, embarrassed by my own idiocy. Well, I was 17.

Later, seeing him and MacLeod talking, I thought maybe there was some mileage in my plan back then to write both SF and crime: it was possible, I was sure, like Banks, to be a multi-genre author. And I was even more buoyed when Banks talked about people bringing the “silly” back into SF (A-la EE Doc Smith) because at the time that what I wanted to do!

Fast forward a number of years, and Banks was still my Scottish writing touchstone. I preferred some novels to others, but I admired the fact that at least he was always trying something different, never really being a one trick pony. He would swerve from bizarre hallucinatory imagery (the Bridge) to slice-of-life (The Crow Road) to, well, Complicity (my first Banks novel, and one I hold a soft spot for). He would later merge his two personas in Transition and of course he had those blistering SF novels, too, none of which were ever quite the same as the other.

Years later, in my day job as a bookseller, running events for the store I work in, I was hugely pleased to get him to do some events for us. He was always great fun and hugely generous. He also had a fine sense of mischief. The second-to-last event he did, I was running about with a microphone to take questions in a large theatre. He took great delight in making sure that questions came from the audience members who were most difficult for me to get to, ensuring I got my exercise for the evening. I wound up clambering over chairs to get there quicker, which of course only gave him more fuel. He was, in short, hugely entertaining.

I can’t claim to know him well. I have talked to him only as a fan and a bookseller. But I can say that when I have met him, he has always been friendly, approachable and full of humour. As a writer, he’s always seemed to do whatever gave him the most pleasure. He’s been a huge influence on me as a writer, and to think that he is so ill is strange and unsettling.

But he’s not gone yet, and there is one more book to go. On his website he says that his publishers have brought the date forward so that he can see it brought to publication. I know that he won’t read this, but all the same, I felt I had to say something about the affect he’s had on my reading and writing life.

If you haven’t read Banks, I recommend you go out and do so. The best remembered books for me are Complicity, The Crow Road, Espedair Street, The Wasp Factory and on the SF side, Consider Phlebas, Feersum Endjinn, Use of Weapons and Hydrogen Sonata.

Thank you, Iain. For the encouragement you never knew you gave, for the entertainment you gave at your readings/events, and for the years of joyful reading.

Genre-Shift

By Russel D McLean

This week I was lucky enough to read an ARC of Lauren Buekes' THE SHINING GIRLS. Its a genre-bending novel that is at once a serial killer thriller, a time travel masterpiece and something altogether a little weirder.

It grabbed my attention straight away.

Why?

Because it was taking risks. Because it was doing something very different. And because it was doing it well (although that was a bonus)

I do think that writers can often be pigeonholed into a genre, that they can be associated with one type of fiction and one type only. I think that they can sometimes be afraid to experiment. I think that sometimes their readers can be afraid, too.

Best example of someone always genre shifting is Iain Banks. He has two distinct fan bases, that do occasionally cross over. But it was interesting when tried to blur the two in TRANSITION, because suddenly people seemed not to know what to do, as though he had committed some grievous sin akin to crossing the DNA of a shark with that of a human being*. Really, folks? Because it dared to have elements of various genres, you threw up your hands in despair?

But its an old problem. I remember Banks talking with despair about readers who give up on perfectly good novels because they come across the word "space" and suddenly their brain shuts down.

And I remember some of the reactions to one of Chris Brookmyre's best novels, PANDAEMONIUM: "but there's deeeeemoooons! That's not realistic!" as though abseiling down a cliff-face using your enemy's intestine as a rope was any more so.** I can only wonder what their reaction to the more pure-SF BEDLAM is going to be like...

Sometimes, playing strictly within a genre becomes limiting. I read a lot of good crime novels, but many of them while competent and entertaining (and sometimes even quite brilliant) can suffer from adhering too strictly to a jaded formula or genre boundaries because that's what's expected***. I find it very interesting that John Rickards (aka Sean Cregan) has started rewriting his earlier novels which were published by Penguin, talking on twitter about how they made him pull back from some of the genre hopping elements he tried to put into them.

Variety is key to life.

Now, not every book should be a genre-hopper. I mostly write straight up crime fiction and I'm happy with that, but I hope if I ever should decide to hop about the genre playground, you, my dear readers, will trust me enough to know that this is what the story needs to be and that even if it plays a little outside of your comfort there is a method in my storytelling madness.

Because fiction should be about experimenting, about trying new things, about attempting to cross-pollinate ideas, themes and characters. Fiction is about possibilities. It should never be limiting.

Not even within a genre.


*apologies, I wound up watching DEEP BLUE SEA the other night primarily because as cheesily insane as it is, I can never resist that brilliant Samuel L Jackson chomped by a shark scene

**one of the best and funniest (in a dark way) moments in BE MY ENEMY

***note I said some, not all. Pure genre storytelling can still be very very very powerful and so well done you don't give a toss what genre it is at all

"...a way of logic that bypasses a lot of nonsense"*

By Russel D McLean
Its come up more than once this week in various situations and conversations. But I’m still amazed by the “ghettoization” of Science Fiction as a genre.

One of Stuart MacBride’s most unashamedly fun novels was the brilliant HALFHEAD – a near future fantasy where the weapons all had onomatopoeic names and where he mocked the establishment quite thoroughly with even more ludicrous beauracracy and a horrific sense of social justice that proved just how savage “human” punishments could be. If I may be so bold, I found it even more fun than his Logan McRae books and was hoping that there would be more. But that, apparently, is not likely to happen because sales were less than for his crime novels.

Why?

Well, he was a debut author all over again. Because SF readers had yet to discover him and crime readers acted in a strangely conservative manner. They missed out on the fact that HALFHEAD did everything they loved in his crime novels and more. Just because the synopsis had the word “future” in it. Of course, this assumption is based on mostly anecdotal experience, but that was what I tended to hear when asking people why they hadn’t bought that one book of MacBride’s.

Is this fair?

Hardly.

It’s the same with Iain (M) Banks to a degree. Now, he’s established as an SF author, but so many of his mainstream fans stay away from the SF stuff as though its toxic. Why? As I heard Banks once say at an event its because it has the word “space” in it, and people are scared. They hear the word SF or space and they get weird clichéd ideas about geeky social misfits and probably odd looking aliens in rubber masks (a-la classic Trek). Or perhaps they see the endlessly complex worlds of computer games like HALO that appear incomprehensible if you’re not on the inside.
What they’re missing, of course, is that SF is a literature of ideas. Yes, it has its clichés, the same as any genre, but move past those and some genuinely philosophical and inventive fiction can be found within the genre. Philip K Dick, of course, is a prime example of an author who uses the form to do something deeper and explore philosophical and metaphysical ideas that mainstream fiction can only dream of. China Mieville** takes this to an extreme and loads his fantastical imaginings with allegory and symbolism that would make most literary writers weep with jealousy. And if that’s all getting a bit heavy for you, Alistair Reynolds writes amazingly accessible and fun adventure stories that still contain real smarts and some very witty undercurrents.

I also find it very interesting that many people who claim not to like SF often adore SF movies without realising it. BLADE RUNNER, ALIEN, ALIENS, GATTACA, THE MATRIX, these are all examples of mainstream SF movies that people don’t seem to realise are actually SF. Why is it so different for movies? And let’s not start on THE X FILES…

Earlier this year I did a library event with Ken McLeod. This was a reader’s day where readers came along and signed up to hear writers talk about one book they loved and one book of their own. Interestingly, there were no SF fans on the day. I was a little worried for Ken who is, after all, an SF writer. And yes, even people in his group had SF reservations. But by the end of the day, many of them were willing and excited to try a whole genre they had ignored due to their preconceptions of it.

I accept – nay, willingly agree – that there’s a lot of lazy, clichéd writing in the SF genre. I mean, seriously, I’ve stopped reading the genre for years at a time due to a slew of novels that just don’t “get” what makes SF special, that spend too much paying homage to other writers ideas and forget to make their own, or concentrate so hard on world building that they ignore the human element that often marks great SF. But when the genre gets it right, its more than a force to be reckoned with.

I guess we’re back to the old argument – the simple one. A good book is a good book regardless of genre. And you shouldn’t be put off just because you see the word “space” or because you expect to somehow “not understand” the conventions at play. Good SF is accessible (with a bit of work; you have to adjust yourself to the terms, in the same a reader of crime fic has to adjust themselves to the conventions and technical language of that genre) and capable of supreme and brilliant storytelling with brains and heart at the centre. Its not just for geeks. Its not just for insiders.

And it very rarely uses the phrase “warp factor 10”.



*Gene Roddenberry, talking about SF

**Who, with multiple PhD’s is as smart as a chap with three heads