SFE: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
Iain Menzies Banks (1954-2013) was a Scottish writer who published fiction for the general market as Iain Banks, and that aimed more directly at sf readers as Iain M Banks. Although differences in register can be detected between the two forms of his name, as a whole Banks's work is more usefully thought of as ranging through a wide spectrum, rather than as bifurcating into two separate categories. As in the case of Graham Greene's "real novels" and what he called "Entertainments", it is a distinction without visible merit, beyond its use in marketing terms. Indeed, separating Banks's two lists of titles has, if anything, actively damaged attempts to come to grips with his considerable oeuvre. His first published novel, The Wasp Factory (1984), is a case in point: the familial intensities brought to light as the 17-year-old protagonist awaits the return home of his crazy older brother are psychologically probing in an entirely mimetic sense, while at the same time his dreams and behaviour are rendered in terms displaced into the surrealistic realms of modern horror; it does that novel no favour to ignore its complex, knowing, Equipoisal traversal of various modes of telling.
Iain Banks's second novel, Walking on Glass (1985), even more radically engages a mixture of genres . . .
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