Iain Banks

Iain Banks' mainstream fiction includes The Wasp Factory (1984), Walking on Glass (1985), The Bridge (1986), Espedair Street (1987), Canal Dreams (1989), The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993), Whit (1995), A Song of Stone (1997), The Business (1999), Dead Air (2002) and The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007). His new mainstream novel is Transition.

Banks' science fiction includes seven novels based around The Culture, a massive interstellar civilization. These novels are: Consider Phlebas (1987), The Player of Games (1988), Use of Weapons (1990), Excession (1996), Inversions (1998), Look to Windward (2000) and Matter (2008). His non-Culture science fiction novels are Against a Dark Background (1993), Feersum Endjinn (1994) and The Algebraist (2004), which was nominated for the Hugo Award. A collection of short fiction, The State of the Art (1989), contains both Culture and non-Culture work.

From his Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:

Who is your perfect reader?

Probably me, with slightly better taste.

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What book changed your life?

The Wasp Factory.

* * *
What is the strangest thing you’ve done when researching a book?

Using the equation e=mc2 to work out the explosive yield of very small quantities of antimatter, to determine how small an effective nano-missile could be.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue