Iain M. Banks, February 16, 1954–June 9, 2013

The leading Scottish author Iain M. Banks was to have been the opening speaker at the conference of the European Utopian Studies Society held at New Lanark on July 1–4, 2013. His diagnosis with imminently terminal cancer made that sadly impossible. Below we publish the text of the eulogy delivered in his stead by Andrew Milner, professor of English and comparative literature at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

As some of you will know, we had originally planned to open this conference with a conversation between me and Iain M. Banks. As many of you will have guessed, Iain cancelled shortly after being diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the liver and gallbladder early in March. And, as most of you must now know, he died less than a month ago. So instead of the conversation we’d hoped for, we’re left only with the opportunity for this brief eulogy.

He published thirteen so-called literary novels as Iain Banks and thirteen science fiction novels as Iain M. Banks. Most obituaries have concentrated on the literary novels, especially The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road, and, of course, The Quarry. But Iain himself always insisted that his science fiction was more important—and more fun—than the literary novels. In a last interview for the London Guardian he told Stuart Kelly that “if I’d known it was going to be my last book, I’d have been quite disappointed that I’m going out with a relatively minor piece; whereas . . . a wild splurge of fantasy, sci-fi and mad reality frothed up together . . . now that would have been the kind of book to go out on. I’m still very proud of The Quarry but . . . in the end the real best way to sign off would have been with a great big rollicking Culture novel.”¹

The distinction between “literature” and SF is, no doubt, deeply problematic. As John Clute and David Langford write in their entry on Banks for the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: “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.”²

There is merit, however, in distinguishing between Banks’s eutopian novels and the remainder of his work. Of the thirteen SF novels nine are set in “the Culture,” and it is these that are of special interest to utopian studies:Consider Phlebas (1987), The Player of Games (1988), Use of Weapons (1990), Excession (1996), Inversions (1998), Look to Windward (2000), Matter (2008), Surface Detail (2010), and The Hydrogen Sonata (2012). Banks’s Culture is nothing less than a prodigiously affluent anarcho-socialist interplanetary civilization that has so effectively transcended scarcity as to constitute Utopia. We should have no doubt that it is indeed eutopian. As Banks himself explained in 1996: “The Culture is . . . my personal image of exactly the place I would like to live. I cannot imagine a better place, there’s no way I can think of to make the Culture better resemble my own personal ideal for a utopian society. . . . I tend to bend over backwards to look at the  underside of the Culture. Having said that, the Culture does do its damnedest to accommodate everyone, even people who hate it. It expends vast amounts of time and resources making sure everyone can live exactly as they want.”³

In the wake of Roland Barthes’s announcement of the “death of the author,” structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory has consistently cautioned against reliance on authorial intention. But as Lyman Tower Sargent rightly pointed out in his much cited essay “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” there is...