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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Famed Scottish novelist Iain Banks talks about how science fiction has turned anti-American, and why there'll be no WMD in outer space.
Feb 17, 2005 | When Scottish writer Iain Banks learned that Prime Minister Tony Blair was supporting President Bush in the war on Iraq, he ripped up his passport and mailed the pieces to No. 10, Downing Street. The bestselling author of both mainstream novels and (under the semi-pseudonym "Iain M. Banks") science fiction clearly isn't afraid of the grand gesture. And why should he be? By all accounts the annual royalties earned on his prodigious output -- 20 or so books in as many years -- have left him flush enough to live the life he pleases, writing only three months a year and devoting the rest to fast cars and whatever else he feels like.
And even if Banks is a short-term pessimist, his science fiction has a more hopeful tint. Where other science fiction writers seem magnetically drawn to dystopian futures full of biotech horrors and cyberpunk darkness, Banks gives us instead the Culture, a civilization of the far future full of abundance and possibility and extremely fetching sentient starships. Racism, sexism, class warfare -- the Culture has edited all that junk out of the future, and wouldn't you just love to live there?
Labeled "the most imaginative British novelist of his generation" by the London Times, Banks has been a big name in the U.K. ever since the publication of his first novel, "The Wasp Factory," in 1984. He's also well known on both sides of the Atlantic in the science fiction world, dating back at least as far as the publication of "Consider Phlebas" in 1987. But his mainstream novels, which often deal quite directly with politics, such as the attack on Margaret Thatcher's rule in 1993's "Complicity," have not been popular in the United States.
Banks made news again recently with his decision to choose a small independent publishing house, San Francisco's Night Shade Books, for his newest, non-Culture sci-fi novel, "The Algebraist," due out in the United States in September. Banks' decision is something of a coup for Night Shade, an essentially three-man operation founded in 1998.
To anyone who has been paying attention to the brilliant crop of science fiction and fantasy writers who have emerged from Britain in the last decade or so, it shouldn't come as any surprise that Banks takes his politics seriously. Some of his most sparkling U.K. colleagues -- Ken MacLeod, China Mieville, Richard Morgan -- infuse their work with a passion that, no matter how fantastical the stories, is rooted in discontent with the real world. Salon talked with Banks, via telephone from his home in Scotland, to get a fix on this new dissident sci-fi invasion.
What prompted this switch to Night Shade? You were with Bantam Spectra [a division of Random House] before, weren't you?
[Chuckles ruefully.] I think I've kind of played the field with the U.S., all the main contenders over time. Bless them -- they've all tried. And I think through no fault of their own, they've all failed to make me big in the States. The conclusion I've come to is that I just don't write for an American audience as far as the mainstream is concerned. The science fiction has done reasonably well. I've had some quite reasonable deals out of them, but they have never earned out or made any royalties. And usually after a few months a very large packet of books comes back and ends up in my garage gathering dust. I think with Night Shade it is a bit different because they are a smaller concern. I'm kind of a bigger fish in a smaller pond, and there's real enthusiasm over there. With the larger corporate concerns it's harder to maintain that enthusiastic edge. These guys are so enthusiastic, I thought it was worth a try.
Do you have any theories as to why the mainstream novels might not be working over here? Are they too U.K.?
I guess they must be. I think if I'd only had one publisher, or if I had only had one very small handful of novels, I could still delude myself that it was the publisher or publicity people or whatever. But I think given that so many different concerns or different companies have tried, I think you have to face facts that the common denominator is me. I get it! I've just been self-indulgent. I write just exactly the kinds of books that I would like to read.
But yes, there is a sort of Britishness, or Europeanness, about them that just doesn't work in the States. The thing is, there are hundreds, thousands even, of very talented American writers who are very intensely sort of keyed into American culture in a way that I am not. We kind of think we are, in Britain, because obviously we get so much American television, we see the movies, et cetera. But even so, I'd like to think -- this is maybe the last shred of illusion I'm maybe hanging on to here -- I'd like to think that if I decided I wanted to crack the United States, or at least write a novel that would have a good chance of doing reasonably well in America, if I came to America and stayed a year and immersed myself in American popular culture, then maybe I could write something that was more popular.
