The Hour

For fans of Fife novelist Iain Banks there has always been an easy rule of thumb to use when categorising his work.

If a novel has been published under his birth name Iain Banks, readers can expect contemporary literary fiction and in most circles it is this work, including The Crow Road and The Wasp Factory, that is best known. Cross the floor of the bookshop to the science fiction section though and you will find award winning sci-fi under the moniker Iain M. Banks, the M. standing for Menzies, Banks’ intended middle name.

So why the distinction? Early in his career publishers wanted to create a difference between the styles and, after considering a pseudonym based on his favourite whisky, the middle initial was used to give a unique imprint to Banks’ imaginative contributions to genre fiction. Simple? Well, until the release of Banks’ new novel Transition, that is.

Transition tells the story of people who can ‘flip’ between different realities but, with a contemporary setting and drawing on the World Trade Centre attacks, a global financial crisis and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in its pages, the novel seems to be blurring the line between two separate categories of work. As a result, it is being published under Iain Banks in the UK and Iain M. in the US.

Nevertheless, the novel comes from the same creative mind and Banks is animated when talking about the writing process.

Banks describes the book as “mainstream fiction with fantasy elements”, and he describes the challenge as one he took on “for a laugh, really”. The writing process he describes involves a lot of planning but once that is over the style he brings is all his own, swearing off fiction while the book is written.

Writing is not all there is to Banks though, a political and environmental consciousness having driven him campaign against the Iraq war, sell his sports cars and give up flying except in emergencies. His downtime has crossed over into his work at times though, non-fiction book Raw Spirit being part whisky guide and part diary.

The day job remains novels though and whether under his given name or its sci-fi variation, the imagination remains the same.