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Excession, LAST YEAR IT was Trainspotting, the year before it was Braveheart. In 1997, the Scottish import to watch is Iain Banks. At once a bestseller and a cult phenomenon in Britain, his genre-spanning novels have enjoyed only a quiet, if fanatically loyal following here. That's about to change, as no less than three of them hit the stands this month.
Just released is Excession, an involute science-fiction epic set against his recurrent, galaxy-wide technological civilization known as the Culture: a freewheeling, libertarian, nigh-invulnerable society of trillions of fun-seeking humans and machines. One day an artifact is discovered that implies the existence of a power dwarfing the Culture's own. Not sure whether to covet or fear it, they launch a score of interweaving intrigues, and whole civilizations become pawns in the struggle to be the first to understand its meaning. Hard on this novel's heels, HarperCollins has issued trade paperback editions of two earlier works: The Bridge, an unclassifiably surreal novel of the sort Italo Calvino might have written if he'd listened to garage bands and dropped a lot of acid, and The Player of Games, the first of the Culture novels.
The U.S. rights to Banks' novels are variously owned, and a handful
of his works are on the shelves under the imprint of Bantam, including
three SF titles and a thriller, Complicity. All are recommended.
With or without the M, this latest Celt to invade our shores should
garner new fans among those who like their fiction inventive and
challenging.
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© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth |
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Banks divides his novels equally between science fiction and
what, for lack of a better word, would have to be called mainstream.
The distinction is easy to spot from the cover: the SF is always
published as "Iain M. Banks," but he drops the "M"
for his other novels. What they all have in common is a brilliant,
savage intelligence, an absence of easy answers, unique literary
constructs and protagonists that often both appall and amuse.
