In protest he cut up his passport and posted it to 10 Downing Street. In late 2004, Banks was a prominent member of a group of British politicians and media figures who campaigned to have Prime Minister Tony Blair impeached following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was a signatory to the Declaration of Calton Hill, which calls for Scottish independence. The argument that an economy of abundance renders anarchy and adhocracy viable (or even inevitable) attracts many as an interesting potential experiment, were it ever to become testable. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge.Īs with his friend Ken MacLeod (another Scottish writer of technical and social science fiction) a strong awareness of left-wing history shows in his writings.

However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife.īanks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. Iain Banks was educated at the University of Stirling where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. Banks.īanks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. From Banks’s Grey Matter attend to Surface Transition, which is certain to happen What form it will take, he already knows the answer Keeping us in the dark till our own ending.This author also published science fiction under the pseudonym Iain M. Complicity with humbug was never one of his faults He escaped the Calvinist smit, a lifelong Humanist Graduated from cocaine to whisky, Raw Spirit of his forebears. Look to the Windward with Whit, Open your mind to the Song of Stone and the Business Dead Air on the steep approach to Garbadale He always knew that the State of the Art Would end in the Crow Road, Where all men go, against a Dark Background.

His grandfather, trades union activitist Gave him his gritty gene, his skating mother Supplied the facility to flow into bizarre regions Boy Banks produced homemade explosives While little peers played with toy cars After uni he hitched round Europe Jobbing as clerk, porter, dustman Wrote of murder, mutilation, insanity, sadism A charnel house of very Gothic Horrors Consider Phlebas, walk down Espedair Street Join the Player of Games, sail with Canal Dreams Decipher Feersum Endjinn, its Scots and textspeak.

Beard, leather jacket, hair like a blown hen’s nest Bespectacled socialist, grey-beard-sprouting Banks Some visited his interstellar anarchic-communist world He called ‘The Culture’.

Poems by Iain Banks