Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

society (and it is a major reason why Swift, Huxley and Orwell chose to write their great works in the
way that they did). Perhaps this is the reason why mainstream writers are so often attracted to it. When
it works (which it does surprisingly often) the result is often memorable. Perhaps the best recent
example of this is Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale which I felt was a tour de force. However
when the experiment fails to work the results are generally dire. The most notorious example of this to
my mind being Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos series which I found (dare I say it?) embarrassingly
naive. In fairness I have to point out that some critics do not agree with me. John Clute, for example, has
praised the series highly.
Often when the mainstream writer goes slumming it is the vocabulary of the field that lets them down.
Samuel Delany has remarked that SF can be characterised by the special sense that it gives to the
meanings of words. He points out that in a contemporary mainstream work the phrase "He turned on
his left side" is quite innocuous and probably refers to somebody turning over in bed. However in an SF
setting the words take on a whole new significance that they never had before. Is the character a robot
who leaves his right side turned off? These word games are not unusual in English, of course. It's one of
the characteristics that makes the language so much fun to use. The canonical example is the
extraordinary number of different ways that you can parse "Time flies like an arrow." But it is definitely
an extra stumbling block when attempting to write SF. Paul Theroux (better known as a travel writer)
has stumbled here on occasion.
Even though the evidence suggests that in Britainat least, the walls we build between categories are
flimsier than they are elsewhere, it still remains a rare thing for a writer to be well respected in both the
genre and the mainstream worlds. However in the 1990s one writer has managed quite successfully to
make a huge reputation for himself in both areas. Not surprisingly he is British (or to be more accurate,
Scottish) and his name is Iain Banks on his mainstream novels and Iain M. Banks on his SF. The ‘M'
stands for ‘Menzies'.
His first published book was The Wasp Factory in 1984. It took the literary world by storm. Stanley
Reynolds, writing in Punch claimed that it was a minor masterpiece and the Financial Times reviewed it as
"...a story of quite exceptional quality...". It is certainly surreal and grotesque and the ending of the book
has always appeared to me to be rather like the punch line of a shaggy dog story. For that reason I have
always felt it was his weakest book.
In 1985 he published Walking on Glass. Again this was accepted by the mainstream critics as simply
another book. Slightly weird perhaps, but in the words of the literary critic of the Observer "Inexorably
powerful... sinister manipulations and magnetic ambiguities". I don't know what that means, but it
sounds impressive. The point though is that while you can't describe the book as science fiction (if it is
anything, it is a paranoid nightmare mingled with a coming of age story) there is absolutely no doubt that
it was written by a science fiction fan. The novel is full of references to the field and the knowledgeable
person will have enormous fun playing ‘spot the SF trope' as they devour the book. It was obviously
going to be only a matter of time before he wrote something that belonged fairly and squarely in the field
proper.
His third novel was a very surreal Kafka-esque nightmare called The Bridge. Again there were quite a lot
of SF references and a side-splittingly hilarious demolition of the cliché barbarian hero. This swordwielding
Conan look-alike has a broad Glaswegian accent and appears to have been born in the Gorbles.
All three of these novels established Banks' mainstream reputation and led Fay Weldon to call him "... the
great white hope of contemporary British Literature."
With his fourth novel, Consider Phlebas, he stopped messing about. This was simon-pure science
fiction and was marketed as such. In this and several other novels and short stories Banks explored the
universe of ‘the Culture'. Unusually for the type of space opera that Banks was writing in these books
the Culture is not an interstellar empire and neither is it a large corporation nor an amorphous power
hungry organisation. Rather it is a loose, but complex socialist commune-writ-large and as such is
probably unique in the genre.
If you want to know more about Banks, and if you have access to the internet, you will find Culture