Iain M. Banks, one of my favourite writers, passed away yesterday. A superb author and a thoroughly decent person. He will be very greatly missed.
***
“They could see the nebulae, beautiful and distant and beckoning, and could tell that those faraway galaxies were composed of suns, other stars like Thrial, and even guess that some of those suns might have planets round them … but they looked in vain for stars anywhere near their own.
The sky was full of darkness. There were planets and moons and the tiny feathery whorls of the dim nebulae, and they had themselves filled it with junk and traffic and emblems of a thousand languages, but they could not create the skies of a planet within a galaxy, and they could not ever hope, within any frame of likelihood they could envisage existing, to travel to anywhere beyond their own system, or the everywhere-meaningless gulf of space surrounding their own isolated and freakish star.
For a distance that was never less than a million light years in any direction around it, Thrial – for all its flamboyant dispersion of vivifying power and its richly fertile crop of children planets – was an orphan.”
Against a Dark Background
***
Rest in Peace, Iain.
Oh no!!!! I'm gutted! RIP Iain
ReplyDeleteWell said sir!
ReplyDeletedam all the best writers from my youth are going I guess its a sign I am old now
ReplyDeleteSadness! Such great stories, so many wonderful characters....
ReplyDeleteSet his ship upon a sea of gridfire.
terrible, terrible news. It'll have to be a dram this evening.
ReplyDeleteIt's very sad, I loved his sci-fi, and some of the other material was very arresting.
ReplyDeleteI ran into him at a couple of SF cons in the 80s/90s. Lovely bloke.
ReplyDeleteHis book on Scotch, "Raw Spirit" is excellent, too - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Raw-Spirit-Search-Perfect-Dram/dp/0099460270
And he had a brilliant sense of humour - check out the Guardian interview in which he goes through some potential Culture AI ship names - http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,6000,367256,00.html - "Stood Far Back While The Gravitas was Handed Out", anyone?
I am so glad you put up this post. I wanted to do exactly the same thing when I heard the news on Sunday but events have rather prevented me doing so. So sad that we will not get any more books from this great author. I've never read a book of his I didn't enjoy but my personal favourites would be: The Player of Games, Espedair Street and the Steep Approach to Garbadale
ReplyDeleteTim D
I didn´t know this writer. Now I must read something from him. Some good writers died recently.
ReplyDeleteTragic news indeed.
ReplyDeleteThanks everyone. A sad day indeed.
ReplyDelete@Brian - thank you! I had a couple last night as well. Fine choice, Sir.
@Mike - thanks for that link. He did indeed have a fine sense of humour.
@Tim - thanks so much for mentioning some of Iain's other books. I love "The Player of Games" - certainly one of my favourites. I've saved up "Surface Detail" for my summer holidays, although it will perhaps be a bitter-sweet pleasure reading it.
Thanks again everyone.
Tim did flag one I forgot - if you haven't read "Espedair Street", then PLEASE do. It's one of his non-SF books, and it's brilliant.
Delete