When I listed favorite books on my profile, I could easily
single out some titles; others had to be grouped, like for Rankin and
Stevenson; but there are two authors whose works I’d read any day of the week,
or if they only composed copy for cereal boxes.
One is Thomas Pynchon, whose name I first encountered in the
late ’60s as a blurber for his buddy Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It
Looks Like Up To Me. I used to foist copies of V, later Gravity’s
Rainbow, onto unsuspecting friends who probably resented the hell out of
it. I stopped keeping track of how many times I’ve reread his seven novels and
am delighted that he’s still at it. I’ve already pre-ordered my copy of Bleeding
Edge from Amazon five months in advance.
The other is Iain Banks, whose work I chanced upon on a trip
to the UK in the ’90s. He writes thrillers, Scottish family sagas, space
operas, and experimental fantasies. He’s far more prolific than Pynchon and
I’ve never been able to get enough of him. But I’m going to have to learn to be
satisfied with what’s out there because he’s just announced to the world that he’s dying.
Banks has been praised as one of Scotland’s literary
treasures but isn’t as well known in the US, except by a select cult of readers
for the science fiction he publishes under the name Iain M. Banks. I haven’t
been much of a sci-fi fan since I was a teenager, but something about Banks
pushed my buttons. The particular universe he created, The Culture, is idyllic
enough to give flight to fancy, but it’s his writing that got me hooked:
galaxy-spanning plots, strange-looking aliens, wince-inducing torture,
outlandish sex, and improbably huge spaceships with outrageous names. And he
spins his yarns with enough of a wink that you can’t help but smile. He inspired
me to pick up other contemporary sci-fi authors to see what I’ve been missing,
but none of them have been able to grab me like Banks, they’re all far too
serious and self-important. Banks has fun.
Now there will be one last novel, and then he will be gone.
I won’t be too surprised to one day read an obituary for the
famously reclusive Pynchon; after all, he’s 75. I’m just happy there’s another
book on its way and wonder if I dare hope for yet another after that. But Banks
is only 59, and one would have expected a good many more years of spilling his
incredible imagination onto the printed page. That, unfortunately, is the way
it goes; one cannot make expectations of the universe.
But of Banks’ universe, I can always expect to have my mind blown
and know I will return to it again and again.