I was planning to make something special of my posting number 200 but the unexpected has taken me over. Completely.
Today I have sent an abstract for a paper on Iain M. Banks’s The Hydrogen Sonata (2012), a novel I have discussed here (see 1-XI-2012, LET’S SUBLIME: A POLITICAL READING FOR THE HYDROGEN SONATA). The paper is for the 16th Culture and Power International conference on Cultural Studies, to be celebrated in Murcia this time with the theme ‘Space’ (http://www.cultureandpower.org/). I have decided to develop what I wrote here as a paper and to consider in more depth how Banks’s very Scottish sense of humour has altered the parameters of space opera. On this very same day a colleague has emailed me to announce that Iain M. Banks has made it official: he has terminal cancer (see his personal statement at http://friends.banksophilia.com/).
Banks, who is only 59, explains that he is “expected to live for ‘several months’ and it’s extremely unlikely I’ll live beyond a year. So it looks like my latest novel, The Quarry, will be my last.” He has just asked his “my partner Adele if she will do me the honour of becoming my widow (sorry – but we find ghoulish humour helps).” As he takes final journeys and says goodbye to friends and family, “my heroic publishers are doing all they can to bring the publication date of my new novel forward by as much as four months, to give me a better chance of being around when it hits the shelves.” I don’t know what to think of this part of the announcement, shocked as I am by the idea that I’ll be considering what Banks means by the Sublime in his last SF novel, as he faces death. There’s a grim chance that I present my paper (in October) as he lies dying. A very grim chance. I do hope that ‘ghoulish humour’ helps us all, writer and fans.
Yet, I know what’s coming now: on the fan front, the greediness to buy it all (is The Quarry SF or mainstream?); on the academic front, a flood of publications, conferences… you name it!! It is a kind of macabre, advanced necrophilia that is really making me shudder to the point that for a while I have even considered withdrawing the darned abstract. Now I think that this would be wrong for that paper will be my homage to the man I have been calling my favourite writer for many years now. Actually, as I prepared the abstract this morning, amidst nausea caused by stomach flu, I was thinking of re-reading all of Banks’s SF novels again –call that a nauseous intuition of the end.
I met Banks once years ago and he signed my copy of The Wasp Factory, always, indeed, a little treasure for me. A big, charming fellow, when I told him that I had just taught his novel his reaction was a candid: “Why?” I liked him very much for that. I must confess, as I think it’s obvious, that I have never enjoyed his mainstream fiction as much as his first-rate science fiction. I need, though, to thank him for all his books and for brightening many, many hours of my life (I have done so already in the guest book of the website I have mentioned). I never thought I could be made so sad by the (inevitable) death of someone who is not an actual friend. This is the mystery of Literature: how we connect with people we may never meet and with the imaginary persons they make up.
I’ll miss buying your new books regularly, Mr. Banks, but I will not miss you, as I’ll make sure you keep me company until I myself sublime… Thanks, thanks, thanks.