{"id":689,"date":"2013-09-07T14:01:13","date_gmt":"2013-09-07T12:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=689"},"modified":"2013-09-07T14:01:13","modified_gmt":"2013-09-07T12:01:13","slug":"read-you-later-iain-m-banks-learning-the-meaning-of-the-word-completist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2013\/09\/07\/read-you-later-iain-m-banks-learning-the-meaning-of-the-word-completist\/","title":{"rendered":"READ YOU LATER, IAIN M. BANKS! (LEARNING THE MEANING OF THE WORD \u2018COMPLETIST\u2019) <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Iain,<\/p>\n

As I have narrated here, on the very same day you announced your imminent death of cancer, I had sent an abstract for a conference about your twelfth (and last!) SF novel, The Hydrogen Sonata. The conference is next October, the paper is written, and you were supposed to live until then. Unfortunately, you died much earlier than expected, last June. <\/p>\n

I thought then that the best homage I could pay to you was re-reading all your SF novels. It\u2019s taken me most of July and August but I\u2019m done \u2013the whole 5,691 pages. The funny thing is that I decided to read them out of sequence, as you explained that, anyway, the internal chronological order is determined by the references to the Idiran-Culture war. And, then, a few of the novels are not even connected with the Culture. So, I left Surface Detail<\/em>, possibly the densest and most demanding, for the end \u2013without recalling that you-know-who turns out to be a major character in your third novel. I have managed thus to put myself into a nice loop. What an excuse to start all over again…<\/p>\n

One doesn\u2019t lose a favourite writer every day and I was really very sad to see you go. Since then my admiration for you as a writer and as a person has increased, particularly after seeing your last interview. Yes, the one in which you discussed really calmly your reactions to the cancer diagnosis and your impending death; being a non-believer, you simply attributed your fate to bad luck. You also downplayed the mystique around writers, presenting yourself as just a guy who wrote stories and who didn\u2019t know the meaning of the expression \u2018writer\u2019s block\u2019 (here you are: Ian Banks- Raw Spirit, BBC Scotland Interview, http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=v2vrypvdqWI<\/a>). That\u2019s how I\u2019ll remember you: braving death with a smile, unpretentious to the end. What a lesson.<\/p>\n

Reading the books has not been that easy. Your imagination is at points overwhelming to someone who, like me, has very poor skills at visualising space, high-tech gadgets and outlandish aliens \u2013and swallowing up large batches of made-up names. This is exactly why I read SF. I almost gave up on you on page 358 of The Algebraist<\/em>: \u201cClouders were part of the Cincturia, the collection of beings, species, machine strains and intelligent detritus that existed \u2013generally\u2013 between stellar systems and didn\u2019t fit into any other neat category (so they weren\u2019t the deep-space cometarians called the Eclipta, they weren\u2019t drifting examples of the Brown Dwarf Communitals known as the Plena, and they weren\u2019t the real exotics, the Non-Baryonic Penumbrae, the thirteen-way-folded Dimensionates of the Flux-dwelling Quantarchs).\u201d <\/p>\n

A reader in Amazon wrote in despair that The Algebraist<\/em> is only for \u2018completists,\u2019 readers fanatical enough to put themselves through the task of reading everything a writer has written, no matter the quality. That\u2019s me (for you). Your protagonist in this novel, Fassin Taak, claims he gets \u2018swim\u2019 whenever he imagines the galaxy full of civilisations, and all the colossal network of relationships. I get \u2018swim\u2019 at your imagination. Clouders, by the way, turned out to be a real beauty.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been dragging my feet for the last 200 pages of Surface Detail<\/em>, thinking simultaneously that it was about time to finish, stop mourning, move on and that I didn\u2019t want to close the book. Not really, not yet, not ever. Right now, as I write, I have this very strange feeling that I\u2019d rather be in your universe than in mine (would I qualify for Special Circumstances?). I\u2019ll miss it sorely \u2013the aliens, the drones, the Minds, the avatars, your men and women, pan-human or not. The humour, the wit, the adventure, the awareness that this is just a tiny corner of the galaxy… <\/p>\n

I must thank you particularly for the women, and for how you have narrated so touchingly the immense difference that living in a totally egalitarian society like the Culture makes for us. Would make for us. I thank you particularly for Perosteck, Sharrow, Lededje, Vyr, Anaplian and Vossil. And I don\u2019t know what the avatars have, but I know I\u2019ll miss them (unpredictable Demiesen and cool Berdle, above all).<\/p>\n

You must be asking yourself: what about my fifteen mainstream novels? Are you also going to be a completist for them? Yes, I think so. I don\u2019t have them all yet but will go for them. You wrote so much… I\u2019ll have to wait until next summer, though (Harry Potter is right now waiting for me). A very intelligent girl student has asked me to supervise a BA dissertation on the body in one of your SF novels, we still haven\u2019t decided which one. I know then, that I\u2019ll have to re-read at least one of the twelve soon (some excuse, huh?). <\/p>\n

I know you\u2019ll probably would say \u2018but why???\u2019, which is what you told me when so many years ago I told you in person that I was teaching your eccentric, singular The Wasp Factory<\/em>. Your fault, for having that wonderful imagination.<\/p>\n

What I am grieving today, I realise, is not only your loss but the realisation that the Culture, the utopia you imagined to protest against so much dystopia, is not within our reach. The recipe you imagined to replace our disastrous civilisation, let the computers and machines take over to free us from the slavery of money and property, is so well built in your novels that it\u2019s hard to accept it is only a remote possibility. The total freedom with which Culture citizens live their lives is a dream from which I\u2019d rather not wake up \u2013I\u2019m even ready, as I told you, to join SC and do the necessary dirty tricks. <\/p>\n

Thank you, there is nothing else to add. <\/p>\n

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\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Iain, As I have narrated here, on the very same day you announced your imminent death of cancer, I had sent an abstract for a conference about your twelfth (and last!) SF novel, The Hydrogen Sonata. The conference is next October, the paper is written, and you were supposed to live until then. Unfortunately, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}