The Wasp Factory: Ian Banks

Product Information

During the ensuing confrontation, Eric attempts to destroy the island with explosives and fire but is not successful. Humanity comes off badly in this book. The truth of what made Frank the person he is will leave you more chilled than any silly evocation of a devil in a religious text. Frank's very being is an ambulatory evil act. But the reason for it, the motivating factor, is the absolute worst horror this book contains. All the animal-torture stuff is unpleasant, I agree. It's not as though it's lovingly and lingeringly described. And it pales in comparison to Frank's raison d'etre. Sometimes I think you're the one who should be in hospital, not Eric.' He was looking at me from under his dark brows, his voice low. Once, that sort of talk would have scared me, but not now. I'm nearly seventeen, and not a child. Here in Scotland I'm old enough to get married without my parent's permission, and have been for a year. There wouldn't be much point to me getting married perhaps — I'll admit that — but the principle is there. Banks took up writing at the age of 11. He completed a first novel, The Hungarian Lift-Jet, at 16 and a second, TTR (also entitled The Tashkent Rambler) in his first year at Stirling University in 1972. [8] [14] Though he saw himself mainly as a science fiction author, his publishing problems led him to pursue mainstream fiction. His first published novel The Wasp Factory, appeared in 1984, when he was thirty. [15] After the success of The Wasp Factory, Banks began to write full time. His editor at Macmillan, James Hale, advised him to write a book a year, which he agreed to do. [8]

the Wasp Factory from the title, an artefact built by Frank and imbued with mystical, prophetic powers. Flood, Allison (15 February 2018). "Iain M Banks's drawings of the Culture universe to be published in 2019". The Guardian . Retrieved 5 May 2023. In 1992 Malcolm Sutherland adapted the novel for the stage. The production was performed at the Glasgow Citizen's Theatre. It was revived in 1997 and shown in Yorkshire and London. [6]

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright: Book 3, Götterdämmerung (1989) by Bryan Talbot from Proutt Publishing, ISBN 0-907865-03-8. The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Times. 5 January 2008 . Retrieved 10 February 2010.

I was never registered. I have no birth certificate, no National Insurance number, nothing to say I'm alive or have ever existed. I know this is a crime, and so does my father, and I think that sometimes he regrets the decision he made seventeen years ago, in his hippy-anarchist days, or whatever they were. Simone Caroti: The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction, McFarland, April 2015, ISBN 978-0-7864-9447-7 Dunno! Motives are bizarre sometimes? Cheap and easy entertainment? Fascination with vulgarity? I was bored at the airport and paid for it? People like violence, especially against women, children and animals. They like to be confronted with bodily functions and exact descriptions of drunken vomit. They like it in the way they like brutal computer games and stupid television shows." but he is better now: he only kills rabbits, rats, gulls and other unfortunate small critters that visit his windblown island on the East coast of Scotland. He has a hobby for making totems decorated with the skulls of his kills, for building dams out of sand and then blowing them to create floods and for burning dead wasps on altars build from dead dog skulls. His favorite toys are catapults with steel balls, improvised flamethrowers, air guns and pipe bombs that he builds in his toolshed from fertilizer and acids.Banks's non-SF work comprises fourteen novels and one non-fiction book. Many of his novels contain elements of autobiography, [79] and feature various locations in his native Scotland. [80] Raw Spirit (subtitled In Search of the Perfect Dram) is a travel book of Banks's visits to the distilleries of Scotland in search of the finest whisky, including his musings on other subjects such as cars and politics. [81] Fiction [ edit ] What Happened to Me" is the title of the last chapter. We were always heading towards this explanation, designed to surprise and therefore to satisfy the reader. All this is engineered. Yet the explanation will only be accepted if it "makes sense" of previously irrelevant details of the narrative. The real clues to Frank's history are, it turns out, ones we have passed and hardly noticed. Frank has occasionally cast adolescent aspersion on the female sex. "Women like to see men helpless." Female inferiority is natural law: rams are "demeaned by the idiotic females they have to associate with and inseminate". Women, Frank knows from watching television, "cannot withstand really major things happening to them". We should have attended to these remarks, we now see. It should not spoil the dénouement of The Wasp Factory to say that it gives a new meaning to the old saw: cherchez la femme! My father snorted into his glass as he drained it. 'Hectares and that sort of rubbish. Certainly not. It's all based on the measurement of the globe, you know. I don't have to tell you what nonsense that is.' Premio Italia Science Fiction Award in the Best International Novel category for Inversions (winner) a b "Interview: Changing society, imagining the future". Socialistreview.org.uk. Archived from the original on 14 October 2011 . Retrieved 9 April 2013.

Arthur C.Clarke Award Shortlists". The Arthur C Clarke Award. 2012. Archived from the original on 6 January 2013 . Retrieved 6 April 2013. Banks's next work of literary fiction was The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007), a return to the territory of The Crow Road. Banks's protagonist, Alban McGill, struggles to prevent his family's company from being taken over by a US giant, occasioning diatribes against American capitalism and American foreign policy that seem straightforwardly authorial. In the end I went for something that kept me closer to my by-then comfort zone: a first-person narrative set on a remote Scottish nearly-island told by a normality-challenged teenager with severe violence issues allowed me to treat my story as something resembling SF. The island could be envisaged as a planet, and Frank, the protagonist, almost as an alien. I gave in to the write-what-you-know school but with a dose of skiffy hyperbole, mining my own past for exaggerateable experiences. I'd built dams; Frank would too, though with a slightly psychotic uber-motif involving women, water, the sea and revenge. I'd constructed big home-made kites; so would Frank, and use one as a murder weapon. Along with a pal, I'd indulged in the then not-uncommon and perfectly innocent teenage boy pursuit of making bombs, flame-throwers, guns, giant catapults and more bombs; Frank would too, though alone and with a more determinedly harm-minded intensity. Francis Cauldhame is a monster, a sort of teenage Hannibal Lecter. He is also the narrator of this deranged fairytale, casually mentioning to the reader that he became a serial killer before his tenth anniversary...

Podcast

Gerard Earley (3 October 2012). "Iain M. Banks became President of Science Fiction Book Club, London England". London: Web. Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia (24 January 2015). "Elon Musk's new drone ships pay tribute to a revered sci-fi author" . Retrieved 8 December 2015. I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me. More rejection slips. More rejection slips from a smaller number of publishers, as fewer had SF lists within which to bring my deathless prose to an unsuspecting but, I was certain, ultimately extravagantly appreciative and indeed rightly thankful public. In 2011 Banks featured on the BBC Radio 4 programme Saturday Live. Banks reaffirmed his atheism in this appearance, explaining death as an important "part of the totality of life" that should be treated realistically instead of feared. [29] [30]