British Books

For a while, it looked like his name and reputation were going to be hijacked by absurdly wealthy, self-regarding tech doofuses. In his pre-X days, Musk claimed to be taking inspiration from Banks's sci-fi visions, declaring himself a "utopian anarchist" while gesturing vaguely toward the Culture universe. Amazon big cheese Jeff Bezos also publicly declared himself to be a Banks fan in 2018 when Prime Video unveiled plans to turn sprawling galactic doorstop Consider Phlebas - the first Culture novel, published in 1987 - into a live-action streaming series. That adaptation was quietly cancelled in 2020 . (My hot tip? Secure the rights to 1990's Use of Weapons, the most badass/emotionally shattering Culture book, and do it as kinetic, stylised anime: a real Machiavellian turbo-screamer!)

A little more than ten years after his death, we are experiencing a timely, double-pronged Banks bump. His 13 sci-fi books as Iain M Banks are being reissued this month with eye-catching new cover art - I'm getting cool synthwave vibes, but also maybe a bit of Tarot? - that will hopefully get them into the hands and brainpans of a new generation of readers. Even more exciting: the recent publication of behind-the-curtain coffee table tome The Culture: The Drawings, collating his earliest conceptual designs for what would become his signature sci-fi creation. Banks was apparently a habitual scribbler and doodler, conjuring crude but detailed geographical maps, architectural drafts, spaceship designs, weapons prototypes and the sketched-out foundations for an entire glyph-based language. (That last requires you to rotate the landscape-orientated art book 90 degrees to puzzle over Banks's exploratory stabs at nonary encoding.)

The result is a chaotic intergalactic blueprint - the Culture in skunkworks form - self-annotated in cramped chickenscratch. Banks was a dude who loved his whisky and his amateur draftsmanship has some of the character of cask spirit: raw and unrefined but heady and intoxicating. It occasionally reads like graffiti scrawled in the margins of a runaway imagination: Banksy Woz Ere. An extended chapter cataloguing increasingly ginormous Culture spacecraft sees old-school Elite-style wireframe models paired with astonishingly detailed tables of their dimensions, crew complements and capabilities. It seems obsessive and perhaps a little redundant, the sort of crammed, maniac dream journal an art department intern might be required to produce while working on a grim serial killer movie. But then you catch another dashed-off Note To Self: "Nothing is so obvious that you might not have to explain it to somebody sometime." The details matter.