The Wasp Factory: Ian Banks

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to look dark and menacing... the way I might have looked if I hadn’t had my little accident. Looking at me, you’d never guess I’d killed three people. It isn’t fair”. Iain Banks: Whit and Excession: Getting Used To Being God". Spike Magazine. 3 September 1996 . Retrieved 3 April 2013. Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Iain Banks was educated at the University of Stirling where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife. The journeys through life that Angus, Frank and Eric make finally all come together in the most unexpected denouement. For lovers of the grotesque, there are some truly disgusting imagery in The Wasp Factory. The event which serves as the catalyst for Eric’s own descent into psychosis is among the best written passages to ever grace horror literature. Banks is to be commended for the work, but the ending loses much of its intended purpose. Frank is not a scion from which lessons can be learned and that leaves only the madness. Enjoy the journey.

a b Banks, Iain M. (10 August 1994). "A Few Notes on the Culture". Originally posted on rec.arts.sf newsgroup. The State of the Art (1991). London: Orbit. ISBN 0-356-19669-0 – also included below in short fiction collections, but included here because it is considered part of the Culture series. [85] The Crow Road (1992). London: Scribners. ISBN 0-356-20652-1. Adapted for BBC TV in 1996 (directed by Gavin Millar). So yes, this book is strong meat. It's got deeply twisted characters enacting their damage before us, the safely removed audience. It's making a serious point about human nature. And it's doing all of that in quite beautifully wrought prose, without so much as one wasted word. Alison Flood (21 May 2013). "Iain Banks posts new update to fans on his cancer". the Guardian. Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn't letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff... while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can't imagine that I'd have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round.

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You are all entitled to your opinion. Here is mine: This book is brilliant. It will be remembered long long after the pleasant entertainments of the day are more forgotten than Restoration drama. (Hands up anyone who knows who Colley Cibber is. And don't front. Or use Wikipedia.)

Lord of the Flies meets American Psycho on the Moray Firth. Frank, a teenage lad with no official record of his existence, lives with his father in an isolated dune land cottage. He spends his time killing birds and other small animals. Occasionally he kills people. His principle hobby is bomb-making, at which he excels. Frank’s half-brother Eric is on the run from a psych-ward. While on the lam he kills and eats dogs. Even Frank considers Eric nuts. But blood is blood, even if it’s diluted and most of it has been spilled. Their father, Angus, lives in a lost world of sixties hippiedom with a basement full of decaying, and therefore dangerous, Army surplus cordite. The biker-mother, Agnes, hasn’t been seen for years. Over the course of a week Eric calls Frank from locations across Scotland, coming closer and closer. He eventually arrives on the island to Frank’s excitement and dismay—he is happy to see his older brother, but he is also afraid of being on the receiving end of the destruction and violence he knows his brother is capable of. Appeals to reason, international law, U. N. resolutions and simple human decency mean – it is now obvious – nothing to Israel... I would urge all writers, artists and others in the creative arts, as well as those academics engaging in joint educational projects with Israeli institutions, to consider doing everything they can to convince Israel of its moral degradation and ethical isolation, preferably by simply having nothing more to do with this outlaw state. [41] a b "Interview: Changing society, imagining the future". Socialistreview.org.uk. Archived from the original on 14 October 2011 . Retrieved 9 April 2013.By his death in June 2013, Banks had published 26 novels. A 27th novel The Quarry was published posthumously. [19] His final work, a poetry collection, appeared in February 2015. [20] In an interview in January 2013, he also mentioned he had the plot idea for another novel in the Culture series, which would most likely have been his next book and was planned for publication in 2014. [21] A project to publish Banks's unseen early drawings, maps and sketches from the Culture universe alongs with his writings and notes on the setting was underway in February 2018. [22] In 2021, the delayed single volume of The Culture: Notes and Drawings was cancelled and replaced with two separate volumes: a landscape artbook of The Culture: The Drawings and a companion volume containing notes, excerpts and new text from Ken MacLeod. [23] In 2023, the release date for The Culture: The Drawings was confirmed for the 7 November that year while the still-untitled companion volume was scheduled for late 2024. [24]

what if Holden Caulfield was born on a remote Scottish Island into a disfunctional family, with a former anarchist for a father and a flower-power mother who ran away soon after he was born? Banks envisioned his angsty teenager character as a sort of alien living on a deserted planet, a translation of one of his science-fiction ideas. The object of the study is sanity and ethics when the individual is removed from the ordinary social interactions most of us take for granted.On the whole this story gives us an insight into Frank's mind and why he was like that. And then there was also a huge revelation at the end which just left md numb for sometime and I kept repeating to myself, no this can't be true. Frank reminds me of Ronnie from Toy Story 1. As Ronnie got a deep satisfaction by breaking and destroying toys, Frank got high on killing insects, animals, and humans. In April 2012 Banks became the "Acting Honorary Non-Executive Figurehead President Elect pro tem (trainee)" of the Science Fiction Book Club based in London. The title was his creation and on 3 October 2012 Banks accepted a T-shirt inscribed with it. [46] But it's essentially a warning to the reader: Don't go there. Don't do the pale, weak-kneed versions of the rage-and-hate fueled horrors inflicted on Frank, and even on Eric. Pay attention, be mindful of the many ways we as lazy moral actors condone the creation of Erics and Franks in our world. This spot reserved for THE JUDGE from [book:Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West|394535] .....I haven't read it yet, but have been told be people I trust that he may actually be #1 on the list. HOWEVER, despite the positive aspects of casually dating a fictional sociopath or psychopath, it is still important to exercise caution when deciding to court (or allow oneself to be courted by) one of these individuals as there are some very troubled individuals that it is best simply to avoid. Therefore, as a public service I have been maintaining a list of these “DO NOT TOUCH” individuals and now need to make an addition to the list.