Iain Banks was a Scottish author who published fiction under two names that marked a clear generic distinction: as Iain Banks he wrote literary fiction, as Iain M. Banks he wrote science fiction, though the boundary between the two was always more porous than the naming convention suggested.
His literary debut, The Wasp Factory in 1984, announced an immediately distinctive voice - dark, formally inventive, and entirely uninterested in reader comfort. The novels that followed ranged widely in tone and approach, from the sprawling generational drama of The Crow Road to the formally audacious The Bridge. As Iain M. Banks he created the Culture, a post-scarcity anarchist utopia administered by superintelligent artificial minds, against which he staged some of contemporary science fiction's most ambitious moral and political arguments. The Culture novels - among them Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons, and Player of Games - are widely regarded as among the finest the genre has produced.
