Iain Banks

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Transcript

Ramona Koval: When I spoke with Iain Banks at the Cheltenham Literary Festival we began our conversation talking about Transition's prologue which is filled with clues to the thriller ending.

It's counterintuitive to start with the end for a thriller.

Iain Banks: First of all, the very first sentence there's an unreliable narrator, and even the first word is 'apparently'. Tricks are being set up that only come to fruition in the final pages. That's part of the fun, setting up dramatic tension I suppose.

Ramona Koval: This guy who has just put seemingly a sweetener into his coffee and then he adds sugar as well...aha, that is the clue. He's about to transition and he's going to use a drug, septus it's called...you'd think he'd put it in his septum.

Iain Banks: You could. It does say that some people snort it. Other people stick it up their bum basically, you can put it into various bits of the human body, he prefers to do the conventional thing and take it orally. I chose 'septus' because...the septum in your nose, it just means 'division', so I liked the idea it's a division between realities, and that's why I thought 'septus' was a good concise name for a drug as well.

Ramona Koval: And this drug takes you out of yourself or takes you into the body of somebody else in another world really...

Iain Banks: Improbably so, yes.

Ramona Koval: But this idea that people can take over other bodies...there's an old Yiddish story called The Dybbuk where this happens. It's a really seductive idea, isn't it. Why did it interest you?

Iain Banks: I didn't really come at it from that angle really, it was more from the point of view of alternative realities in the first place, I came at it by that route. Alternative realities attracted me in the first place, and then the whole thing about someone taking over somebody's body or just somehow...the implication of the many worlds or the multiverse idea is that absolutely everything that could possibly have happened has happened, and in a sense already has, and your past, present and future are all mixed up.

So in theory there should be someone precisely like you, having just come from somewhere else and is just somehow in that situation. It is absolutely mad, but the thing is there is a physics research that does imply this is almost the most rational explanation for the way the universe works. So there's a sort of bizarre plausibility to it, so that attracted me.

It is one of these things that I think people do become interested in, this idea of taking over somebody else's body in a non-sexual way, inside somebody else's body and becoming them and making them do things. It's been not exactly done to death but it's been used time and time again.

Ramona Koval: Yes, but in a sense we are in different worlds. Your world and my world, even though we have this Venn diagram crossover at this moment, we're all in different universes really, aren't we.

Iain Banks: Our own individual universes fit into something the size of a small cooking pot, that's the size of your brain, that's it. Your whole way of understanding everything else outside there is done through that and your senses. The idea of solipsism is also mentioned in the book, and in some ways solipsism, again, is almost a more rational response to reality than accepting 'yes, fair enough, it's all like that and it's all a bit weird'. In the end it is clinically insane really, but it is brought into play, it certainly is mentioned.

But the same way that everyone reads a different book, no-one really reads the book that I wrote, he or she has their own take on what the book is meant to be about, but it's every individual person who especially makes up their own images, that's where it departs from film because once books are made into film then the images that are presented become the ones that live in your head. If you've read a book, then read a novel, then see the book that was made subsequently, it will tend to be the images you saw on the screen that you'll remember, not the ones you made up in your own head when you first read the book. That's the way it works for me, maybe I'm easily distracted, I don't know.

So in a sense this is the recompense for if your books don't get turned into films, they stay more yours. You don't get the money, but never mind. Money, fame, red carpet...[sigh].

Ramona Koval: Now, don't be bitter.

Iain Banks: It's an issue, sorry.

Ramona Koval: And it seems that the way that septus works, from my reading, well, you can either do that through septus but sometimes it seems to be...in moments of intense pleasure or pain or a kind of out-of-body experience, that's when you might jump into another world.

Iain Banks: Yes, certainly in the case of our hero, whatever, Mr Oh, yes, that's why he becomes a very precious commodity in his own right because it looks like he's able to do it all by himself. Perhaps semi-rationally he's managing to produce the drug inside his own body and therefore can do it, so he becomes of extraordinary interest to the people who otherwise are in complete control of the supplies.

Ramona Koval: The Concern.

Iain Banks: Yes, and also Mrs Mulverhill, the bandit queen, as she's called, who's got her own little operation going, as it were. It's one of these things, again, I think we'd like to think that if you're being tortured or something you could somehow just...well, conventionally faint, that would do, or just suddenly die or whatever, or interesting stuff like be out of it with one mighty bound...

Ramona Koval: Or have an orgasm.

Iain Banks: Um, that would do...an unusual response to torture certainly!

Ramona Koval: I just popped into another multiverse.

Iain Banks: Sadly it's a myth, it just doesn't happen, but there we go.

Ramona Koval: You play with language here because you need a whole new language when you're describing things like this, don't you.

Iain Banks: You kind of have to, yes. You have to mix and match, as it were. You can completely invent new words but you've got to be careful of that, you've got to try and retain some link with the reality that we do share, so you have to be careful of that. But that's where my training as a science fiction writer comes in; making up words is part of the fun. That's one of the perks of the job, making up words.

Ramona Koval: But you have to allow people to come with you, you can't just have a whole glossary like it's a different language that people have to learn.

Iain Banks: Yes, you can only go so far. My previous novel had a big glossary at the back certainly, yes...

Ramona Koval: But not this one.

Iain Banks: Not this one, no.

Ramona Koval: Shall I give people an example?

Iain Banks: Please do, yes.

Ramona Koval: You say something like, 'Are you properly ambiated? Are you fully embedded yet?' So are you on the way to..?

Iain Banks: How much more easy can I make it for people? 'Ambiated' is like the sound of, as in something coming to ambient temperature. 'Embedded', that's got a journalistic, war meaning as well obviously. But it's actually giving you two bites of the cherry there. If you don't understand one, you've got to understand the second one.

Ramona Koval: What about 'fragre'? It is, I suppose, the fragrance of a history or a culture or the smell of a place..?

Iain Banks: Yes, it's hard to express it, it's the overall sense you get of a place that is actually a different world, as it were, that worlds somehow have...individual bits of worlds will have an overall sense. It's an amalgam of all the other senses, that somehow if you have these abilities you're able to experience.

Ramona Koval: You've got foreseers and trackers, flitters, blockers, exorcisers, inhibitors, randomisers...

Iain Banks: Yes, I remember all those. What was that..?

Ramona Koval: Tandemisers. Explain a tandemiser?

Iain Banks: A tandemiser is someone who is able to take someone else with them. Not only can they go between realities, usually by touching someone they can take someone with them as well. So they can take their consciousness as well as their own.

Ramona Koval: So how do you go about making up these words? What's the process?

Iain Banks: Things like 'tandemiser', it's fairly obvious, the person who is a tandemiser is at the front in control, and the person who's being dragged along is the person behind. So again, that was a fairly obvious one I guess. But a large part...again, it's the perks of the job, this sort of stuff, getting an idea, it's wonderful when you get an idea, and you can't really usually track where they come from, sometimes you can...

Ramona Koval: What about this idea?

Iain Banks: I woke up in a wee hotel in the 5th arrondissement in Paris, just off the Rue Bucherie one morning and my smashing girlfriend tells the tale of waking up and seeing my big face going, 'I've just had an idea for the next book, hurray!'

Ramona Koval: So was it a long time coming? Why were you so thrilled?

Iain Banks: I'm always thrilled when a new idea comes along, especially when it might be the signs of a book. I have lots of ideas, ideas for lines of dialogue and stuff like that, some are single words, some are ideas for bits of tech or whatever, especially when you're writing science fiction you think, oh, that would be a cool thing if you could have that. But now and again an idea will come along and you think, there's a story in there, that isn't just a single little idea you can slot into a pre-existing framework or a story, that's got legs, that becomes the kind of thing you can slot other things into.

The way I work...I don't really write short stories anymore, I used to write a few, I've a book of short stories, but I haven't written one for about 20 years, and the reason is that most of the ideas that could have become short stories instead tend to get absorbed into novels. Some of my favourite literary experiences are going back and just reading some old science fiction, or remembering reading them for the first time. There's this idea that the golden age of science fiction is when you personally were 14, and it's generally true. So that's my nostalgia trip. There are people who are just superb at writing short stories and I'm not really one of them. As I say, usually they not really just short story ideas, they're ideas that can get used elsewhere.

Ramona Koval: But it is remarkable to think that you can get a whole universe, a whole world into a short story. It's hard enough to get...

Iain Banks: I'm a great admirer of when it's done properly. I don't really have that gift, I tend to run off the screen, as it were.

Ramona Koval: We're talking about Iain Banks' new book Transition, and it's a book of many worlds and multiple timeframes and one of the worlds is populated by a group of Christian terrorists, as Iain Banks explains.

Iain Banks: I wanted some sort of feeling of threat within the society, people actually genuinely were worried about getting blown to bits. It was such a cliché to have them as being Muslim or Islamic terrorists, and I devoutly did not (if I can use the word 'devoutly' as I'm an evangelical atheist obviously) want to join that basic Islamiphobic Muslim-bashing brigade. So it had to be somebody else who is going to be the terrorists, so why not Christians terrorists.

And as soon as I thought of it, I thought, wait a minute, Christianity, yes, especially Catholicism because it doesn't matter how horrendous a thing you commit, you can confess it, a couple of Hail Marys and you're off and away, free. And also that horrendous idea...I've no idea what sick fuck thought this up, but the idea of original sin, a kind of existential depravity, to have had that idea and to have got that into common parlance and into so many people's heads, this idea that a baby immediately out of the womb, before the cord is even cut, is consumed with sin in some sense. It's just a despairingly, terrible, awful and sadistic idea.

So for all sinners, even the most innocent of innocent, if a newborn baby is a sinner in some sense, then it's not so bad to kill them. So in that case that's kind of the excuse. I think religions don't tend to need that sort of excuse, it doesn't really matter, some minor doctrinal dispute is enough to put them to the sword or the feet to the fire or whatever. So it just did strike me, it was a nice little...you could kind of see why people might feel that way, you could sort of explain it.

The possible mistranslation, you know, the thing about if you're an Islamic terrorist and you think that you're going to meet 40 virgins when you go to heaven, it might have been 40 loaves of bread or something, I don't know, I'm not an expert...but I just thought it was an idea. I was going to do that anyway, regardless of the neatness and the way it fitted in, I just thought, yes, let's give the Christians a bit of a bashing this time, why not.

Ramona Koval: And the Concern is an organisation that has a sense of itself as having all the right on its side, and its job really is to go into all these multiple worlds and sort things out, fix things up.

Iain Banks: Yes, that's the idea, it's meant to be doing good works, but by the time Madame d'Ortolan comes along that's entirely gone by the board, it's just really all about power and the exercising of power and keeping hold of it and making sure nobody else gets any of it.

Ramona Koval: Sometimes when the person is flitting (I'm using your language now, 'flitting') from one personality to another, occasionally they notice that they've got a little obsessive compulsive disorder.

Iain Banks: This happens to Mr Oh, certainly, yes.

Ramona Koval: And mostly he carries this obsessive compulsive disorder with him throughout all the different people he becomes.

Iain Banks: I have no idea why. I'll say it right now, I haven't the foggiest idea, I just like it, I thought it was a nice...I end up putting things like that in to make it somehow more convincing because it's such a ludicrous idea, it's basically about bananas when you think about it, but if you give little things like that so it doesn't all happen all nice and smoothly, if you give it the kind of...the debris, the scatter, the clutter you get in real life that we're used to, that is the mark of things being genuine rather than being just a whole lot of theoretical supposition or whatever, then it makes it more believable. But there's no other reason for it than that.

Ramona Koval: But it did raise questions about who are we really, and how do we know who we are and how do we know what the 'is-ness' or us is.

Iain Banks: Yes, and the book is happy to play with that. I think writers probably do spend quite a lot of time thinking about that sort of stuff. They don't always bother to put it into novels, mind you. I think you do because you're living through your characters and there's always that aspect of...and I think most of the characters in my books, there's some small part of me...you have to have some sympathy, even with the most ghastly characters there has to be some small part of you that somehow is there expanded absurdly to make the characters so you can relate to them and therefore so that they'll be believable to the reader when they come to read the thing. So therefore because of that feeling of you putting yourself into...even in a fairly rarefied sense, because you're putting yourself into the novel, it's the kind of thing that writers do think about.

I guess people are writing various confessional novels or novels where you're basically telling the story of your family or something that's happened to you or your friends, it's much more germane, as it were. So yes, I think you do tend to think about that sort of stuff if you're creative. If you're creating characters in particular, you do think how much of that is me and what does it mean to be a character. I suspect very few creative writers haven't thought about that slightly clichéd thing of maybe the character comes out of the novel or they start to rewrite the novel themselves or maybe I'm being written by somebody else, blah, blah, blah. It's hard to get a new take on that, but Hollywood keeps trying, failing usually.

Ramona Koval: You've got a very interesting mind...

Iain Banks: That's very kind, thank you.

Ramona Koval: I just wonder what it's like to carry it around in your head, all of that stuff.

Iain Banks: Glibly easily quite frankly, it doesn't bother me. I'm quite a happy soul, for a start. What you see is what you get really. I'm not consumed with angst or anything like that.

Ramona Koval: And what sort of a little boy were you when you were thinking about the universe and your place in it?

Iain Banks: Quite a thoughtful one, certainly. Only child, lived in my own head, lots of wee pals, lots of chums in my village. A fabulous start in life of just being loved, my mum and dad loved me and indulged me...not completely, I was disciplined, I couldn't just do as I pleased, but I was loved, I was made to feel important and that I mattered. Again, I think being an only child, I think there's definite psychological provenance there in terms of turning into a writer because you do live in your own head, you haven't got siblings, so you make stuff up in your head, so that's a grounding in writing novels or writing stories right there and then.

I remember there used to a program when I was a kid called Sooty and Sweep, I used to think it was great. Sooty was a hand puppet, a little golden hand puppet, and Sweep just made squeaky noises from a little squeaker, I imagine, inside the puppet. And Sooty...you never actually heard Sooty speak. Sooty used to just whisper in his master's ears. Great, didn't have to be a ventriloquist, that's a brilliant idea, you didn't have to bother learning to be a ventriloquist, 'What's that Sooty?'

And I remember I was sent down to the shop to get a pint of milk or something for my mum, I remember walking down and I had my first proper religious philosophical experience en route on the way down and back from the shops, all of four minutes walk. I was thinking how did God make the Earth, how did God actually make things? I imagined God as being Sooty and standing on a planet. There were several problems with this. First of all, Sooty doesn't have any feet, he's a fucking glove puppet. Standing; how? Hovering?

God must have been like Sooty and then he went 'b'ding' and the Earth...hold on, hold on, what's he standing on? He must be standing on a planet or a wee moon or an asteroid. Where'd that come from? Who made that? Wait a minute, look at him and his wand. And then I thought, hold on, who made Sooty, who made God? Hmm, there's more to this than meets the eye, I thought. I can't have been more than six at the time. I was certainly younger than nine. I think I was quite a lot younger than that. Obviously I'd like to exaggerate how much younger I was.

Ramona Koval: Did you ask someone about it? Did you ask your parents?

Iain Banks: I don't think I did, it was my little conundrum I was keeping to myself. I don't think I did actually, no. It was a long time before I realised there was actually a difference of opinion between my mum and dad about religion at all. I used to go to Sunday School and I got old enough...again, nine or just pre-nine, I used to go to church with my mum, and I just assumed that dads didn't go to church because my dad didn't go to church, so I thought it's just for women. I was standing there, 'Come all ye faithful...' and I thought, there's men here, it's not just kids and women, that's my pal Bob's dad, what's he doing here? So that day I went, 'Dad, how come you don't go to church?' 'I don't believe in God, son.' 'It's an option?! Why wasn't I told?' 'No, I'm an atheist, like my dad before me.' And I'm here years later, I've blossomed into an atheist as well.

The launch of Canal Dreams, the first launch [unclear] publishers to have outside London, so let's have a launch in Scotland, so I had it in Edinburgh, and even more of my family was in the area than now, and I thought...in case no-one came along, I wanted it to look packed and successful, so I got all my family to come. It was great, loads of people, not all my family as well. So we had this launch and...I guess it was an American or a Canadian exchange student came up and said, 'Gee Mr Banks, I just read The Wasp Factory. You must have had a really disturbed childhood.' 'No, and in fact for once I can prove it. See that little silver-haired lady over there, that's my mum, you go and ask her.' 'Okay, thank you, thank you.' He went off, and about two minutes later I heard my mum's voice floating out over the crowd going, 'Och no, Iain was a very happy wee boy.'

Ramona Koval: Here Iain Banks talks about reading science fiction books.

Iain Banks: I was the most promiscuous reader of science fiction. Also I didn't take any notice...I probably got into science fiction properly in very early teens, 13, 14, I used to go down to Gourock on the coast of Clyde on the west coast of Scotland by this time, I used to go down to Gourock Library and I'd just scan the shelves looking for Gollancz, yellow covers with the big splodgey 'SF' thing at the bottom and I'd just read those. I didn't know what books I read or who they were by.

My good chum and fellow science fiction writer Ken MacLeod years ago when we first met back in 1972, 1971, Ken would say, 'Have you read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein?' I said, 'Don't think so, tell me about it.' He says, 'Well, it's one where the computer and the Moon becomes intelligent...' 'Oh yes, yes, I've read that one.' I hadn't bothered to look at the title or who the actual writer was. So I'd just read anything that was science fiction. So I'm probably better read than I think I am in terms of...I was kind of just reading whatever was available. I was just coming in at the time when the British new wave was starting and there were people like John Sladek and Mike Harrison, stuff like that. But I quite love, obviously, people like Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke. I probably slightly prefer...especially Aldiss, those four Brian Aldiss would be my particular favourites. Anything I can get my hands on really.

Ramona Koval: But you chose to go to university and do literature and philosophy and psychology rather than physics or chemistry or 'how does this place work'?

Iain Banks: I didn't get good marks in my math. I have documentary evidence of the fact that I wanted to be a writer from the age of 11. In primary school...they've got these big things called jotters, a drawing jotter, a drawing book, blue cover on it, brownish paper, quite rough, and you drew in it with crayons, and there was tissue paper in between. And one time she said, 'Right, get out your jotters, we're going to draw. Draw what you want to be when you grow up.' And all my pals were drawing astronauts and train drivers and firemen and stuff like that, and I thought about it, discovered the purple crayon tasted best...that's my smashing girlfriend's line, not mine, I have to confess...and I said, 'I'll draw a writer,' I wanted to be a writer. So primary seven apparently is when you're 11 years old. I didn't know how to draw a writer so I drew someone standing on stage, actually standing on stage sort of going...like that.

Ramona Koval: Just like this.

Iain Banks: But up in the top left-hand corner in white crayon it says 'And writer'. So I wanted to be a writer for a long, long time, and I went to university thinking...it does shame me slightly to think of this now, I'm a bit embarrassed about it, but I did think, right, I'm going to be a writer, I should go to university because you should do that because that's what clever people do and I'm definitely clever, so I'm going to university. Well, what should I do? Well, English literature, obviously, find out what the opposition have been up to, get some clues. What else? If you're going to write you have to learn philosophy, you can't just write rubbish, there's got to be some meaning behind it. Philosophy, I'll do that as well. You're going to have to work with characters...psychology, obviously.

Complete bollocks, just nonsense, absolutely ludicrous. It made some sort of sense to do English literature, a bit. But philosophy...I loved philosophy because you could waffle more. I got much better marks in philosophy than I did in English. You had to read the darn book, for God's sake. Did they think I had all day? So it seemed to make sense at the time, but I stayed away from proper science, as it were, because I got really bad marks, especially in maths.

I fluked a really good result in O levels, so I was put into the highest class, and I had no idea what I was doing, so I failed miserably. I ended up with an extra two O levels at the time. I don't know how it works nowadays, they don't even have O levels but back then certainly in Scotland, if you'd done not well enough to get the Higher, as it's called, if you hadn't done quite well enough you got an extra O levels. What sense it made to have...I've got three math O levels, what does that even mean? What's the point? Can I cash them in and get a Higher or an A grade? Never mind.

So yes, from an early age I definitely wanted to do all that, and I always had a proper layperson's love of science and technology. I was an absolutely avid watcher of Tomorrow's World in its heyday.

Ramona Koval: Or New Scientist, Scientific American..?

Iain Banks: Yes, still reading New Scientist, and I just love all the tech and the gizmos. I'm a bit of a sucker, I'm a naturally early adopter. As soon as something comes in the shops, 'I've got to have that', I try really hard not to.

Ramona Koval: What's on your list now?

Iain Banks: Nothing at the moment, but probably the fourth generation iPhone. Every time it comes out I buy it almost immediately, so it means I've always got overlaps of bloody contracts. Cunningly the contracts are 18 months but they bring up a new phone every year, so you can see what they're up to there. But I just don't have the patience to wait for the six months until the old contract runs out before I get the new one. Fascinating, isn't it. Yes, I love gadgets and gizmos. The more buttons a thing's got the better.

Ramona Koval: You talked about philosophy and how it was useless but it's not because a huge bit of this book is a treatise or a meditation on the philosophy of torture.

Iain Banks: Yes, that was an idea that definitely could have been a short story. I thought it up as a...I remember having discussions with people about how...one friend in particular was saying that torture could be justified, and it was this great thought experiment. It's one of the things that you do encounter in philosophy. One of the great things about philosophy is some of the bizarre ideas you come up with to investigate what's right and what's wrong.

I remember one great one, it's about a whole lot of people going into a cave, they've got one stick of dynamite, and the cave starts to fill up with a flood, there's rain and flood and the cave starts to fill up and you're going to die, and there's only one little exit. And stupidly you let the fat person go first and he/she gets stuck. Are you morally justified in sticking the dynamite...wedging the dynamite alongside their enormous roll of gut and blowing them to buggery to all get out? I loved that idea, it's never going to happen but...well, you never know...

The torture thing. The classic example is if someone's put a bomb somewhere and you know that lots of innocent people are going to get killed, surely it's right...you should be allowed to torture them to get the truth out of them. My gut instinct is no, you're not, that's just wrong. And I was trying to get that idea across, and I'd worked it through my head and...what it ends up is that there's a policeman who basically does do that but then he wants to be prosecuted for it, and his point is that torture is absolutely always wrong, but in the same way the fact you can have laws against murder, we have absolute laws against murder but that doesn't stop people from getting murdered.

In the same way, if someone is so convinced that by torturing someone they will be able to save innocent lives then they should damn well do it and suffer the consequences, that's the point. But as soon as the state starts to allow torture, you're instantly in a very, very steep and very greasy sliding slope where it goes from being that very cut-and-dried thing where you're absolutely guaranteed you will save lots of people...again, always never really happens that way, to when you're just torturing people just because they've been at the wrong place at the wrong time or they're the wrong colour or they're the wrong religion or whatever.

And in the end this policeman, his life is destroyed, he ends up deliberately going to prison, but for quite a short time, and because he's convinced he should have been more severely punished he deliberately causes trouble in prison and stays in until he's convinced that he's now served the time he should have served for the crime that he committed, because torture is a crime. So in a sense it's trying to get the best of both worlds, but I think that is the most moral approach to it. I think society should always absolutely condemn torture, you just shouldn't be allowed to do it ever. If it really comes to it, someone will do it, but society, the state, should not...

Ramona Koval: But there's also a practical argument in this book too, that it doesn't actually work.

Iain Banks: Oh no, it doesn't, basically people will tell you anything to stop getting hurt. I would, certainly. 'Yes, there is a God! Now fuck off.'

Ramona Koval: What about this interest that you have in the limited company?

Iain Banks: Yes, it is a bit of a bee in a bonnet thing. When people talk about 'thinking outside the box' and that sort of shite, especially in a commercial context, that nobody ever really does, and when we talk about, say, capitalism and the possible alternatives to it, we always assume that there's just one form of capitalism and this happens to be the one that we've got. It struck me that there might be lots of other different types and some of them might actually be more humane or at least less insane.

I just loved the idea, when I finally understood what a public limited company really means, it's like this thing, this entity that real people put money into it and if it does well they get money out of it. If it does really badly...because it's a limited company, the company is actually a legal entity, it's a person in its own right...no, it's not, but it's supposed to be, legally it is. And so therefore the debts are its debts and the people who put the money into it don't owe the money. And so it did seem to me that probably partnerships are a more moral way of approaching the problem of people getting together to pool their money to make more money or whatever.

But the public limited company is just a gigantic contract really, and basically capitalism...the clue is in the word, it's about capital, having the money in the first place, the rich get richer, that is the point in a very real sense. So a public limited company is just this fabulous contract whereby the rich get richer. And you can fill in the blanks what happens to everybody else. So yes, I think that's kind of interesting. I don't think I'll use it now but I had this idea...stuff about the culture, the science fiction civilisation, what I have created, if it ever did come to Earth or something like Earth, that they would only deal with partnerships, they would never deal with PLCs.

Ramona Koval: Because they're a utopia?

Iain Banks: Yes, and they believe in morality. It's a bit implausible, so that's why I'm not using it. But I just thought it would be a wheeze. I just thought in terms of commercial nous that the invention of the public limited company was a fabulous if highly deceitful idea. Capitalism has worked in the sense that it has produced the goods. It might have been done more morally, it might have been done without the poverty. In the end, before the galactic [unclear] of justice we have done something seriously wrong, if the aliens ever did come down, 'Right, about this thing, you've produced more than enough food to feed everybody on Earth but roughly a billion people are malnourished. What the fuck are you playing at?'

We haven't got a defence, we just don't, especially not since the fall of the wall, not since you stopped having the tension between capitalism and communism, we don't even have that excuse anymore. Capitalism won. So you can't just say, well, we have to keep people poor to give them incentive or something, in case they go commie or something. That's gone, that's disappeared, so it's just us I'm afraid, that's what we're like. We're not necessarily a terribly nice species.

Ramona Koval: The irrepressible Scottish writer Iain Banks in conversation with me at the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival in England. And his latest book is called Transition and it's published by Little Brown.

Publications

Title: Transition

Author: Iain Banks

Publisher: Little Brown