Iain Banks

In Scotland the vocation of writing carries with it the weighty knowledge of that lineage of authors who have gone before us and produced such an enduring body of work. From Burns and Sir Walter Scott down through Conan Doyle and George MacDonald to Alasdair Gray and George Mackay Brown, literature has been seamlessly interwoven with the aesthetic arts in Scotland. Then there is science fiction.

Writing SF in Scotland is a bit like being a rock guitarist at a Bach festival. No-one’s actually going to throw you out of the auditorium, but no-one will miss an opportunity to deride you in public. The scorn SF attracts is especially grotesque considering the long history of Scottish involvement in all fields of science, technology and philosophy. Iain Banks, however, has managed to neatly sidestep this ritual contempt. He’s shown how it’s possible for a young Scot to write outside what’s regarded as contemporary Scottish literature (with all its class, religious and cultural insularities), to deal with anything from surrealism to SF, and to be both financially and artistically successful at it. The importance of such achievements to aspirant Scot writers should not be underestimated.

Iain’s first novel was The Wasp Factory, published by Macmillan in 1984. Critical reaction swung between severe disapproval and wholehearted acclaim: ‘the lurid literary equivalent of a video nasty,’ ‘soars to the level of mediocrity,’ ‘a truly remarkable novel,’ ‘a Gothic horror story of quite exceptional quality.’

Such a wild divergence in opinion seems to be a further indication of the staleness of the ‘mainstream.’ What is certain is that Iain Banks firmly stamped his presence on the field in a way that transcends the barriers of Scottish/British literature, yet without losing touch with his personal and cultural roots.

An admirable ambition for any writer.

For our American readers, can you give us a basic potted biog of yourself, from whence you came, that sort of thing.
Um... born 1954 in Dunfermline in Fife, and brought up in North Queensferry, also in Fife, till I was nine. Then moved through to Gourock on the west coast of Scotland.

Not Gourock, the hub of the Western Empire!
‘Fraid so, on the Costa del Clyde. Went through high school and the rest of it, went to Stirling University, did English, Philosophy and Psychology. Visited ‘round Europe once, went to the States in ’78, went to Washington DC, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Got various wee daft jobs and finally the supply of wee daft jobs in Gourock ran out so I went down to London in December ’79. Got a job in London as a lawyer’s clerk.

So that’s where the London connection comes in.
Yeah, from ’80 to ’84. Then in ’84 The Wasp Factory was published, I gave up my day job, lived in Faversham in North Kent, half an hour’s drive from Dover, for three or four years, then I moved up to Edinburgh in January last year (1988).

I remember asking you at the World Con in Brighton if it was necessary to work as a writer from London, and you said most certainly not, Scotland’s a far nicer place.
Damn right, yeah. I stand by this.

Talking about misery (laughter), did you have a miserable childhood?
No, I had a very good childhood actually. An only child, you know, the standard writer’s cliché, and I had all the classic symptoms – not quite talking to myself but definitely having my own little world, making up my own stories. I always got on well with my parents, lots of cousins, and I wasn’t bullied at school or anything.

When did you move from east to west again?
My dad worked for the Admiralty and he moved from Rosyth dockyard to Greenock when I was nine, 1963.

That’s the connection, it’s the east-to-west counter-culture shock.
Well, it’s true actually. On the east coast everyone talks like that, they turn their voice up at the end of every phrase. Go to the west coast and it’s “y’awright, Jimmy? Y’ wan’ a drink, aye?” (assorted authentic Glaswegian verbalisations). Mind you, get that across in the phonetics of the interview!

(laughs) This will be an interesting experiment. So, can you point to any literary influences in your childhood?
I remember my very first SF book, it was Kelmo and the Zones of Silence, some children’s series called Kelmo or something.

How old were you then?
About ten or something.

It’s all tying in, you see.
Oh, it does. I remember I used to raid Gourock Library every week for three or four books and I always looked for the yellow Gollancz covers, and I’d read them whatever the hell they were. As long as it said SF on the cover I’d read them. Until it was pointed out to me that these books were all written by different authors. I didn’t know I’d read virtually everything Robert Heinlein had done, up to a certain point. I didn’t realise I’d read Magic Inc and loads of Heinlein novels. I just saw ‘SF’ and took it.

 The first SF novel I read was Welcome to Mars by James Blish, after which I rapidly went downhill when I discovered EE ‘Doc’ Smith I never got to that stage. I remember at one point one of my friends was into Superman comics, and I just couldn’t take them seriously. I read Heinlein and Clarke and when I got to EE ‘Doc’ Smith it was too late, I’d decided this was crap, I just didn’t want to know. Perhaps I was already too old by that time. The other thing was I actually remember I read Lord of the Rings before it got famous. No-one else had heard of it...

These three great thick volumes sitting in the school library...
That’s it, the grey ones with the Eye of Sauron...

... and the dust on top of the pages.
I was fourteen, that was 1969, and I remember I got the first two volumes from Gourock library, then went away on holiday to Skye with my parents. It rained all the time, of course. When I got back, Lord of the Rings was suddenly incredibly famous and I never did get hold of the third volume. I had to buy the Unwin paperback and read the whole thing again.

Was it one of your formative influences?
I think it was, actually - put me off trilogies for life (laughs). Well, that’s not fair, it’s everybody else’s trilogies since. Lord of the Rings was great. I can go back now and see the writing’s a bit thin, characterisation and the rest, but I loved it at the time.

How old were you when you began to write?
Between 14 and 16, I decided I wanted to write and I tried to write my first novel when I was 14, and it took up three whole school jotters. Then I did a word count and found it was about 10,000 words long – oh, it’s not a novel, it’s a short story! I actually wrote my first novel when I was 16. At the time I was very much under the influence of Alistair Maclean, so it was a spy story, basically. It had vast amounts of sex and violence, neither one I’d had any experience of whatsoever. And to this day, thankfully, still not violence.

This is one of the 5 pre-The Wasp Factory novels?
Yes, the very first, written in longhand in an Admiralty logbook my dad brought home. 140,000 words long, about two average novels. Terrible, but it meant a lot to me at the time.

Some of those 5 novels were SF?
Yeah, the one after that was sort of SF. At that time I was under the influence of Joseph Heller, Catch 22. It was actually set in the near future and what happened was towards the end of the century there’s a Sino-Soviet border war that hasn’t gone nuclear. And basically the Chinese win and take over Mongolia. But to help them win, they brought in America. The US hasn’t had any training grounds, proving grounds for weaponry since Vietnam. So they help the Chinese although they don’t want any part of the winnings – trouble is, China doesn’t want Mongolia either. So this giant military-industrial combine says they’ll take over all of Mongolia and it’s to become Mongoliana. So the story takes place in the three weeks up to this happening. It’s full of terrible, terrible puns and silly character names like Gropius Luckfoot, Dogghart Jammaharry and Dahomey Brezhnev who is the central character, the hero. Terrible novel. That one worked out at about 400,000 words. It just got bigger as it went along. It’s the only novel I’ve ever started without knowing the ending, and since then I’ve learned my lesson. I always have a plan. I thought I’d let that one just grow organically, but it sort of mushroomed all over the place. Every 100,000 words or so I’d get depressed and start thinking I’ve got to try and end this bastard somehow. So I’d get the next 5,000 words on and forget the plan and go off in another direction entirely. Eventually I managed to scrape it all together and tie up loose ends, cut them off, but it was a long bastard.

How long did that take you?
About nine months, actually. That was novel number two, and the next three were all SF. And the third of those was The Player of Games. Just the first draft, of course, written in ’79, just before The Wasp Factory, and I went back to it last year.

I see, so what were the other two SF novels?
The other two, I’m afraid to say, are with any luck going to be unleashed on the public, next year and 1992. The stories are okay, the writing’s terrible, all purple prose and too much description. So providing I can convince the publisher that they’re good, I’m going to rewrite them.

How ruthless are you with regard to purple prose?
Very much indeed. I try to take it all out. You learn the lesson eventually. The trick is to leave a lot to the imagination of the reader and to take out as much as you can. To make the point and stop. It’s like a ski jump, you go only so far and the rest of the arc is described by the reader’s imagination. Don’t tell everything or else they stop thinking about it when they close the book. The trick is to make the whole book a ski jump – oh no! We’re talking Eddie Edwards! Oh no! The Eagle has fallen...

How did you feel about the rejection of those early novels?
At the time, terrible. But the thing is, when you’re that optimistic you think ‘well, they’ve made a mistake, they’ll be sorry later on, and meanwhile I’ve got a new idea that’s even better than those ones, and the next one’s going to be really brilliant and it’ll really knock them dead.’

You were always filled with enthusiasm and optimism?
You’ve got to have that.

Based more on joy than obsession?
Oh, I think equal amounts of both, probably. Not so much obsession since I enjoy writing. And I used to think, suppose that the heavens opened, the clouds parted, and this big hand comes down and a voice says, “BANKSIE! READ THIS!” And it’s a big stone tablet that says ‘Banksie, you will never, ever, ever publish a work of fiction of any sort in your entire life during the future course of the universe!’. The ultimate rejection slip, a rejection slip from the Universe, from god! And I thought no, I’ll still write. I might not write as often, but I’d still do it because I enjoy writing. And I enjoy giving it round to my friends. So even if I didn’t get published, I’d still do it. I enjoy getting my thoughts down on the page.

I asked that because I felt that parts of The Wasp Factory and Walking on Glass almost seemed a commentary on elements of The Player of Games, for example.
I think I know what you mean, but be a bit more specific.

Well, there’s the Castle Doors (or Bequest) in Walking on Glass, and there’s Castle Klaff in The Player of Games. I was wondering if there were one and the same for you.
It’s not the same castle, no, but I did eventually work out to my own satisfaction the idea of the castle – the house in The Wasp Factory counts in this also. The castle, in a way, represents the individual writ large. There’s the central keep which is your inner core, if you like, and the curtain walls, external defences, as the areas of defence of the human being, used to let the world in at certain areas and in certain restricted ways, and to keep the rest out. While the central core is always there, fortress-like behind defences. Have you read a book by a guy called Irving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life?

No, I haven’t.
It was a set book for psychology courses. It’s about the way we use more or less assumed identities, taken from films, TV, books, people around us, to construct defences to keep the world back.

Persona and masks.
That’s exactly the idea. So any time a castle appears in any book, certainly in mine, in a way it stands for the individual. Joined with the landscape yet apart from it. Like ‘no man is an island’, the idea of the island as one person. That’s why the island comes into The Wasp Factory because Frank is almost literally cut off – little joke there – from the rest of society, literally insular in his perceptions. But in The Wasp Factory it’s not really an island, at low tide it’s not an island anymore.

I hadn’t thought of that before, even having read all your books. I had the feeling of a couple of general themes running through them anyway. One is games, from the personal right up to the macrosocial. In The Wasp Factory there are Frank’s militaristic games, the Wars against the local wildlife and a framework of incantatory ritual with which he surrounds himself. And Frank revealed as the victim of his father’s pseudo-scientific game. The ending totally boggled me. I read it for the first time quite recently with its wild critical reaction in mind, and I was wondering ‘what is going to enter my mind from this work?’
It’s not that terrible, is it?

Well, I read it from my SF/Horror background, thinking, ‘this is really good’.
That’s one of the great things about going to SF conventions because horror seems partly subsumed by SF. I’ve had some people come up to me and say ‘I don’t read SF but I really like horror – I read The Wasp Factory , s’ok, s’quite well written, but I kept waiting for the really nasty bits!’ to which I reply, “thank you very much, friend!”

The sex change concept also appears in The Player of Games.
Yes, it’s built into the Culture. That’s the reason the Culture is the utopia it is, you can’t have a sexist society in which you can change sex that easily.

Yes. Still with regard to games I had that feeling about Walking on Glass where Slater and Sarah are playing a sexual game with Graham, and Steven Grout’s life is the game of the sacrificed pawn/warrior in an imagined war. Whereas for Quiss and Ajayi, the game is out on centre stage. So for the first two their lives are a game, and in the third the game is their lives.
The reason games are attractive in that way is because they’re ready-made symbols, the whole idea of the game is an automatic symbol of life, because all games are in a way small attributes of life, small sections that people try to codify and make into a game. It’s also a mental exercise, we exercise our brains with games because we can’t exercise them any more by hunting for animals. So the game is a ready-made symbol for our attempts to understand life. Games are structured in the same way that novels are structured, or can be.

Like a self-contained universe.
Exactly. It’s a self-contained universe, something that is set out in front of you. A game is like a novel – it’s a set of rules and symbols and patterns, and in certain novels you have to work it out and I like to have that idea in novels.

The idea that you’re playing a game with the reader as well.
Yeah, exactly, why the hell not? It engages your attention, your imagination. If you sat down and told everything... which goes back to what I said earlier, leave it to the imagination then the novel lives after you’ve closed the book. To simply tell a story, tell everything, all shown, every card on the table, not left to chance in a sense, then it’s a bit boring, actually. You could do so much more, why not make it live beyond the last page?   Make the characters live, make the plot live, the ideas live. And games imply that as well, games imply a continuation of the play.

There’s also the game of Damage in Consider Phlebas. And in The Player of Games, where the game is the society, there’s also the game of deception and blackmail that Contact plays on Gurgeh. How does your fascination with games relate to whatever moral viewpoint you have?
Well, morality is involved in games we play with one another. The morality of games is the rules. Games have a very definite and set morality, you play according to the rules or you don’t play at all. The difference with the games that we play as human beings is that the rules are always changing. You can make up your own rules to a certain extent, and there’s a general set of rules but they leave a lot open to how you play the game yourself. It’s trying to make the connection between the games that societies play on each other and on the individuals within those societies and the games played on the basic interpersonal level. Now, I don’t know the answer to all that, I do not know why everything is the way it is. I’m still trying to work towards that, but certainly in the books I try to use games as symbols of the way we react to one another and to society. There’s a conscious effort to make sense of all that, but there’s no conscious answer because it’s too difficult for any one individual. You can put down the evidence, saying ‘this is the way I see it.’ But in fiction the trick is to give people a choice of potential answers so they can disagree with what you’re saying, or what you think you’re saying.

Morality was what I thought of as being the other main theme, which was most obvious in The Player of Games where, three-quarters of the way through, the drone Flere-Imsaho takes Gurgeh down into the bowels of the Azadian city, and takes him through all that. Then later shows him the restricted TV channels, as if revealing the poison and guilt of the Game of Azad. I think you say in the book that Azad is a game that recognises no innocence.
It’s originally the starship, Limiting Factor, who says that, then the drone says ‘Yes, it does recognise innocence, but you see what it does with it.’ The problem with the (Azad) society is that it can’t stand innocence, it sees innocence and it feels guilty. It can’t bear the idea that something exists outside its morality so it has to despoil it, it has to make it suffer. So Azad does recognise innocence, and in that sense the drone is almost setting Gurgeh up in terms of what he’s going to think about; the society, the system. And the drone is saying that the entire society is about power, and that’s why you’ve got this overbearing sense of sexuality in the Azadian Empire, they’re obsessed with sex, as we are. It’s there, it informs the whole society, it’s about power, domination, sexuality.  The Culture had got beyond this stage, of course.

Did your ideas about that come from living in London, in the south?
Well, no, because the first draft was written in ’79. It was just general realisation. The only thing that came from London was the entire second half of Consider Phlebas where Horza’s down in the underground tunnel system. I’ve stood on the platforms of tube stations and heard the rails sing and felt the draught of air as the train approaches.

Yeah, the description of the dust just lifting off the platform.
And what came from that was a sense of being trapped, contained. I was trying to imagine the King’s Cross disaster and thought, my god, what a vision of hell. For Consider Phlebas, I was thinking that one of the ways you can set up tension is when the reader knows something the central character doesn’t, and when it’s a group of people who don’t know what’s going to happen. Hence the idea of the inevitability of a tube train – it must go down that tunnel and arrive at that place, it’s got to go there. And I thought, what a wonderful way of setting up a disaster waiting to happen. So it was the mechanics of plotting to get that to happen, so the reader would be on the edge of their seat, thinking – ohmigod, get the fuck off that train, you stupid bastards! – meanwhile the other train is going mmyyeeEOOW!

The reason I asked about the London connection is that, although there’s no overtly political stance in your novels, I was wondering if you had an overtly political opinion?
Fucking right, I hate Thatcher and detest the Tories. The Tories are in fact the hyena party, if you’ve ever noticed the behaviour of hyenas; they tend to go for the young and the weak, the sick and the old, which the Tories seem to do as well.

Yes, I was wondering about that especially with regard to the social consequences of the game of Azad in The Player of Games.
Well, the idea is that Azad is actually their life, it genuinely is a reflection of the life of the Empire. Because life in the Empire is beastly, and it is a beastly game. You’re expected to win, and to win you defeat somebody else, not try and co-operate with them. In a way Gurgeh’s trying to do that, in certain bits. Towards the very last few games he has the game taped in such a way that he can actually set the game up not as a conflict but as a means of co-operation, a beautiful song. And he actually lets the Empire take over the Culture in the game; he lets the Emperor take him over, but again he knows that his values will take over the Empire. It’s like the invading army and Rome – it might invade and apparently win but it becomes the thing it originally invaded. In terms of the game of Azad, the Culture’s ethos is better than the Empire’s, therefore the Empire appears to win but will get taken over. That’s why the Emperor just goes crazy.

What was your basic attitude towards science fiction before you published?
I got into it when it was interesting, when it was New Wave. And I didn’t encounter New Worlds till it was a quarterly paperback, and I saw it on sale in Gourock Station, on a revolving stand. And I thought ‘Science Fiction – I’m into that!’. So I bought it and after that it was ‘wow, yeah, New Wave, yo, yo, here we go.’ I think that then science fiction was healthy. But I sort of agree with the American perception of British SF, that’s it’s very parochial, it’s very downbeat...

The Home Counties SF syndrome.
Yeah, a bit. There’s too much of that and I’m afraid it tends to get too much attention. It seems very difficult for British science fiction writers, and especially English science fiction writers, to write on the broader canvas, to get stuff out on a big screen. That’s one of the things I was trying to get away from.

You read the Greg Benford article in SF Eye 4?
Yes, and there’s quite a bit of nonsense in that, I thought, but in other places I thought, yeah, fair enough. It’s like what Charles Platt wrote in Interzone (an article on British SF called ’Destination: Gloom’), which again is a terribly simplistic point of view, it’s like imagining all Americans wear Stetsons and ten-gallon boots (laughs, speaks to microphone) it’s a joke! It’s ok, I don’t really... oh forget it, doesn’t matter. But it’s cliché. But there was a grain of truth, definitely, and that’s one thing I was trying to get away from in Consider Phlebas, get away from that whole British-English science fiction cliché. It’s very small, it’s like little country lanes instead of fucking great state-wide freeways.

You think you’re doing your bit to push the envelope of British science fiction?
Yeah, I guess. With Consider Phlebas you shouldn’t be able to pin it down. It looks like a very depressive American book or a very wide-screen British book, but it should simply be itself. There’s a very dynamic central character – despite being rescued from the sewer-cell instead of fighting his way out – a very dynamic hero, and a very tragic one because he dies at the end.  That’s not supposed to happen, dammit, supposed to be the first part of a trilogy! Partly Consider Phlebas is putting two fingers to American SF – one finger up at trilogies, for a start, and the other is when you meet a dynamic central character, he’s therefore the good guy. But Horza isn’t the good guy because the Culture is the side of good. I was actually at a presentation for Futura Books when they first did The Wasp Factory in UK paperback. And this guy got up to address booksellers and bookdealers about one of the Omen books, and with a little smile on his face he said, ‘this is the fifth book of the trilogy’ so everyone laughs. But he was making the point that it’s an ongoing thing until people stop buying it, a publishing/marketing exercise where not the publisher, not the bookseller, not even the writer believes in it; it’s a commodity, a fucking product. And that’s one word I really object to in publishing – don’t call my fucking book ‘product’ you bastards, you fucking dare. I sweated blood over it and it’s not ‘product.’ So Consider Phlebas is not about deconstruction or anything as complicated and arty-farty as that. It’s just trying to react against what’s gone before, which is why although it’s a wide-screen book, there’s no princesses involved. No pneumatic voluptuous heroines, no derring-do heroes who win through. Horza dies at the end. Yalson, the female mercenary, who I hope is believable and makes sense, is quite admirable in a lot of ways. And it’s basically written from the grunt’s point of view. I couldn’t have written Consider Phlebas without books like Michael Herr’s Dispatches, or a wonderful book called Chickenhawk, about helicopter pilots in Vietnam. This is a poor daft gang of mercenaries who happen to get involved in a nasty bit of the war.

It’s the sense of their ineptness.
Well, that’s the way war is, as a rule, mistakes. Now I loved the first half of Dune, but what annoyed me was that everyone knew what everyone else was going to do, like a chess game. And things aren’t like that, even if we eventually have conscious machine intelligences, it’ll always be a game of luck, and Dune was too set up...

Both sides thought too reasonably.
Exactly. No-one ever made a mistake or a fuck-up, and war is fuck-ups. Always has been, always will be. But Dune’s so tight, its reality is so vacuum-packed. Great book, I really loved it, hated the last line. I think it has the worst last line of virtually any book in Christendom – ‘history will call us wives.’ Is that it? Frank, what are you doing to us here?

Consider Phlebas was the first SF novel you published after the first three, wasn’t it? How was it received by those in the London Lit Establishment? How did they react?
Well, they didn’t because they weren’t sent it. Macmillan knew this was an SF book and initially it was to go to a different publisher. So I said I don’t mind coming up with a pseudonym, so it wouldn’t confuse. So my editor said, give me a pseudonym and my first was John B Macallan and my editor said why? Well, it’s my two favourite whiskies – Johnny Walker Black Label, my favourite blend, and Macallan is my favourite malt whisky. Nowadays it’d have to be John B Laphroaig-Macallan. But he said, it doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, and I said, okay, how about Iain M Banks? It was to have been on The Wasp Factory but I got a wee bit of grief from my family because my middle name is Menzies (pronounced Ming-iss). So I thought for the science fiction we’ll put back the M to distinguish it from non-SF. And I said that it had to say ‘a science fiction novel’ on the cover along with a great big space ship so no-one’s got any excuse for thinking ‘ah, it’s another Iain Banks novel in the same vein as The Wasp Factory, Walking on Glass and The Bridge... fuck, it’s a science fiction novel. Not going to read that.’ That’s the idea, so there’s no ambiguity; I didn’t want it bought under false pretences, I wanted them to know what they’re getting.

So you don’t feel restricted by science fiction?
No, I don’t think you can be in the end, it’s a false thing to say you’re restricted by the genre or by the way it’s perceived in the rest of the literary world. That’s not your fault. Constrictions you can always move out of, get out of. I mean, I’m very lucky, I’m sort of riding on the backs of people like Brian Aldiss and Ballard. They’ve done all the groundwork in terms of making it easier for people to cross between science fiction and other fiction.

Similar to what Gibson’s done in the States.
Yeah, and Mike Moorcock, as well, who I think is a great writer.

How do you feel about the Literary Establishment’s contempt for SF? It’s my impression that it’s become even more extreme in the last year or two.
Well, I don’t think much about the Literary Establishment anyway, I don’t like it very much, I don’t want to be part of it. To me, the ultimate genre novel, in terms of limitation of connotations and meanings, is what they regard as the Booker Prize winner; the novel of character and it’s always set in Hampstead fucking Heath...

Father-Daughter relationships...
Yes, and the central character is usually a writer! Oh fuck off, who needs that? That to me is a pure tiny little genre, and they just happen to have control of the Lit Establishment, those wankers writing about themselves. I don’t need that and I don’t think any reader of mind needs it, dammit.

Espedair Street, which came out in ’87, was non-SF – how close to life was your research on that?  From my experience, the rock and roll atmosphere was pretty authentic.
Well, the only research I did rests on those shelves (points). I bought the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, and the one on Hit Albums, and the book of You’ll Never Be Sixteen Again, the BBC programme. The rest was just all done from what seemed reasonable to me, from the layperson’s knowledge of rock music and pop.

The examples of craziness were just spot on.
Great, that’ll do!

What’s bizarre was that I read most of the book while listening to the Marillion albums which fitted perfectly for me.
Well, funny you should say that. While constructing the character of Danny Weir (also known as Weird), I was thinking mostly of Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac, cos he’s big and dark-haired and not incredibly handsome. And I was thinking of Fish (ex-lead vocalist with Marillion). Neil Gaiman knows Fish and he phoned me and said ‘hey, there’s a guy I know moving back up to Edinburgh from London. If he rings up, d’you want to go out for a pint?,’ ‘yeah, of course, any friend of yours, Neil,’ ‘ok, his name’s Fish,’ ‘oh yeah, just like the guy from Marillion?,’ ‘no, he is the guy from Marillion,’ ‘oh, fuck... ’ So this was about three weeks ago and I rang Fish about two weeks ago and he said he was doing a lot of demo stuff and he’d ring me at the start of February.

 Might get a mention in the sleeve notes.
Probably hit me. But Danny Weir wasn’t really based on anyone. Frozen Gold was a cross between Led Zeppelin and Abba. Can you imagine that? I can’t! The whole thing about the Eastern Bloc dumper trucks and tractors and beer is that it actually happened to Abba. They used to sell a lot of albums behind the Iron Curtain, used to do concerts, but you’re not allowed to take money out of there. So what they did was use the cash in their Eastern Bloc accounts to buy things like dumper trucks, tractors, JCB equivalents and booze. Then take them out of the country and sell them outside. What happened to Abba was that the company they set up to sell the stuff went bankrupt, it actually lost money. Don’t know what happened, someone siphoning off funds or something. So I had the same thing happen to Frozen Gold, except Weird gets to keep it all, in a church he’s bought. Stacks of Stolichnaya and dumper trucks.

Espedair Street is set largely in Glasgow and Scotland. What about your relationship to Scottish writing? Do you think you have one, or would you like to have one?
Shit, a hard question, oh fuck...

I mean, there’s most certainly a Scottish Literary Establishment too.
Yeah, but I don’t like it either. I hate the London Lit scene and I hate the Scottish one too. Who needs it? I mean... okay, I speak as a Labour voter who’s thought very, very seriously indeed about voting SNP (Scottish National Party) in the next election. Because I’m inclined to think ‘England, if you want that bastard woman you can fucking have her, we don’t anymore.’ Yeah, being Scottish means something different from being British these days. But the way I was brought up in terms of what I read was more American SF and world literature, what was available. I read a lot of English SF too, you can’t cut yourself off from that. But you end up writing about what you know and I know Scotland a bit better than I know England. That’s why The Bridge is probably the most important of all the books; it’s based in Scotland and is very much about Scotland, growing up here in the 60s, 70s and 80s. But I don’t see myself as a Scottish writer in the sense of being very much involved in the literary scene.

You don’t get invites to literary do’s and parties?
Thankfully, no.

Was The Bridge conceived as a whole, with it all springing from the inspiration of the car accident, or was it made up as you went along?
Very much conceived as a whole, though as a framework, with spaces lying around for a lot of other ideas to fit into, some of which I’d had lying around for a while. The inspiration came from talking, quite casually, to my editor about dreams, and having much the same conversation with my girlfriend as well, and having just read a book about the construction and history of the Forth Bridge. The bridge always meant a lot to me because I almost literally grew up in its shadow; my bedroom window looked out onto it, and living in this wee village, North Queensferry, gave you, even as a little kid, a strange sense of pride, to have this massive great construction towering over the river; you knew it was world-famous, both for its simple presence – it’s beauty, even – and for this thing about always painting it. Anyway, I just woke up one morning with the idea of setting a book about, or at least, heavily featuring, dreams, set in a giant, magnified, chaotic version of the Forth Bridge. The rest fell into place with ridiculous ease. I was a day or two into the planning of it, doing what I always do, going through all these old notebooks and diaries looking for ideas that might work in whatever new thing it is I’m working on at the moment, and I was doodling on the top of this sheet of paper; three flattened hexagons with two little linking sections between them, which is the shape of the bridge, and I’d been wondering how to set the book out; chapters or what, and suddenly I realised the bridge itself had a perfect shape; three sections, the little linking bridges-within-bridges, the four feet on the stone caissons... everything; it was all there; a literal framework. I suppose a really smart writer would have thought that up immediately but it took me a few days, like I say. After that it was all easy; the framework didn’t get in the way of the writing once; on the contrary, it always seemed to have a place for whatever section or sequence I wanted to use.

Do you consider the book to be a reworking of the techniques of Walking on Glass? Was that a warm-up for The Bridge?
I guess it worked out that way but there was no deliberate plan for that to happen. There is what looks like a smooth – if exponential – progression of structural complexity, but it came about partly by accident. Certainly I wanted to tackle something more challenging than The Wasp Factory for the second book, but I’d no such ambitions about superseding that as well with the third book; it just worked out that way.

Do you have any intention of trying another one of these detailed surrealist novels again?
Yes. I wanted to get back to basics after The Bridge; I felt if I tried to better or even match it in terms of complexity with the next book, I’d be in serious danger of self-parody. So I dropped back down the ratchet to something that was an easy read again with Espedair Street. Of course Consider Phlebas came out in between, which was another nice kind of holiday from all this incredibly intricate, detailed stuff, and then The Player of Games was a more literary SF novel, and now the next book Canal Dreams, which is quite short and simple in a way, but there’s a lot going on under the surface, and... I think after this year’s book, I’ll be ready to take another crack at something comparable to The Bridge. It’s the one I’m proudest of, and for a year or two there I thought I might never write anything better, but I re-read the latest British paperback edition recently, and there’s room for improvement. If I write it next year, that’ll be five years between the two so I hope I would have improved over that time. I have this vague feeling it’ll be a longer book than The Bridge, too.

What are your feelings about The Bridge, emotionally?
Pride, like I say. If all the books are a family, it’s the one that became a university professor (The Wasp Factory became a punk, but then got rich and famous in a rock band). Also, it’s kind of a weird sort of alternate world autobiography; what I imagine I might have been like if I’d been born five years earlier and had decided to get a proper job, just writing in my spare time. Certainly the guy’s taste in cars and music is very close to mine. A lot’s different, of course; he is older, he’s born in the west and moves east, not the other way round, and he goes to Edinburgh, not Stirling, university – which, especially at the times concerned, is a bit like going to Berkeley rather than... I don’t know; Kansas City, if it has a university. The point is that going to Edinburgh in ’67 was light years different from going to Stirling in ’72, which is what I did. But he’s like me, I suppose, despite all the surface differences, and despite the fact there’s virtually nothing directly autobiographical in the book. So I’m quite close to it, but in the end it’s just a story.

You’ve done a book for Mark Zeising...
It’s a novella, about 35,000 words, called The State of the Art. It’s a Culture story, like the SF novels, only this one’s set in 1977, when a Culture starship discovers Earth. It’s a sort of love story – this guy falls in love with the planet – and it’s an opportunity to say a few things about us, and the Culture. It’s quite funny – well, I find it funny – in places, though it gets more serious towards the end. The machines have most of the good lines, as usual.

A final question to wrap up with...
A final question; which pub are we going to?

(laughs) Well, the penultimate question. What do you have upcoming, forthcoming?
Well, Michael, you see this manuscript that your wonderful microphone-person is sitting upon, that is the next book. It’s called Canal Dreams, it’s not SF but it is set in the year 2000. It’s set in Panama where’s there’s a Nicaraguan-type situation, and the Contras are involved.

Sort of political extrapolation. What else are you working on at the moment?
A graphic story – not long enough to be a novel – with SMS, the artist, a short story for The Observer (a Sunday paper in Britain), and maybe a play and/or some television work, though the next book – another Culture novel – will have to take precedence. This next Culture book will be a bit more adventurous, in structural terms; with any luck it’ll provide a sort of dry run for the biggie to follow it. If I’ve any spare time – well, actually, most of my time is spare, but I mean if I have any spare application... dedication... bills to pay – then I might write this film script I’ve been thinking about for about the past eight years. But, probably, I won’t.