In article <slrnf5mjgf.469.fmackay@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
fmackay <fmackayatclaradotcodotyookay> wrote:
> Mostly an interview with Iain Banks, but Iain M Banks tells the Guardian
> a bit about his next sf novel (eta Feb '08):
>
<http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/sciencefiction/story/0,,2087924,
0.html>
"A man of culture", by Stuart Jeffries
"[Recently] he sold his car collection. "I was a complete petrolhead,
but I realised it had to stop." He had spent more than £150,000 on cars,
and owned a bottle green 3.2-litre ****sche Boxter, a burgundy ****sche
911 Turbo, a 3.8-litre Jaguar Mk II, a 5-litre black BMW 7 series, a
souped-up Land Rover Defender. He replaced the fleet with a Lexus RX
400h. "It's a hybrid, but it's ridiculously huge, a real Chelsea
tractor. I may have to downsize even more. But as soon as there are
battery-powered s****ts cars, I'm going to buy one..."
Chelsea tractor??
..
..
..
"You'll have to leave," says a functionary. "You're not the real people."
"We are real people," retorts Banks.
Good point. And anyway, doesn't this woman realise that Banks was voted
fifth greatest writer ever after Shakespeare, Austen, Orwell and Dickens
in a BBC online poll..."
..
..
..
Banks tells me that he has spent the past three months writing another
Culture novel. It will be called Matter and is to be published next
February. "It's a real shelf-breaker," he says enthusiastically. "It's
204,000 words long and the last 4,000 consist of appendices and
glossaries. It's so complicated that even in its complexity it's
complex. I'm not sure the publishers will go for the appendices, but
readers will need them. It's filled with neologisms and characters who
disappear for 150 pages and come back, with lots of flashbacks and
-forwards. And the story involves different civilisations at different
stages of technological evolution. There's even one group who have
disappeared up their own fundaments into non-matter-based societies."
Heh. Look forward to it!
Happy reading--
Pete Tillman
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