Why sci-fi novelist Iain M. Banks was an ‘astounding’ world-builder

As a author of house operas set in international universes, I’ve at all times written exhaustive world-building paperwork, the whole lot from character graphs to hyper-detailed plot outlines to encyclopaedic entries on the cultures I’m creating. That is a necessary a part of my course of, and I’ve studied a few of the greatest: the late Iain M. Banks, who died in 2013, was an astounding world-builder.

Greatest identified for his Tradition sequence, Banks described the Tradition civilisation as a “secular heaven”. Its human/machine/AI inhabitants has achieved a post-scarcity utopia the place benevolent AIs (referred to as Minds) handle the well being and upkeep of society. Not like different science fiction that imagines AI overlords stamping out or enslaving humanity (assume The Matrix), within the Tradition, people and machines share equal rights and have significant, trusting relationships. Sure, on the finish of the day, the machines name the photographs, however they often name them proper, and their human residents don’t expertise oppression.

In fact, it’s not at all times that easy. In Banks’s The Participant of Video games (1988), the protagonist Gurgeh is bored together with his good Tradition life; when he visits the comparatively shifty Azad Empire, its individuals are hostile towards the Tradition’s supposed utopia. They’ve good purpose. The Tradition takes an ethnographic and condescending view of different civilisations. It debates whether or not to go away them alone or take them over. Within the novella The State of the Artwork, members of the Contact service acknowledge that absorbing Earth into the Tradition would kill billions, however that’s acceptable if it creates one thing higher in the long term. This stress between the Tradition as paradise and supremacist empire is a widely known theme, and Banks finds fascinating methods to discover it. His world-building is one in every of them.

As a author obsessive about the craft of world-building, I’ve not too long ago devoured Banks’s posthumously printed The Tradition: The Drawings. The ebook reprints a big assortment of Banks’s hand drawings and notes.

Therein, we see him answering questions which can be additionally necessary to my very own writing: what language do the characters communicate and why? What are the naming conventions of individuals and locations? How does know-how influence not simply broad societal constructions, however the nitty-gritty of each day life? In Banks’s drawings, he solutions these questions with tough sketches of ships, intricate diagrams of weapons, rows and rows of numerical calculations, and maps labelled right down to the smallest nook. These paperwork level each to the idyllic nature of the Tradition and its militaristic elements. By way of these particulars, we see the complexity of Banks’s writing course of and the way he achieved his fully-developed universe and civilisation.

I’m engaged on a novel now that additionally options a complicated alien civilisation. I hold returning to Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, whose benevolent aliens deny people company in their very own lives. I additionally hold desirous about Jacques Sternberg’s quick story “So Far From House”, the place an alien visiting Earth walks round in fixed disgust with humanity. After which there’s Banks, whose work serves as a guidebook for the way I’d make my world really feel actual, lived in, accessible if not acquainted. I don’t have Banks’s drawing expertise, however I establish together with his have to visualise his society, to map the blueprints of the ship the place all people is hanging out, or chart a star map of serious locales.

That is the scrumptious pleasure for me of science fiction. The imagined world.

However there are different, subtler ways in which Banks builds his worlds. My entry into Banks was the aforementioned The State of the Artwork, whose protagonists are alien guests to Earth. They’re a pleasing group who method Earth’s historical past and tradition with curiosity, if not horror over its atrocities. However whereas a lot of the story has a lighthearted tone, Banks creates sinister moments that present us the intrinsic issues within the Tradition.

As an illustration, there’s a scene late within the novella, a cocktail party, the place the character Li eccentrically argues for destroying Earth. His companions heckle him, however with out the despair they’ve proven towards earthly atrocities just like the “Last Answer”. The scene culminates with Li presenting his friends a dish of lab-grown human cells, that’s to say, cooked human flesh. “If they may see us now!” one character exclaims gleefully. “Cannibals from outer house!”

This second of world-building fascinates me.

Consuming vat-grown human steaks is clearly on a special scale to the Holocaust, however each reveal a carelessness towards human life, the laughter-tinged indifference of people to these they take into account subhuman. It provides us a glimpse into the Tradition that Banks’s drawings of weapons and tremendous ships might have hinted at, however don’t essentially seize on an emotional stage. In different phrases, world-building in Banks’s novels is about greater than geography, linguistics and know-how. It’s about tone. The unsettling admixture of lightness and dread that present him for a grasp of his craft.

Anybody new to Banks ought to have a look at his drawings and technical descriptions. They supply wealthy perception into the method and mechanics of making a brand new world. I’d additionally urge you to concentrate to the moments of contradiction and uncertainty threaded by character dialogue and self-reflection, areas through which Banks significantly excels. Watch his tone. Watch his humour. For me, that’s the place the sharpest classes are.

Bethany Jacobs is the writer of the Philip Ok. Dick award-winning novel These Burning Stars (Orbit). Iain M. Banks’s Tradition novel The Participant of Video games (Orbit) is the December 2025 learn for the New Scientist Ebook Membership. Signal as much as learn together with us right here.