This seems an appropriate place for an Iain Banks quote: " "Well," he says, "if you are going to write what a friend of a friend once called 'Made up space shi

This seems an appropriate place for an Iain Banks quote: " "Well," he says, "if you are going to write what a friend of a friend once called 'Made up space shit', then if it's going to have any ring of truth that means sometimes some of the horrible characters get to live, and for there to be any sense of jeopardy, especially in future novels, the good people have to die. Sometimes." Banks freely admits that he enjoys writing his SF novels more than his "literary" novels, and the Culture novels more than his other SF. The hedonistic, anarchistic, post-scarcity series is "a hoot. It's my train set. I adore the freedom and the size of the canvas," even though writing them "requires a greater degree of concentration. And there's so much baggage with the Culture now that I have to get each new novel aligned with earlier Culture history. I don't have the same leeway to make things up compared with when I started." " From his last(?) interview: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-the-final-interview https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-the...