St Albans Festival, 19:30 Wednesday 16 June, 2010

[daveh]

Iain Banks is appearing at the St Albans Festival.

Location: Verulamium Museum
Tickets: £5
Details: http://www.stalbansfestival.com/literature-a-spoken-word/icalrepeat.detail/2010/06/16/219/40/iain-banks-transition

[daveh]

Finally managed to get a ticket. You have to get them from the local Waterstone's but can reserve them via 01727 834966.

[daveh]

Quick report - probably more in the next Banksoniain. Split by paragraph as there seems to be a 10,000 character posting limit!

Iain was on good form. As it was a paperback launch event he didn't read from either Transition or Surface Detail but talked about himself and his writing for a bit and then took questions, threatening to go into self-questioning mode if the audience could not come up with any. In the event the questions when he asked for them came in abundance and were pretty good quality.

[daveh]

Iain talked about his background saying he came from a working class family with pretensions, but in a good way. A further detail about his mother's career which is usually listed as professional ice-skater - she was a chorus line performer in a travelling ice show. His mother had demanded they get a television as his father was away with work, so they were the first family on their street with one in 1953 before he born. He said his parents made him feel special and loved which is a great start in life but added this meant he had a security problem rather than an insecurity one and would therefore never be a great artist as he hadn't suffered enough. He regards himself as an entertainer. The most traumatic thing that happened to him was moved from the east of Scotland to the west when he was nine, and as they sometime went to visit friends as it was only a 90 minute drive (even before the motorway) it was not much of a trauma. The death of his cousin Bill in the Derbyshire sinking in 1980 was the next trauma. He went on about "great art" often being cheap self psycho analysis, and so sometimes worried that what he did was just bollocks, as he writes what he wants to read which is where the twiddly bits and big explosions come from.

[daveh]

He then took questions. Asked about why his mainstream was so difficult to classify, and if he reinvented his style on purpose he said that is was showing off, pure male preening. He could write to a formula as those sell very well but he does not want to. Even with The Culture it is the furniture that is the same and hardly ever the characters. Recent authors he admires are people like Alan Warner and David Mitchell (for Cloud Atlas). He is secretly proud of A Song of Stone despite the lack of regard others have for it. Asked whether he had a preoccupation with things in the air; kites, towers, airships etc., he said he thought not, but liked his landscapes to be 3 dimensional and this was a way of doing that. When on the train from Edinburgh and about an hour out of London he gets bored by the flatness, as a Scotsman he demands mountains. Asked about unpublished works ever making an appearance he said not whilst he was alive, maybe a limited edition after he was dead, and wouldn't be around for the reaction.

[daveh]

When I was getting my Transition paperback signed I asked if he had any more thoughts about the chapbook he will be writing for Novacon. At Easter he mentioned that he might use a piece that got cut from Transition but said that this had now been include in the Extras App. So I cheekily put in a request for something about Dahommey Brezhnev, who is a character from The Tashkent Rambler, the 400,000+ word story Iain wrote c. 1973, as at Eastercon Iain had mentioned some short fiction based on him. He chuckled and said he would think about it.

[There is a compulsory 30 second gap between posts - I must be a spammer]

[Tangendentalism]

Ace write-up Dave! Thanks for posting it.