The Wasp Factory: Ian Banks

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This is not my genre at all and I see that it’s referred to as a Gothic horror and yet, I started to read it and couldn’t put it down. I really cannot understand it. I cannot tolerate torture, and cruelty to animals, but strangely through Frank Cauldhame’s eyes, not your normal sixteen year old teenager I hasten to add, I was allowed to enter into his own special world. I warmed to his strange ways and ideas immediately, and even felt sorry for this rather badly adjusted adolescent. I felt he was on the road to discovering himself. Unfortunately, he was also a murderer:

HOWEVER, despite the positive aspects of casually dating a fictional sociopath or psychopath, it is still important to exercise caution when deciding to court (or allow oneself to be courted by) one of these individuals as there are some very troubled individuals that it is best simply to avoid. Therefore, as a public service I have been maintaining a list of these “DO NOT TOUCH” individuals and now need to make an addition to the list. Premio Italia Science Fiction Award in the Best International Novel category for Inversions (winner) In the end I went for something that kept me closer to my by-then comfort zone: a first-person narrative set on a remote Scottish nearly-island told by a normality-challenged teenager with severe violence issues allowed me to treat my story as something resembling SF. The island could be envisaged as a planet, and Frank, the protagonist, almost as an alien. I gave in to the write-what-you-know school but with a dose of skiffy hyperbole, mining my own past for exaggerateable experiences. I'd built dams; Frank would too, though with a slightly psychotic uber-motif involving women, water, the sea and revenge. I'd constructed big home-made kites; so would Frank, and use one as a murder weapon. Along with a pal, I'd indulged in the then not-uncommon and perfectly innocent teenage boy pursuit of making bombs, flame-throwers, guns, giant catapults and more bombs; Frank would too, though alone and with a more determinedly harm-minded intensity. I cannot believe reason two happened....really I can't and in some ways makes me want to give the book 2 stars but More rejection slips. More rejection slips from a smaller number of publishers, as fewer had SF lists within which to bring my deathless prose to an unsuspecting but, I was certain, ultimately extravagantly appreciative and indeed rightly thankful public.

Short stories to keep

Lindsay Deutsch (7 May 2013). "Book Buzz: New Iain Banks coming in June". USA TODAY . Retrieved 10 May 2013. Andrew Brown (4 April 2013). "In one sentence, Iain Banks speaks volumes about marriage". The Guardian . Retrieved 9 June 2013. a traumatic early childhood accident that left Frank with an unmentionable disability of his sexual organs No Sartre, no Lessing, no Mailer: Frodo the hobbit beats them all". The Independent. 20 January 1997. Archived from the original on 20 June 2022 . Retrieved 1 February 2019. MacLeod, Ken (14 February 2015). " 'Readers of Iain Banks's prose will find in his poems much that is familiar' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 9 December 2015.

AND NOW, MAKING IT AN EVEN 10, THE NEWEST MEMBER TO JOIN THE “THEY MAKE STEVE SCREAM LIKE A LITTLE KID WHEN THEY LOOK AT ME” CLUB IS..... In 2010 Banks publicly joined the cultural boycott of Israel, refusing to allow his novels to be sold in the country. He was a frequent signatory of letters of protest to the Guardian and a name recruited to causes of which he approved, from secular humanism to the legalising of assisted suicide to the preservation of public libraries. Banks himself was a self-declared "evangelical atheist" and a man of decided political views, often expressed with humorous exasperation and sometimes requiring ripe language. He relished his public status as no-nonsense voice of a common-sense socialism that had an increasingly nationalistic tint.His first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas, was published in 1987, though he had drafted it soon after completing The Wasp Factory. In it he created The Culture, a galaxy-hopping society run by powerful but benevolent machines and possessed of what its inventor called "well-armed liberal niceness". It would feature in most of his subsequent sci-fi novels. Its enemies are the Idirans, a religious, humanoid race who resent the benign powers of the Culture. In this conflict, good and ill are not simply apportioned. Banks provided a heady mix of, on the one hand, action and intrigue on a cosmic scale (his books were often called "space operas"), and, on the other, ruminations on the clash of ideas and ideologies. What's in an M (or) What a difference an M makes". Archived from the original on 28 September 2007.

Simone Caroti: The Culture Series of Iain M. Banks: A Critical Introduction, McFarland, April 2015, ISBN 978-0-7864-9447-7 Kerridge, Jake (9 June 2013). "Iain Banks: an honest, funny and compassionate writer who beguiled 21st-century readers". The Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022 . Retrieved 18 June 2013.Morelle, Rebecca (13 May 2019). "Mariana Trench: Deepest-ever sub dive finds plastic bag". BBC News . Retrieved 13 May 2019.

the writing is clean, clear, precise and the tone is surprisingly upbeat. the protagonist's thoughts have a quiet yearning and naiveté to them that makes even his most horrific plans and rationalizations seem almost understated, almost innocent. the deadpan humor also relieves some of the viciousness of the very dark activities portrayed. the dissection of gender was fascinating! and the use of the wasp factory itself moves beyond that of a torture maze, becoming a metaphor and a parallel for the fates of each of the characters. overall, a disturbing but very enriching experience. I shook my head at him, scowling, and wiped the brown rim of soup from the inside of my plate. There was a time when I was genuinely afraid of these idiotic questions, but now, apart from the fact that I must know the height, length, breadth, area and volume of just about every part of the house and everything in it, I can see my father's obsession for what it is. It gets embarrassing at times when there are guests in the house, even if they are family and ought to know what to expect. They'll be sitting there, probably in the lounge, wondering whether Father's going to feed them anything or just give an impromptu lecture on cancer of the colon or tapeworms, when he'll sidle up to somebody, look round to make sure everybody's watching, then in a conspiratorial stage-whisper say: 'See that door over there? It's eighty-five inches, corner to corner. ' Then he'll wink and walk off, or slide over on his seat, looking nonchalant.” Banks's next work of literary fiction was The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007), a return to the territory of The Crow Road. Banks's protagonist, Alban McGill, struggles to prevent his family's company from being taken over by a US giant, occasioning diatribes against American capitalism and American foreign policy that seem straightforwardly authorial. Often I've thought of myself as a state; a country or, at the very least, a city. It used to seem to me that the different ways I felt sometimes about ideas, courses of action and so on were like the different political moods that countries go through. It has always seemed to me that people vote in a new government not because they actually agree with their politics but just because they want a change. Somehow they think that things will be better under a new lot. Well, people are stupid, but it all seems to have more to do with mood,caprice and atmosphere than carefully thought-out arguments. I can feel the same sort of thing going on inside my head. Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.Iain Banks: 'The SSP gets my vote....'» Scottish Socialist Party". scottishsocialistparty.org. 10 June 2013. The book sold well, but was greeted with a mixture of acclaim and criticism, due to its gruesome depiction of violence. The Irish Times called it "a work of unparalleled depravity." [2] Plot [ edit ]