The Wasp Factory: Ian Banks

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Perhaps someone like Frank would react in this way, as his emotional capacity is different from the ‘ordinary’ person. Join him and Iain Banks for a discussion on Thursday July 10 at the Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1.

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright: Book 3, Götterdämmerung (1989) by Bryan Talbot from Proutt Publishing, ISBN 0-907865-03-8. The very title of the novel is a puzzle, confirmed by the opening paragraph: "I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I was also trying to make the point that childhood innocence isn't - and wasn't - as most people seem to imagine it; children probably harbour quite as many violent thoughts as adults, they just don't usually possess a sophisticated moral framework within which to place them.His first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas, was published in 1987, though he had drafted it soon after completing The Wasp Factory. page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Genre fiction always makes reviewers squirm a little bit when it comes to using such expansive language as.

Frank believes that when he was three years old he was attacked and castrated by the family dog, Old Saul. A first novel of such curdling power and originality that whether you like it or not - and you may hate it - the arrival of its author Iain Banks must mark the literary debut of the year. 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. Through a series of strange rituals and experiments, Frank creates a world he can control and understand.Fashioned from a giant clock face that Frank has discovered on the town dump, it is a precise network of tiny passages down which captive wasps must crawl to various kinds of death.

Is there good reason for Frank to be so blithely unhinged, so devoted to his warfare against wildlife and his ritual killings? On 23 January 2015, SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk named two of the firm's autonomous spaceport drone ships Just Read The Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You, after ships in Banks's novel The Player of Games.

It even opens, like The Bridge, with an evocation of the Forth road bridge, the building of which Banks had watched as a boy from his bedroom window – or at least in this case, of a fictional bridge resembling it.