The Guardian is holding a live webchat with the man himself at 13.00 hours today.

"When we asked you whom you'd like to see more of on the site, one of the names that came up over and over was Iain Banks. And who are we to argue?"

Details of how to participate are at www.guardian.co.uk.

[Heads-up via the always-vigilant David H of The Banksonian]

Here's the video recording of the interview (available via YouTube) which took place at the Cheltenham Literature Festival last year. Derek talks to Iain about various topics, including the digitisation of books, his writing process and the impact of world events on his work.

An audio recording of the interview is also available via audioboo.fm.

Many thanks indeed to David H (editor of Iain Banks fanzine The Banksonian) for the heads-up!

• Iain M Banks SFX Fannish Inquisition, part one
• Iain M Banks SFX Fannish Inquisition, part two

"We interviewed Iain at the Luton Library Theatre before he went on stage, in a half-hour interview which turned out to be both amusing and insightful. The full interview is only available in our printed and digital editions."

Here's a taster question to whet your appetite:

The View From Here: Is there a grand plan for the Culture, are you taking it somewhere or just having fun with it?

Iain M Banks: "No – and yeah... it will go on until I stop having fun with it and then I will just sort of leave it to be. There's no overall strategic plan and in a sense that is the plan, having no plan is the plan. The plot of the Culture is not going to come to some huge climatic end, well unless I come up with an idea that can only work in those terms but I'll try not to.

"That is, the Culture just keeps on going: it's this society where by now you might have expected it to sublime, to retire from the normal matter base life of the galaxy and the universe and go off into this magical realm. (Which I may have to deal with as I keep getting asked about it these days, so I’m going to have to explain what the hell it is.)

"But it's definitely not doing this, deliberately staying back and surfing the crest instead of going down the wave - it wants to keep on doing good works, it wants to be part of the normal life of the galaxy. So it's deliberately not doing what it’s expected to do. So that theme of continuance, of sticking around – like passiveness, almost bloody mindedness is why it can't just all suddenly come to a big crashing stop and I think eventually it will fade away, but it’s going to leave lots of echoes.

"That was one of the questions today during the Twitter thing which I had to put in quite concise terms: somebody said, will the Culture ever fall? And I said, it’s not going to fall but it will fade and that’s going to leave echoes everywhere. ( Mock evil laughter )"

If you want to read the full interview you'll need to pay The View From Here the princely sum of $1 (one US dollar) or 69p (sixty-nine British pence) for the downloadable pdf edition, or $7.35 / £4.99 for a copy of the print remix.

More information from www.theviewfromheremagazine.com.

You can listen to the whole show until October 25th via the BBC iPlayer (visit the link above and look for the 'Listen Now' link) and the BBC have also extracted the following highlight from the show (Iain talking about his position on evangelical atheism) which is also available on YouTube.

[Heads-up thanks to David H of The Banksonian and huge thanks also to Guy Oldfield of BBC Radio 5 Live for sending through the vid clip]

To propose a question for Iain, tweet it with the hashtag #mbanks. Waterstone's are offering the chance to win signed copies of Surface Detail if you submit one of the best questions.

Visit www.timhaighreadsbooks.com for an earlier interview with Iain on the subject of his previous novel, Transition.

[Podcast produced and hosted by Green-Shoot.]

To propose a question for Iain, tweet it with the hashtag #mbanks and the Waterstone's crew will scoop 'em up and pick the best ones to put to the man himself on the 19th, then tweet the resulting answers.

Topics of discussion include Iain's writing history, his take on mainstream literature's opinion of science fiction, his influences, recommended writers and whether he thinks ebooks will eventaully take over form print media.

Read the interview at www.SciFiNow.co.uk.

[Another big thank you to David H of the Banksoniain for he heads-up!]

The deadline for submitting a question is Tuesday, June 15th. Details of how to submit can be found at www.sfx.co.uk.

The show will be broadcast next Wednesday, 19th May, at 11.30 GMT BST and repeated the following Sunday at 10.30 BST. More info at the BBC Radio Scotland website. The show should also be available post-broadcast, via the BBC's iPlayer service.

Thanks to David H of The Banksoniain for the heads-up.

Yes, that Ken Livignstone, the former Mayor of London. Turns out he's something of an sf fan: he name-checks David Brin and mentions putting in an appearance at the Brighton SF Festival in 1987, and says he reads sf classics. You live and learn, eh?

Read the full piece at www.newstatesman.com.

Good reading over at www.guardian.co.uk.

Well worth a visit to www.independent.co.uk to read the full article.

Read the full interview at news.scotsman.com.

"Iain Banks will be the guest on Clive James in Conversation on Tuesday 18th August (i.e. TODAY!) at the Assembly Rooms George Street, Edinburgh."

See www.clivejamesguests.com for more information.

When asked about forthcoming brand new novel Transition's placement in the M / non-M spectrum of his work, Iain said:

"The template I had in mind was The Bridge, my third novel, from 1986. I still think very highly of it, and I liked the way its structure let me use different voices and approaches. So, for Transition, I was trying to come up with something as different and challenging. I still think of Transition as basically mainstream, but I guess there's enough sci-fi in there to justify publishing it as such in a market where my sci-fi has generally done better."

Visit www.praguepost.com to read the rest of the interview.

Many thanks to Joe G of FPI Blog fame for the heads-up!

The discussion ranges across Iain's love of Risk!, the 'anorak' label as applied to science fiction fans, the possibility of a Wasp Factory movie, Iain's reaction to reviews, his taken on the publishing industry and more.

In the course of describing his general approach to the degree of scientific realism he includes in his different writing modes, Iain also lets slip a tantalising hint about his next novel:

My new book is a mainstream novel that borrows science fiction tropes. It plays with the idea that there are an infinite number of different worlds.

So it's using speculative hard science. And it's important to the book that there's a degree of respectability about the idea of the multiverse, or the many-worlds theory.

You can discuss the implications of this little snippet over on the Iain [M] Banks fan forum, should you be so inclined...

[via the FPI Blog and Dave H]

Read on for the latest Q's from Iain's readers and fans, with A's from the man himself...

Once again, a very big thank you to everyone who sent in questions for Iain and to Iain himself for taking time out of his schedule to provide another great set of answers.

Interviewer Judith Spelman has posted a (1.23Mb) pdf copy of the piece on her own website at www.judithspelman.co.uk.

[Thanks to DaveH for the heads-up]

Independent columnist Matthew Bell makes a brief mention of Iain's recent appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Webzine Dazed & Digital has a brief interview with Iain, also conducted during the EIBF.

Paul Cornell gives a brief progress report on his BBC radio adaptation of 'The State of the Art' during an interview with IO9.com.

And so - without any further ado - we present Iain's Email Q&A, episode II:

From Pete Davies:

Q: For me the big three "literary, but accessible" British novelists for my generation are yourself, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. But where do you see the next great voices coming from and do you have any theories as to why it's taking so long for you three to get some competition?

Well, I'm flattered to be mentioned in such august company - I suspect a lot of people would dispute my inclusion. To answer your question; I think in the shape of Alan Warner and David Mitchell they're already here, and have been for a few years.

But if it's not them then I don't know and, more to the point, probably wouldn't know. I try to keep up with developments in mainstream and SF but I just don't read fast enough to do so reliably in either field; far more clued-up commentators exist who read more widely and deeply in contemporary literature. Frankly I wouldn't trust my own judgement in such matters.

Double submission, from Tam Ham and Barry de la Rosa:

Q: In several of your books, games play a prominent role (Azad, Empire!, Despot) and the Halo Trilogy is said to be heavily influenced by your Culture books. Would you ever consider developing your own computer game? Or would you ever consider licensing a game company to produce a role-playing game or MMORPG based on the Culture universe?

In theory yes, or at least maybe. The trouble is I'm not a team player (an only child thing, I expect), plus writing novels anyway kind of spoils you for co-operating with other people. You get too used to being God, controlling everything, calling all the shots and just generally doing it all your own way, with no arguments or compromises.

Modern computer games are so complicated and time-consuming to write - and cost so much money to develop - that they have to be co-operative efforts and I don't think I'd fit into the team ethos required. I have supposed I could act in some sort of advisory or consultancy role but I don't know how realistic that idea is. Anyway, it would really require somebody approaching my agent with a serious proposal in the first place; like translation and film deals, you can't push these things - people come to you with a proposal or they don't come at all.

It would probably take a significant film deal - and likely one carried through to a successful film - to produce the kind of commercial climate necessary to make a Culture computer game viable. Generally, I'd have no objections in principal to licensing a role-playing or other game based on the Culture - these are things you have to evaluate on the particular merits of any individual proposal. And if none of this ever happens I'm happy to settle for the ideas behind the Culture somehow influencing both games design and the assumptions behind them.

From Bruce Attenborrow:

Q: One of the key aspects of the Culture's ability to perpetuate itself is the essential reliance it has on the Minds. You mentioned in the previous Q & A that the Culture's Minds find the Culture itself interesting and therefore continue to work in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship (or at least, they appear to). What, in your opinion, is it that the Minds find so interesting? Why don't at least some of them turn on the Culture and cut loose? What is it philosophically and moralistically that keeps them on the straight and narrow? Could the Culture exist without the Minds?

The idea is that the Minds find us interesting the way we find our pets interesting. We're their fish tank, their ant farm, their Sims.

The assumption is that AIs so many generations down the line from when their human (or whatever) instigators created the first generation will be free of any prejudices or drives (or the equivalent of drives) those biological designers might have included in the AIs' design, deliberately or otherwise. So they'll be vastly wise - and may well have something like a drive in the shape of a thirst for knowledge - but they'll also, arguably, be almost too perfect, too powerful, too self-sufficient. They'll need something to keep their interest in the mundane workings of reality, and the humans in the Culture provide that.

Those humans are far better-behaved and much less neurotic and psychotic compared to us but they are still humans, with a collection of drives, needs and desires that produce behaviour a Mind would find fascinating, and something worth caring about.

As humans, we feel both tenderness and a duty of care towards those who are relatively powerless, weak and vulnerable compared to ourselves - whether it's towards our own children or animals (especially when they're cute). I'm suggesting that even without deliberately designing it into a Mind, there would be a similar or at least analogous feeling or urge in those Minds - based on a shared ability to look at the universe and both to wonder and to reason - sufficient for them to find it rewarding and even pleasurable to cooperate with and to some degree look after the humans involved.

However, some of the Minds do just bugger off after they're completed, and the Culture accepts this degree of apparent waste as part of the price for creating AIs which are their own entities - individuals with genuine personalities - rather than just carefully designed components of the civilisation.

My feeling is that there will be ways for any currently existing generation of Minds to tweak the properties of the next generation (I'd assume there would be a smaller likelihood of the sort of apostasy mentioned above occurring during what one might term the war economy necessary for the successful waging of the Idiran War, for example) and the extent and frequency of such tweaking would be something that would have evolved and developed over time, so that by the time the Culture stories are set this has become a mature technology.

I don't think the Culture as it is portrayed in the stories could exist for long without the Minds. They anchor it; if they all suddenly disappeared (and in a sense kept on disappearing even when new ones were created) it would drift, eventually, into a different civilisational course. Arguably it would drift into the main sequence of galactic civilisational development, describing what the elder civilisations (who, as mentioned in the Appendices section of Consider Phlebas, take an interest in such matters) would recognise as a more familiar arc within the space of developmental possibilities, moving towards conventional Sublimation rather than sticking around - engaged, in-play and just generally interfering - as the Culture is, quite deliberately, doing.

I also think that just knowing the Minds are there - and relatively accessible - makes a huge difference to the average Culture citizen. They make it easier to enjoy the Culture's nearly infinite pleasures with a clearer conscience.

Double submission, from Andy Smelt and 'Bascule the Teller':

Q: I was watching the final double episode of the last series of Doctor Who and I noticed that the Doctor described the Dalek's ability to move the Earth as a "fearsome technology" and later called the resulting collection of planets some sort of engine (a reference to Feersum Endjinn?) Have you been approached to write or co-write a Doctor Who episode? If you ever were, would you take up the offer? And if you did, what sort of episode do you think you would write?

I'd put that use of language down to coincidence (if not, then I'm suitably flattered). I don't recall being asked to write or co-write a Doctor Who episode but I'd almost certainly say no anyway. It's that teamwork thing, in a way; you have to accept the limitations of the form, including the stipulation that any monsters taken out of the box during the course of the episode(s) are put back in it again at the end, and I don't know that I could adapt to that.

This is not to denigrate the writing in the recent series at all; some of the Doctor Who episodes over the last few years have been amongst the best SF ever to appear on TV or film and may well prove much more influential than anything I've ever written, but, even so, faced with the reality of having to write within a framework after so many years of using SF as the place where my imagination gets totally free rein, I think I'd still find the restrictions too frustrating to work with.

You never know, though; if I suddenly had a spiffing idea that would work best - or even only - as a Doctor Who episode I'd happily submit it.

From Mike Smiffy:

Q: I've noticed while reading your SF in particular that you are constantly describing very precise distances and measurements; whether it's miles, kilometres or even centimetres and millimetres. I was wondering: is this something you do consciously to set the scene and give the reader a more vivid picture of the surroundings and distance to the goal, or is it just you putting your ideas down exactly as you see them?

Hmm. Mild OCD on my part, perhaps. Could just be the skiffy equivalent of a phenomenon we writers refer to as Doing Too Much Research And Insisting On Showing How Much You've Done.

I do have the dubious habit of drawing out Culture ships and the like, so they sort of have precise dimensions rather than just vague impressions of immense size or whatever and I guess sometimes these figures get incorporated into the text.

Otherwise it's just me trying to get an idea of size and scale over as simply as possible. It seems fitting, somehow, in SF. If I was writing proper Fantasy I suppose keeping it more vague and abstract would make sense.

From Gary Wilkinson:

Q: I recently read that another writer, Steve Brust, had a dragon from one his books tattooed on his back... if you were to do something similar, what character, object or image from your books would you have tattooed? And where?

Well, I wouldn't. I think tattoos look fine on other people, but there's a remark a character makes in The Steep Approach to Garbadale about having a tattoo meaning you will never be truly naked ever again, and I kind of agree with that (and think it's a unnecessary limitation).

If I ever change my mind, I guess a wasp - probably quite subtle, life-size - would be the obvious contender and I imagine somewhere out-of-the-way without being what you might call intimate would be appropriate; the ankle, perhaps.

From Tal Porter:

Q: In "An Audience With Billy Connolly", the Big Yin gets asked what he does with groupies. He replies that comedians don't get groupies, they just get drunk blokes telling them jokes and insisting they go in the act. Do you similarly get fans plaguing you with ideas for your next novel? It's just I've got this great one for the next Culture book...

Nope. Never really noticed any groupies either, at least not when it would have made a difference (though I've been told they were there and I was just being too thick to notice, which I'm afraid sounds horribly plausible).

People sometimes say things like "You should put that in a book!" but it's generally about some unlikely though still mundane event rather than anything to do with SF. I'm not really in the market for other people's ideas for Culture or any other novels; for me a large part of the fun of writing books is seeing what I'll surprise myself with in the shape of the idea for the next one, and professional pride alone would prevent me out-sourcing that process!

Once again, a big thank you to everyone who sent in questions, and of course to Iain for taking the time out of his summer schedule to come up with his answers. There's a distinct possibility that we'll be running another Q&A session before too long, so do watch this space (or, even better, subscribe to the site's RSS feed) for further announcements.

Here's the link to the original article: www.financialradio.co.uk.

And here are the three YouTube links:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Embedded audio after the jump, click on 'read more' to access.

And so, without further ado, we hereby call for all you Banks-fans and readers to send in your next batch of questions for Iain. The same general guidelines as last time will apply once more:

Send your best question (just one per correspondent, please), by email, to orbit@littlebrown.co.uk, with the subject line 'Iain [M] Banks QandA Suggestion'.

The deadline for submissions for this second session is Wednesday August 13th. After that date, the half-dozen or so queries that - in the collective opinion of the team here at Orbit / Abacus - are the most interesting and / or intriguing will be put to Mr Banks for his consideration and contemplation. The resulting answers will then be posted to to the website as soon as Iain has gotten his answers back to us.

Fire away!

From Ed Ashby:

Q: Imagine you've agreed to write a novella; the only two provisos are that the story must be set in the Culture and it must feature a character from a previous Culture novel. It doesn't have to be a main character, and the events in the novella can take place before or after those of the original book in which they appear. Who would you pick, and why?

Iain Banks: Hmm. Good question. I think I'd go with Shohobohaum Za, from The Player of Games, the man who saves Gurgeh's ludic arse when he's attacked outside the games hall, orders the preposterous cocktail from the Limiting Factor's module and who turns out to be - surprise - an SC agent. Now there's a chap who must have had an interesting past. And would doubtless go on to have a just as interesting a future (though you wouldn't necessarily bet on it being all that long).

I always felt he was a character who could carry something bigger than the cameo he has in TPoG, and it would be good to have an SC agent who isn't so obviously weighed down by the past, like Zakalwe from Use of Weapons or Anaplian from Matter; Za has a much more blasé take on the whole being-an-SC-agent lark, and that would be refreshing. So I'd probably write about some future adventure, scrape or escapade of his. No idea what the story would actually be, but I wager it would be colourful.

From Paul Raven:

Q: Which is your favourite (or most hated) literary manifesto, and why? If you could start your own right now, and gather an instant flock of rebel cohorts, what would it be called, and what would the agenda be?

Iain Banks: Cripes. We don't much hold with them there literary manifestos round here, though I'm sure if I had a concisely annotated list of them before me I could find one or two I thought were sensible or inspiring, and some I'd regard as a bit daft. Honestly, I don't really pay such things much attention. I'm always a bit sceptical about any movement or even allegedly coherent group of writers really existing for much longer than whatever lunchtime the idea of said movement was dreamt up.

That whole herding cats thing, you know? I feel writers tend to go their own way, especially these days, and any pattern or appearance of a programme only appears in retrospect, and generally only to those looking for it.

If I was going to have a manifesto - just for the sheer flipping heck of it - I'd draw up one that denigrated cliché, demanded greater realism in narrative and bound its adherents to resolutely refuse to acknowledge the existence, even as handy plot devices, of any form of supernatural or spiritual force whatsoever.

Ha! (That's a 'so-there' type of 'Ha', not a 'tee-hee' sort of 'Ha'.)

From Dave Haddock:

Q: The Culture books have been chronological so far - have you thought about writing about the Culture before it was the Culture?

Iain Banks: Yup, I have, and generally jettisoned the idea pretty quickly. It's one of those ideas that is kind of waiting for the right story idea to come along; an idea that somehow implies the Culture but doesn't depend on its existence. I guess the trouble is that when I'm in what you might call a Culture state of mind then I really look forward to using the usual props; the ships, the drones, the knife missiles and so on.

(Even in Matter, where most of that stuff is kept fairly isolated to brief sections while the rest of the story rolls on, there's a kind of expectation, I think, that all this will come to the fore at some point, so that when the flurry of action does take place at the end, it's a kind of long-built-up release.)

And when I don't have my Culture hat on, I usually take the opportunity to get well away and do something quite different, maybe even something that is effectively incompatible with the Culture universe (The Algebraist being the best example). These are kind of the two faces of the coin being spun here, so waiting for a pre-Culture Culture story might be like waiting for the coin to land on its edge. Still, you never know.

From Gabriel Bihian:

Gabriel: Could you write a science-fiction novel without wars and violence?

Iain Banks: Good grief yes. I've toyed with the idea of writing a Shakespearean - okay, a sub-Shakespearean - comedy set in the Culture where some feckless / rather dizzy / profoundly spoilt human characters suffer a series of misunderstandings (with hilarious results), attended by jaded and long-suffering drones. It's just I'm kind of a sucker for the unlimited special effects budget written SF hands a writer - and big explosions (I blame Gerry Anderson).

Again, though, it'd be a narrow idea-window for me to hit; a story that needed to be SF, but didn't need all the pyrotechno-gizmology I've become so fond of. Any ideas I've ever had in this direction, when sternly asked the question "Couldn't you do almost exactly the same story set in our reality, present or past?" tend to look pretty shifty, break eye contact and start drawing doodles in the dust at their feet while starting to whistle.

Definitely possible though.

From Massimo Gasperini:

Q: Can you suggest any particular parts of Scotland that would be most interesting to visit and explore, from the point of view of someone who likes your books?

Iain Banks: Reading Raw Spirit might throw up more, but off the top of my head:

The stretch of shore West of Portmahomack in Easter Ross (helped inspire The Wasp Factory), the Forth Bridge (no prizes for guessing which book), Greenock, Oban, the Glenfinann House hotel, Glenfinnan and the area around the Crinan Canal, all of which provided raw material for The Crow Road. Edinburgh, obviously, given that it plays a part in Complicity (and Loch Bruc in the novel is sort of based on Loch Shiel, the loch which Glenfinnan is at the head of... there's a rather poor joke in there with an utterly irrelevant Australian connection. Moving swiftly on).

The upper reaches of the Forth - the flood plain as far as Stirling - is there in Whit (and briefly Edinburgh again), and the whole area around Stirling University and the town of Bridge of Allan (plus Stirling Castle in one scene) lies behind the setting of Song of Stone. That's all I can think of!

From Mark Wilson:

Q: What do you think is the one, single, most vital collective development that humanity needs to take before it has any hope whatsoever of evolving into a Culture-like society?

Iain Banks: Genetically modifying ourselves, I suspect. Finding the set of genes that code for xenophobia in general - these days usually expressed though sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, Romaphobia and so on (and on, and on) - and knocking them out. Possibly then we'll be nice enough for the Culture or something like it. Of course maybe inventing true AIs will be enough, always assuming that they're as benign - and yet sympathetically interested in us - as they are taken to be in the Culture.

The one thing that won't be enough is getting to a post-scarcity society; a statistically valid number of us have lived in something very like that for the past decade and a bit and we still collectively behaved like slavering morons, so it'll take more than just having more toys than we know what to do with to make us truly civilised.

I mean, nil desperandum and all that, but - still - don't hold your breath.

Thank you very much indeed to everyone who sent in questions, and to Iain for taking time out to provide us with answers. We're hoping to announce further Q&A sessions in future, to watch this space, or even better, subscribe to the site's RSS feed for updates.

So if you've got a burning issue that you'd like Iain to address, or if there's something that's intrigued you about his recent work, or a question that's been lurking in the back of your mind ever since you read one of his earliest novels that you'd now like to bring into the light of day, then this is your chance.

Send your best question (just one per correspondent, please), by email, to orbit@littlebrown.co.uk, with the subject line 'Iain [M] Banks QandA Suggestion'. The deadline for submissions for this first session is July 9th. After that date, the half-dozen or so queries that - in the collective opinion of the team here at Orbit / Abacus - are the most interesting and / or intriguing* will be put to Mr Banks for consideration. The resulting answers will then be posted to this very website in due course.

We're hoping that this will be the first of a number of regular Q&A sessions with Iain, so don't worry if you can't think of something fascinating to ask him straight away; why not mull it over a bit and maybe submit it to us for the next round?

*Hint: Questions such as "why did you cut up your passport?" and "why did you sell all your sports cars?" have been answered no end of times elsewhere, we feel. Likewise, "where do you get your ideas?" will be given short-shrift indeed. We're looking for interesting and / or intriguing queries to put to Iain, folks... so fire up those imagination circuits!

David from 'The Banksoniain' tells us the piece "starts off being about Matter, but goes onto more general things, including the first hints that the next SF book is likely to be a 'Culture' one..."

Intriguing stuff. See the ASIM website for more information on ordering a print (AUD$8.95 plus postage) or pdf (AUD$4.95) copy of the latest issue.

Addendum: Simon Petrie of ASIM very kindly sent us a pdf copy of the interview with Iain, so we can confirm that he talks about (among many other things) his addiction to writing science fiction: "The point is, though, that science fiction is the genre that I love

You can check out the video version (in two parts) over on the CNN website, or if you don't have a broadband connection handy right now, you can read the text version of the interview instead.

[Thanks to Gary W for the heads-up]

Style-watchers will note that Iain is also very pleased indeed with his new leather jacket...

In the interview, Iain reveals the secret of his amazing ability to transcribe fluent technobabble almost as if he were making it all up:

"I suspect it's just the right balance of wide-eyed, totally fascinated enthusiasm for 'real' tech speak along with a healthy dose of cynicism regarding how easy it is to make up such stuff without really having any idea what in the hell you're talking about. I am happy to report I have both, in spades."

Read the full interview at time-blog.com/nerd_world and thanks again to Alex for the heads-up.

Craig recently interviewed Iain Banks for The Scottish Sun. In his blog piece he has posted the original audio file of the interview, along with the copy that he submitted to The Sun and a pdf of the final article as it was printed in the paper. He also invites journalism students to prepare their own piece from the audio transcript and submit it to the site for comparison purposes.

"I shall be using a staggeringly complicated but brilliantly capable music processing program called Logic 7 to make music on. Objectively the results might be unlistenable rubbish but as I can finally hear through my ears what I've only ever heard in my head all these years, I remain resolutely tickled pink by the whole process."

We'll be doing our best to blag some MP3 downloads for the site, of course, but can make no promises whatsoever...

Iain talks more about his life than his writing in this one (or at least, that's how it's written up), so it makes for some interesting background reading.

In her interview with Iain Banks Annalee asks questions like: "Do you suspect that a little weirdness is a necessary component of longevity for a species or civilization?" (answer: "Absolutely...") and in her accompanying review of Matter, she declares:

"Told with Banks' usual nihilistic humor and flair for outlandish description, this is a novel that will grab you by the shorthairs, scream at you about realpolitik, and then smack you on the head with a laser blast. And of course, you'll love every minute of it."

Head on over to io9.com to read the full interview and review.

Iain also talks about his current plans for the next book...

"I'm thinking about thinking about the next book. I'm going to start typing it in October. So I'm not thinking about it. I'm thinking about thinking about it. There's a distinction I hope you appreciate."

...just in case you were wondering.

You can read the full interview at www.socialistreview.org.uk, as well as Patrick Ward's (brief) review of Matter.

Iain tells Paul about the background and inspiration for the major themes in Matter, the conceptual basis of The Culture, and his brief flirtation with short fiction. Well worth tracking down a copy.

The topic of the interview is 'Why I Write', and Iain talks about his inspiration and motivation for living the writer's life, plus the joy of getting up and writing at 4 a.m. if that's when inspiration happens to strike: "Which is good because then I can finish my allocation of words for the day by breakfast and have the day off."

"Iain Banks lifts a corduroy trouser leg to reveal a nasty-looking scar line just below his kneecap. It's the last physical mark of the best-selling author's rock'n'roll days as he renounces his decades of high-octane, health-shunning hedonism and embraces rather calmer ways of greener, cleaner living."

Read the full interview over at women.timesonline.co.uk.