To whet your appetite (and give you something to talk about over on the forum in the meantime) the whole of chapter one is now available to read here on the site.

Here's how it all begins:

"This one might be trouble."

She heard one of them say this, only ten or so metres away in the darkness. Even over her fear, the sheer naked terror of being hunted, she felt a shiver of excitement, of something like triumph, when she realised they were talking about her. Yes, she thought, she would be trouble, she already was trouble. And they were worried too; the hunters experienced their own fears during the chase. Well, at least one of them did. The man who'd spoken was Jasken; Veppers' principal bodyguard and chief of security. Jasken. Of course; who else?

Click here to read the rest of the first chapter.

The site is back in action now, as you'll have noticed if you're reading this article on the Latest News page. On the other hand, if you're reading on RSS, do click on over to the website, take a quick look around, maybe let us know what you think of the new look.

We've added a bit more functionality to the news items. If you regulalry use one of the major bookmark and / or link-sharing apps or online services then you'll hopefully find an appropriate shortcut button at the end of each item to help you post and share a link. There's also a link on each news item to a suitable section of the Iain Banks Forum, to make it quicker and easier for you to talk things over with your fellow Banks fans and readers (although you'll still need to register as a forum member before you'll be able to join or start a conversation thread).

Alternatively, if you have something useful and relevant to add to a news item, then you can do so via the Comments form on the article in question. We are going to be quite strict with the comments submitted to the site to make sure that irritations from spammers (zero-tolerance there) and time-wasters are kept to an absolute minimum. So: all comments will be moderated (for the time being, anyhow) and anything non-relevant will be politely declined.

We've also improved the main bibliography section, merging Iain's SF and non-SF titles into a single list and then providing chronological listings of his SF, non-sf and Culture books, as well as his entire output to-date.

Anyhow, do have a look around, and if you feel like letting us know what you think of the new site, please do so over on the Forum or via the contact page.

Hopefully everything will be working smoothly, although it's fairly inevitable that gremlins will have messed with something during the switch-over. If you spot a problem, please do let us know and we'll fix it as soon as we can. One thing we do already know about is that the extracts are temporarily missing from the site. That's because we had a bit of an issue with a database backup a while ago and some of the content was unfortunately truncated. We'll get the extracts back up and properly linked in before too long, all being well.

Cheers!

Darren Turpin, Site Admin
pp the Iain Banks website team

Update, 13.01.09 The transfer is now complete and normal service appears to have been restored.

This new forum replaces the old installation which has been largely defunct and closed to new members for quite some time. Former and brand new members alike are most welcome to sign up for an account and join the conversation. Your frienfly, neighbourhood Forum Admin, along with moderators 'edash' and 'rac', will be on hand to help new members settle in and will be happy to answer any queries you might have.

See you there!

[If anyone happens to have the address of a friendly Mind who could make this happen in a nano-second or two, please do let us know via the usual channels.]

Update 17.11.08: Looks like this will be happening some time early next week now, folks. Normal service will continue for a short while yet...

Slightly shorter lead-time this time around, folks: we'd like you to send in your questions to us no later than Friday October 3rd, please - so that gives you just over two weeks to think of something devastatingly interesting to put to Iain.

We do still have a few potential candidates on file from the first two rounds, so please don't feel the need to repeat yourself if you've already submitted a question that hasn't quite made the cut yet. On the other hand, if you'd like to try a new angle, or follow-up on something that was mentioned in the first two Q&A sessions, then that's always worth a try.

Same procedure as before, folks: send your best question (just the one per correspondent, please), by email, to orbit@littlebrown.co.uk, with the subject line 'Iain [M] Banks Q&A Suggestion'.

We're hoping to post the answers sometime during the week commencing October 6th, Iain's schedule allowing, of course...