The no return of Iain Banks

Iain M. Banks was 33 years old when he published

(1987), the first of the novels in the Culture series.

It was the beginning of what he called his "train game", that is, the model of another possible world with which he liked to play, that of a super civilization - understanding that super as Nietzsche's super man was understood - in the one that every last petty feeling had been eliminated - and also the last crime - since there was nothing that the

couldn't get if they wanted to.

His was a post-scarcity, hypertechnological, egalitarian, and pleasantly anarchic society.

Oh, what about the

?

The

are frankly stupid beings -auténticos

- which, of course, are against such a desirable utopia.

And, of course, they are everywhere.

It could be

, and the other nine novels in the series he wrote before a fulminating cancer will take in 2013 as a cruel and sarcastic redraw

, by Ursula K. Le Guin.

He never denied it, on the contrary, Banks claimed her as the absolute teacher of his peculiar universe.

And she also vindicated the idea of science fiction as dialogue.

A dialogue between the work of those who arrived before and those who would arrive later and, of course, those who are yet to arrive.

“All writing is;

a writer reads something, maybe something quite famous, and he says, what if this were not exactly so?

She then climbs on that giant's shoulders and, taking it as a starting point, creates something new, ”she once wrote.

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That is why it could be said that all families of dead writers are alike, but those who inexplicably refuse to allow

writer's

work to

acquire a new form have not understood anything.

This week Dennis Kelly, the guy behind the gorgeous and twisted hilarious

, regretted, and deeply, that the heirs of Banks have decided that finally La Cultura is going to be left without making the leap to the small screen, resigning with This means that the dialogue the writer was talking about was propelled into the unspeakable because wasn't Amazon trying to turn Banks's sarcastic universe at war into a literally “global bombshell”?

They were thinking of something like

.

They weren't going to spare any expense.

Kelly had been working on the adaptation for two years.

The publishers were considering luxury editions of her books.

Iain was going to be back.

JG Ballard's

reverse

- he also always admired it, although it could be said that the only thing they had in common was their utterly perverse vision of the human being - was going to go out there and perhaps, for sure, find new readers.

He was always bothered by the way science fiction was underestimated.

Today, when, globally, realism could be described as fantastic and vice versa, things have changed, and his work, prolific and visionary alternative, could have re-fitted, and offered, from the past, another way out to the present.

The playful aspect, so important to Banks, a constant mantra in his work, which views the world as a collection of overlapping games - and sometimes fun, as much as the names of his ships, so ridiculously long and funny, No More Mr Nice Guy, It's My Party And I'll Sing If I Want To–, fits perfectly in today's hyper-recreational world, in which everything, every aspect of life –from personal relationships to a sunset– capitalism Wild through, it has become a micro-game, and its sum is the chain that keeps us together and distracted from, as Philip K. Dick would say, what is really going on out there.

xxxxx

Iain M. Banks was not always Iain M. Banks.

Sometimes it was just Iain Banks.

It had to do with a doubling then necessary.

He added the initial of his middle name - Menzies - to novels that he considered purely science fiction.

The others, which he described as merely literary, he signed as Iain Banks.

The son of a professional ice skater and an officer in the British Royal Navy, Iain decided he would be a writer at age 11.

He finished his first novel at 16. It was, of course, a science fiction novel.

It was also a science fiction novel that he wanted to publish first, but none of the doors he touched was opened.

One did, however, when he delivered

, a sort of

solipsistic

, in which a kid creates his own macabre society - inhabited solely by him - with his own chilling rules and sacrifices - to things like reading the future. He considered

, and its terrifying non-science fiction novels -

,

,

-

novels

when in reality they were macabre explorations of the human being, and the (even darker) side of his anarchospace self. . Two sides of the same coin, two ways to untie, two ways of, ultimately, play.