Iain (M.) Banks is dying of cancer

Famed Scottish author Iain Banks has announced that he was recently diagnosed with gall bladder cancer. The 59-year-old author is in a race to finish his final book (titled The Quarry) and wrap up his life before it ends.

In order to refocus his priorities, Banks has withdrawn from all of his public engagements, asked his publisher to push up their deadline for his final book, and asked his long-time partner Adele to marry him. (In Banks' words, "to do me the honor of becoming my widow (sorry - but we find ghoulish humor helps)."

Earlier this year, Banks began suffering from back pain, which he ascribed to all the hours he was spending writing at his desk. He finally went to a doctor who diagnosed jaundice due to a bile duct blockage. Further tests revealed the presence of an aggressive cancer which had started in his gall bladder, and has already spread to most of his major organs and lymph nodes.

Both with and without the M, Iain Banks has been a tremendous force in literature over the last 30 years. He publishes literary fiction as Iain Banks, and science fiction novels as Iain M. Banks. Under both names, his work is dark, complicated, cutting and filled with tenacity.

Banks' enduring legacy is most likely to be his creation of The Culture, a series of loosely linked science fiction novels set in a far-future, post-scarcity world where AI is so well-developed that artificial lifeforms like spaceships have attained full legal personhood.

When everyone can have everything they want with just a snap of their fingers, what's left? Political jousting, covert operations on non-Culture worlds, and (in my personal favorite Culture novel) contact with an impassive alien force.

Banks says it is "extremely unlikely" that he will live as long as a year. The world will be a much smaller place without him.

Image courtesy Flickr/NelC