Iain Banks books in order

Iain Banks (1954-2013) was a Scottish novelist who wrote mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, best known for The Wasp Factory and the Culture series.

Iain Menzies Banks was born in Dunfermline, Fife, on 16 February 1954 and studied at the University of Stirling. He thought of himself mainly as a science fiction writer, but difficulty finding a publisher for that work led him to mainstream fiction, and The Wasp Factory came out from Macmillan in Britain on 16 February 1984. It divided critics on publication but later sold over a million copies. His other mainstream novels include Walking on Glass (1985), The Bridge (1986), Espedair Street (1987), The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993) and Stonemouth (2012).

His first published science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas (1987), opened the Culture series, a sequence of space operas about a post-scarcity interstellar society in which artificial intelligences called Minds play a central part. It continued with The Player of Games (1988), Use of Weapons (1990), Excession (1996), Inversions (1998), Look to Windward (2000), Matter (2008), Surface Detail (2010) and The Hydrogen Sonata (2012). He also wrote Raw Spirit (2003), a book about Scotch whisky. In 2008 The Times named him among the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. He announced in April 2013 that he had terminal gallbladder cancer and died in Kirkcaldy on 9 June 2013; The Quarry was published after his death.

For collectors. The Macmillan first edition of The Wasp Factory (1984) is a 184-page hardback with a jacket by Philip Mann (ISBN 0-333-36380-9) and is his first published novel. Consider Phlebas (1987), the first Culture novel, is the key science fiction title.