Like a kick in the teeth · 12:52am Apr 6th, 2013
On Wednesday I gleefully took Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks from my mailbox. A few hours later, I learned that Iain M. Banks has terminal cancer and is unlikely to live longer than a year.
Shit.
I wasn't sure whether I should blog about this at first. I don't generally like the public gushing the invariably accompanies the death of a famous person. It feels disrespectful. It feels insincere. And yet... Here I am, writing this. In part, I think it's just because I'm becoming more sentimental as I get older. I just feel the need to write something. In a sense, this is more of an anguished inchoate personal rambling that's gonna go splut against the wall for everyone to read[1]. And in part it's because I had a least two blog posts planned (In Defense of Awesomeness, and a list of crossovers I would like to see in which Equestria meets the Culture would take the starring place) in which Banks would feature heavily. Now I couldn't possibly write those without first acknowledging this grisly news.
Picture this. Angsty, geeky teenager. Loves science fiction. Love space opera. Cynical godless socialist. Yadda, yadda, the usual stuff[2]. And then he discovers Iain Banks. What is this witchcraft? A writer who openly ackowledges how bleak the world can be and pulls no punches about that. A writer who tells grand, amazing stories of an absolutely awesome spacefaring civilisation that had badass spaceships and deep philosophy in equal measure. A man who believes that despite all the horrors inflicted upon us by man and nature, we can overcome it all and use our own imagination, wit, intelligence, and rationality to build utopia for ourselves. A man who brushed aside existential angst with amiability and fun. A man who can really fucking write.
And thus my little mind was blown.
Plus, y'know, there's always that adorable sense of tribal pride when we find someone really who shares some of our views.
So, as you can imagine, it felt like a kick in teeth hearing the recent news. I've seen far, far too many people die, and never does that weird sinking feeling become any easier to handle. Just... Ugh.
But I'm sure my attempts at communicating my deep'n'meaningful incommunicable inner feelings are of little interest to anyone. So here's something better. Here's a (hopefully) Banksian response to the whole thing. Iain Banks will die and we who've read enough of his work to pretend to know will mourn as we do. We're social animals. That happens. Nothing to get too excited about. But, once we've mourned, rather than simply whine about how much the world has lost, we can do something greater. As Banks once inspired us, we can try to inspire. We can sing the praises of imagination, wit, magnanimity. We can respond to the horrible reality of his death by refusing to be cowed. We can keep fighting, keep having fun and expressing ourselves along the way, and we can do our best to inspire someone else so that when our mortality catches up with us, they can do as we have done. And maybe we can try and enable the first steps towards those badass spaceships, too.
We can never replace Banks. We will likely never hold a candle to his skill. Obviously. But we can be ourselves. And, unless you're a terrible person, that should suffice.
[1] Which makes it like damn night every other blog post in the world, I suppose.
[2] Yeah, like I've changed. Now I'm just more verbose and mopey.
The last bit is sort of a re-iteration of the point I tried to make in one of my stories, The Dragon and the Photograph. I make no apologies about that. These are the sort of truths that need repeating.
For what it's worth, Cloud Wander is planning a crossover of MLP and the Culture. Since I adore the Culture stores (for many of the same reasons you seem to), and since Cloud Wander is an incredible writer, I expect it to be amazing, and a tribute to Banks' work.
Somehow I never noticed this blog post before.
I also don't really have anything useful to say about it, except that I agree completely.