“Iain always insisted that he brought the same imagination to bear on his mainstream works as he did on his SF, and that conversely he lavished the same craft and care on his SF as he did on his literary fiction. The only difference, he said, was in the setting and scale. He likened writing literary fiction to playing a piano, and writing SF to playing a vast church organ” -Â Ken MacLeod, noting that too many eulogies to Iain Banks downplay half his body of work
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And depending on which eulogies you read, it’s either one half or the other. He was either a literary author who had an embarrassingly prolific side career in SF, or an SF author who kept frittering away with that literary stuff no one ever actually reads. (Both nonsense, of course.)
I can’t think of any other author who had a foot in both camps in quite the same way as Iain Banks, who was as well regarded in both fields.
I’m not well-versed enough with the literary scene to know quite how high his standing was in the genre was, but I do know he was one of the giants of SF, possibly the most significant British author of his generation.