SF Super Author Iain Banks. Just Resting.
01/06/2000 . Source: Jessica Martin 

Crikes, how will his legion of fans be able to cope?

Iain Banks has now announced he is to snatch a year-long break from writing. What by the frozen moons of Jupiter are the great man's motivations for this cruel deed?

I mean, come on, in a good year we might just squeeze one new Culture novel out of the Scottish celebrity. This normally runs alongside the non-SF novel that he writes to please the literary luvvies on the book review page of the Guardian, and Times Literary Supplement.

Two books a year is not an enormous output - especially for the SF stuff, where most the 'research' is done in the mind. Come to think of it, the modern fiction he turns out can't exactly be taxing on anything other the imagination.

Poor show, Iain. I mean, what if everyone felt the same as you? Imagine next time you were popping into your local McDonalds in Glasgow, in your insane search for a double cheeseburger with chocolate milk shake.

"Och, I'm sorry Mr Banks," the assistant would say. "Nae can do. I have been feeling a little stale recently. I'm off for a year traveling around Siberia in search of myself. Make your own bampot milk shake."

Can you see now, Iain, the error of your ways? Society would collapse if we all just popped out for 12 months traveling the Caribbean islands in a long sleek yacht.

Your chums at the 'Nest expect a free Culture short story by return of post to feed your legion of fans during the long darkness of the soul which you are about to plunge them into!