Iain Banks dies of cancer aged 59 | Hacker News Reader

Iain Banks dies of cancer aged 59

bbc.co.uk

350 pointsandyjohnson0133 comments

From his wikipedia:

"Following graduation Banks chose a succession of jobs that left him free to write in the evenings. These posts supported his writing throughout his twenties and allowed him to take long breaks between contracts, during which time he travelled through Europe, Scandinavia and North America. He was an expediter analyser for IBM, a technician (for British Steel) and a costing clerk for a Chancery Lane, London law firm during this period of his life.[4]"

Kind of inspiring. Most of my generation (I am 23) want instant gratification and won't eat shit like a guy like Banks would in order to support what he really liked to do.

My sister is a writer[1] in her mid twenties and she is doing similar things to Banks.

[1] http://www.randomhouse.com.au/authors/rhiannon-hart.aspx

Nice plug you've snuck in there. I'll make a point to avoid her books. I might of actually read them otherwise.

Aside from the fact that none of those jobs sound like 'eating shit' to me, you might take notice that most of his generation didn't either.

Here's a strong recommendation to anyone who hasn't read yet The Bridge by Banks, to go and read that wonderful novel. Not to mention his classic and highly imaginative Sci-fi novels: The Player of Games, Feersum Endjinn, Use of Weapons, Excession...

On the non-science fiction side, The Wasp Factory is also great, as is Crow Road and Complicity (if you want something closer to a crime thriller).

I am a huge Banks fan, but I really didn't enjoy The Wasp Factory.

I think the Wasp Factory, although obviously well written, was mostly functional, it got Banks the recognition he deserved, and initiated his literary career. He did write other novels before it, which only got published afterwards, and at least during his first creative decade, was highly creative and very ambitious (Against A Dark Background, The Crow Road, etc. all very ambitious works).

I also found "The Business" a very good book, that should be good for people starting to read him.

That was the one novel I could not stand of his - I almost thought it was written as a parody.

Interesting. I loved it too. Sadly, I've just trudged through Stonemouth and found it deadly dull.

...while I found Stonemouth quite compelling and stayed up way too late reading it more than one night.

The Crow Road is my favourite book. It might speak more to Scots – I don't know – but it's wonderful.

IMHO his non-scifi, is good.

The Wasp Factory is pure genius.

Absolutely.

I'd recommend reading the Culture series (3 of the above mentioned books are part of it) in order if possible [0], they all have something to offer.

By the way, I'd recommend against reading any reviews for his books prior, they're easily spoiled.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series

Yes. I'd also recommend Inversions only after you've read some of the others - and start with Consider Phelbas (which for non-readers, is told from the perspective of a non-Culture citizen).

Strictly speaking, so is most of Use of Weapons and The Hydrogen Sonata, as well as significant portions of Look to Windward, Matter, and Surface Detail.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I'm realizing that one of his more common means of telling us about the Culture was through the eyes of non-Culture citizens.

You're right - but Phelbus stands out to me because you get almost no internal culture perspective - you are almost entirely embedded with a person who does not simply dislike the culture, but is actively working towards its destruction. Its a bold choice given the Culture was (in Banks' own words) the closest thing to a Utopian ideal.

> Consider Phelbas

"Consider Phlebas" has its merits, especially the outsider's POV of the Culture. But I'm part of the faction that feels The Player of Games is a better introduction, as it's more polished and shows off the Culture itself more.

Hmm - I like TPOG, but I can't say I enjoyed it or had it give me as much perspective on the Culture as Phlebas did - but I know its a favorite for a lot of people. Partially because I was more interested in the Changer as a character than the gameplayer.

Got a recommendation of a novel of his that is available in audiobook format? :)

I think almost all of his books are available as audiobooks.

http://www.audible.com/search/ref=sr_ab_1_1_3?searchAuthor=I...

I'd start off with Use of Weapons or the Player of Games

Thanks man, I'll check them out.

It was only yesterday I came across his most recent update[1] and was hoping the best for him. Truly a sad day for all who knew him, or enjoyed his works.

In the spirit of Douglas Adams' Towel Day[2], I propose the institution of 'Anti-Gravitas Day', date to be determined.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/21/iain-banks-updat...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_Day

> date to be determined

I've never read Banks and don't know anything about him or his worlds aside from the reputation, but failing to find a better day, I'd suggest picking the release date of one of his books.

How about January 2nd? It's the day on which the GCU Arbitrary left Earth orbit in The State of the Art.

I was just flicking through Excession trying to find some appropriate event, but yes, I think that would do nicely.

As a bonus, it's also a Scottish bank holiday[1]

[1] http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/People/bank-holidays/

It's the day after the day you spend recovering from Hogmanay...

>a Scottish bank holiday

I see what you did there.

Since hearing he was ill on Hacker News, back in April, I decided I should finally get back to reading. I followed the recommendations here and read The Player of Games, then moved on to Consider Phlebas which I finished this morning. Afterwards, I went over to his website to see how he was doing.

The two books I read were fantastic and it is bittersweet to have discovered them in such a way. However, I'm thankful to him for getting me back to reading. My thoughts are with his family and friends.

/me cracks a bottle of whiskey across the bow of the ROU The Infuriating Fragility Of Life In A Pre-Contact Civilisation

I had rather hoped that Iain was from the Culture - sending a Contact operative down to drink whisky and write about Drug-using Commies in Space would be just the kind of sneaky but nice thing they would do.

In the middle of the night, Iain turned over and whispered to the transceiver hidden in his wedding ring. "It's over, people. I just can't take any more of this terrible planet." After a brief argument, there was a soft pop as the Steaming Piles Of Freshly-Laid Gravitas Displaced the Culture agent, leaving a cooling meat puppet in his place.

Iain Banks, for me, was the individual responsible for introducing me to seriously good Scotch. ^_^

It was East(er)con '90, at the Adelphi Hotel - a rather wonderful example of architecture, designed by someone with a passion for steps, to the point that you couldn't walk more than 20' without at least a single step along the way - after a long, good day of con proceedings. We were gathered around in the lobby, around 3am, a circle of some dozen attendees, and he begins passing his whisky flask around. I forget what it was, specifically, but I believe something at least a dozen years old, maybe even a 21.

It was a revelation. ^_^

There was no barrier - no Famous Person, just a bunch of people who all enjoyed sci-fi, chatting into the early hours.

He made the world a richer place to inhabit.

In Liverpool(often passed it, never in it but heard some stories)?

What a shame. One of the most brilliant authors of his generation - I'd urge everyone here to read Use of Weapons, which is storytelling done right.

Possibly two of the most brilliant :)

RIP writer man...

A very good point. In that vein, let me recommend Whit from the non-scfi side; the most sympathetic book about a 19 year old cult member that you can imagine (especially from an avowed atheist like Banks)

Having defined the most beautiful imaginary world where there's no more sickness and unwanted death, and dying of cancer before 60. What a cruel world where're living in.

I'll go and reopen Excession for one more time - just for you, dear Iain.

I hope our galaxy's version of the Culture are good guys and backed him up, so he can have a very enjoyable and long life. RIP.

I'm really getting sick of my favorite people dying of cancer. I hope he had some fun.

I just hate cancer, and I can't believe we don't have the cure yet, but I guess there just isn't enough money in it.

Just in case you're not being facetious...Cancer is a label that groups a huge variety of diseases that involve "unregulated cell growth" (thanks Wikipedia!). Curing "cancer" is extremely difficult because it isn't one thing.

I was tempted to reply saying something similar, but he's a troll, and I don't think there's much point feeding it.

Curing any cancer is extremely easy. The hard part is the host surviving the cure :(

RIP. Never read many of his stuff but what I read was very good. I do hope he hadn't suffered much at the end.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1500#comic

Then at least the cure for one type of cancer. I am okay with there being different cures for different types. What I am not okay with is that is that I haven't seen a cure for any type of cancer that doesn't boil down to lets kill a ton of cells using methods that are slightly less likely to kill normal cells than cancer cells.

Many types of cancer that were uniformly fatal 50 years ago now have near-100% survival rates. The easier ones have been cracked. The hard ones are left.

The reason cancer is so hard to fight is that it's not so much a single type of bad cell but an evolutionary process (see: clonal evolution) that continues to generate hardier bad cells. Cancer is when cells become individually fit (in an aggressive way) at the expense of the organism. Cancer isn't one undesirable mutation; a typical cancer cell has at least 5 detectable mutations. It's a process.

The perversity is that cancer treatments are themselves carcinogenic (of different cancers) because the stress on the body (exposure to cellular toxics) causes faster mutation and creates more opportunities for mutant cells (that thrive amid the toxin, at least differentially) to take over.

This is also why cancer can stop responding to treatment. It's like antibiotic resistance.

People are working on more targeted treatments (including minimally invasive ones like radiofrequency ablation) than the typical systemic chemotherapy. The problem is that these are best used with early detection. At Stage IV, the cancer is likely to be all over the body and systemic treatments are necessary... but there are limits to how far those work.

I want to thank you for that answer, it is the first explenation I have been given that doesn't simply point out that doctors and their relatives also die of cancer (but what single doctor can found even a single research cure? FDA approval would take years and not be very certain at all).

But you say that some of the easier cancers have already been cured (near 100% survival rate, which is as good as it gets since it would always be possible to discover too late), or mostly so: do you know why this haven't been more widely published or talked about? I mean we haven't cured all infectiones diseases (or even the common cold), but when the cure was found for polio it was massively published, to the extends that court rooms took a break to hear the announcements.

Because not all people get all cancers. There are a lot of different types of cancer. If you get really really lucky, you get a benign tumor which can just be cut out and is pretty much gone forever.

A lot of people, and Mr Banks...not so much.

There are only a few cancers which can be cured eventhough they have spread everywhere. One of these are testicular germ cell tumours (eg Lance Armstrong), as well as some rare types of gestational trophoblastic disease (essentially out of control placenta) and acute leukaemia and lymphoma. It's not big news because these tumours are quite rare, and treatment for leukaemia/lymphoma has always worked better than for solid tumours. There is also nothing to be gained from a public health persepctive by telling people that testicular cancer can be cured with multiple cycles of chemo, surgery and radiotherapy.

Some cases of advanced colon cancer can be cured if the disease has only spread to the liver, by cutting out the disease in the liver.

But your most common cancers eg breast, lung, colon for the most part, gastric,prostate... they aren't curable once widespread.

That's a very good explanation. I would add that a 'cancer' takes 15 - 20 years to develop from one original cellular derangement to a clinically obvious tumour. we arrive in the last 12 months of the process and try to affect cure on this diverse, evolved cellular civilisation. No wonder we fail.

Harnessing the immune system however - now that could be more promising as an approach that the cancer can't evolve away from as easily eg announced just last week: http://www.ascopost.com/ViewNews.aspx?nid=4189

Let me introduce you to one type of cancer: chronic myelogenous leukemia. A friend of mine has it. Previously, the prognosis was terrible. Since the development of imatinib, survival rates are basically like anybody else.

That might depend on how you look at it:

http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research/n...

High risk, ambitious ideas are more than worth a try.

I wouldn't just say cancer is about "unregulated cell growth". What it's about is a conflict of interest at the cellular level. Some cells become individually fit at the expense of the highly specialized civilization called an organism. It's not just "growth" (mass effect) that makes them so dangerous, because if it were only that, the cancer would just displace stuff (like a benign tumor which, contrary to the name, can kill you-- especially in the brain, where displacement can be fatal because location/connection matters). In addition to reproduction, cancers steal resources from (and starve) or invade healthy cells and cause organs to fail.

The underlying theme isn't just "cell growth". It's about cells that override the body's mechanisms for coupling individual fitness with the body's needs. Much of what makes the disease hard to treat is that cancer cells become increasingly fit (individually speaking) over time, and while systemically damaging the environment (e.g. chemotherapy, radiation) works great if it kills all of them, if it doesn't, it leaves an even more fit subset alive.

A third of people in rich countries die from cancer. There's plenty of money in it. It is just that unregulated cell growth is an extremely difficult problem to solve.

We need more regulation!

But yeah, there seems to be tons of money in the problem. Take into account how many rich people don't want to die and have cancer. And, while there are many different kinds of cancer, they all just boil down to unregulated cell growth. Could that be solved programmatically? I think so, provided we could interpret existing genetic code and write it from scratch. But we are far from this--at the moment, we can't even read it in long strands very well.

The underpinning assumption seems to be that genetic code works as a program - that there is computation as understood in the sense of Church/Turing. I don't know if that is true. I do know that no one knows if it is true.

The other stronger assumption is that the processes that underpin how cells work are mechanistic in the way that we understand mechanistic processes, that is to say that there is no hidden step that invokes "a new physics". Again I say I do not know if this is true, but no one knows that it is true.

We are silly apes at the beginning of an intellectual adventure that may last for hundreds of thousands of years, or more. Or it may not, we may snuff ourselves out, or we may find that things are as simple as our current theories seem to intuit. However I would point to the following; until recently (20 years) cosmologists were utterly unaware of 80% of the universe as it is now perceived, there are five models of probability in common use in statistics even though there are probably (geddit) an infinite number of models, no one knows what life is, no one can adequately define intelligence, no one can adequately define consciousness; no one can describe the processes that define a cell; no one can make a list like this that is not risible (seriously). The point is, we know shit, and it's really not surprising given how big the universe is and how long we've been in the game of trying (with any degree of seriousness) to understand it.

Cells certainly don't have "new physics". But chemistry is the manifold interactions of well understood physics - look up what we're currently studying there to get a sense of the scale of those permutations.

"The cure for cancer" is about an ill-defined goal as "the right way to earn money" - it's a very complex topic and we're making a shitload of progress on it every year.

Which doesn't mean it doesn't suck.

There is a lot of money invested in this, it's just that it's terribly hard, and - as others said - there is no simple cure.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1162

That's pretty sobering for a comic

Yea, this also struck me rather hard.

http://xkcd.com/931/

Or maybe it's just one of those things in the real world that doesn't have any easy answers.

They're doing very well with testicular cancer treatment. About 90% are cured regardless of stage. Treatment of other cancers hasn't progressed as well unfortunately.

Agreed.

For some incredibly interesting reading on the history of battle against cancer I highly recommend The Empreror of All Maladies [0].

0: http://www.amazon.com/The-Emperor-All-Maladies-Biography/dp/...

Why do great people like Iain Banks, Steve Jobs, Carl Sagan all die relatively young, while evil sons of bitches like Dick Cheney live to a ripe old age despite having 100 heart attacks?

Confirmation bias

Obviously confirmation bias is a very long term illness.

There are a plenty of examples that say otherwise.

Also, the older someone is the higher chance you'll get to hate him. "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain."

Most people I know become better as they age, even if the change is slight (i.e. wholly bad people rarely turn to good people just because they get older).

Certainly, I'm a much better person than I was ten years ago. That might just be reversion to the mean, because I was somewhat of an asshole.

Even if the get better, some of them might get the power and time to do stuff that more people will consider bad.

I have no idea if Dick Cheney got better or worse with age, for example, but being VP under Bush certainly gave him a far better opportunity for stuff people disliked about him to be noticed.

Younger or older people have an unfortunate habit of letting the exercise of power turn them into "bad people" (whatever that means).

I don't think than Iain Banks, Steve Jobs, and Carl Sagan made contributions as important as:

Galois — 20; Markov — 25; Abel — 26; Ramsey — 26; Ramanujan — 32; Riemann — 39; Turing — 41; Von Neumann — 53, etc.

But Erdős, Cantor, Newton, Archimedes, and Gödel (though he starved himself to death) lived past 70. So not all great mathematicians die young.

dont forget gauss.

Vladimir Markov, who died at 25, probably isn't the brother most people would associate with the name.

not to diminish Vladimir's contribution to mathematics at such a young age - but Andrey Markov, of the chains and processes, lived until 66.

You guys don't seem to get sarcasm. Obviously, I realize my statement is not literal (hence, the 100 heart attacks). I'm surprised someone didn't point out that Cheney has only had 3 heart attacks.

I don't think you understand what sarcasm is. Here's a hint: it's not an appropriate reaction to death.

Speak for yourself, sometimes it is.

I feel like I'm dealing with a bunch of Sheldons from "Big Bang Theory"

Yes. Your genius of humor is unrecognized by the base masses. That's entirely what this is.

(That was sarcasm.)

you obviously don't watch "Big Bang Theory". Sheldon is not anywhere close to a base of masses.

For you, maybe. Please don't presume to dictate to the rest of the world.

Having lost a number of people in the last couple of years, I am of the firm opinion that nobody gets to say what an appropriate reaction to death is. It's a big thing; people have the feelings they have.

I do think there are more and less appropriate contexts to express those feelings. I think the ring theory is a pretty good guide: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0407-si...

I think here we're all in the same ring in regards to Banks, so I'm ok with people expressing their grief as it comes to them, as long as they're not being giant dicks to other grievers in the process.

Since three distinct people felt a compulsion to comment on it over an 8 hour span saying the exact same thing,

I apologize. Yes, sarcasm is sometimes an appropriate reaction to death.

I stand by the assertion that sixQuarks' attempt at sarcasm as an attempt at dark humor was still inappropriate, which was completely unclear from my original statement.

Is he so great? His books are great I hear, but he's antisemetic: He supports BDS.

I haven't decided if I want to read his books anyway. Divorce the artist from the art.

(And please don't tell me that BDS is not antisemetic because that's nonsense - just look at who the founders were.)

I didn't know Banks personally, unfortunately, but I challenge you to find a single anti-semitic statement he made. As for BDS, I wasn't familiar with it until 5 minutes ago, but it seems to be a group calling for a non-violent boycott of Israel. I have a hard imagining how you can paint everybody who supports them as antisemitic.

If you want a shortcut into his politics, I suggest you read Dead Air.

> but it seems to be a group calling for a non-violent boycott of Israel

They are calling for the delegitimization of Israel as a country.

> how you can paint everybody who supports them as antisemitic

I can't. I don't know him, but if you are going to publicly support a group it behooves you to look into them first.

Thanks for the mention of Dead Air - have you read it? I'm not familiar with UK politics - why is he so mad at Tony Blair?

> They are calling for the delegitimization of Israel as a country.

[Citation needed] While there is a fair bit of criticism flying around that argues one way or the other that thought through, the goals of the group could mean just that, there is no statement from the group itself. So they are certainly not 'calling'.

It is a very controversial group, I give you that, but it is not as clear cut as you make it seem to be. I agree that I wouldn't touch it with a stick, but that still doesn't make it as easy you try to make it seem.

> They are calling for the delegitimization of Israel as a country.

They are? They don't exactly advertise that on their website. Even if they were, it's like saying "Belgium is not a real country". It's orthogonal to one's feelings wrt Belgian nationals. Unless you think Stephen Hawking, another BDS supporter, dons a balaclava at night to beat up his kippa-bearing neighbours.

I have read Dead Air. And it's pretty easy to understand why he would be pissed off at Blair. If your country was headed by a compulsive liar, whose lies had brought your country in a protracted, costly, pointless war, you'd be pissed too.

Not every critique of Israel is antisemitism, the same way that critique of Mugabe doesn't make you racist.

Pretending that it is so is one of the traditional "arguments" of US far right, and I don't think it has place any in reasonable discussion.

EDIT: just in case you're wondering why the downvote.

> Not every critique of Israel is antisemitism

Most are. People and organization who make a point of criticizing every injustice they know about can make that distinction.

But for virtually everyone else criticism of Israel is just thinly veiled antisemitism. And pretending it's not also doesn't have any place in reasonable discussion.

It's especially obvious from counties that criticize Israel for kicking out and/or not allowing back in Palestinians - and simultaneously have expelled thousands for Jews from their own lands. (Or from people who know about it, and yet don't also criticize the Arab countries.)

I've heard rebuttals along the lines of "I don't have to criticize everyone for my claims to be valid". But when the only county they focus on is Israel the true feelings are obvious.

> But for virtually everyone else criticism of Israel is just thinly veiled antisemitism. And pretending it's not also doesn't have any place in reasonable discussion.

If criticizing Israel is the de facto definition of antisemitism, maybe antisemitism isn't as bad as i though?

Criticizing Israel is the de facto symptom of antisemitism.

It's the "socially accepted" version. Because, rarely it really is just criticizing of Israel - but that's rare. So people claim "I'm also one of the rare ones".

> It's the "socially accepted" version. Because, rarely it really is just criticizing of Israel - but that's rare. So people claim "I'm also one of the rare ones".

What? It's very easy to find something to criticize Israel for, so I don't understand this reasoning. Either you want to stop all conversations that are any bit negative about Israel, or your honestly believe that everyone is an antisemite.

I did not say everyone - I said it's rare. Sure, if you go specifically looking for something to criticize you'll find it.

But you'll find that most of the people who criticize Israel are obsessed with Israel, who focus only on Israel, and don't care about any other county. Their true motives are pretty obvious.

Not really. Israel has made a lot of poor decisions. They could have delt with Palestinians either though expulsion or integration and the problem would have been dealt with instead they have tried to compromise which has failed and presumably will continue to do so. I am not saying they need to do X or Y just criticizing them for a failed strategy. Granted, people would also criticize them for either choice, but just because your in a no win situation does not man you can't make poor decisions.

PS: If anything I am amazed at the Jewish people for prospering dispite there government and regional politics rather than blaming them for the failures of there government.

Did he ever do anything bad to Israel? Did Israel ever do anything good to him?

As you know from history, if both answers are "no", then he's not antisemitic, he just happen to have an opinion.

Lovely bit of hasbara but you're not convincing anyone. Anti-zionism is not anti-semitism.

While still alive, Dick Cheney has to be sort of living in his own little personalized hell - imagine everywhere you go 99% of the people in the room think you are an evil piece of shit.

I expect he mostly goes to places where 99% of the people in the room don't think that.

agreed but that means he probably can't go anywhere outside of certain places in the dc-metro area

I'm pretty sure there's a large area in the middle of the country, far from the coasts, where he can go just fine..

I am so glad he had the chance to see how much he and his work are appreciated, and by so many people. RIP.

I recall reading an article by him (about a month or so ago), shortly before reading an article about a new possible cancer cure (sadly still untested on humans). A sad loss for the literary world (amongst others). I hope he got the opportunity to make "an honest widow" (as he joked) of his girlfriend before he left.

Safe travels Iain, you'll be missed by many.

He did indeed marry Adelle back in April.

For anyone unfamiliar, that's Adele Hartley, not Adele the singer.

I've loved most of his books since I first read The Wasp Factory in 1987. A sad loss. I hope someone does a faithful and sympathetic movie version of one of his culture novels. RIP

No such thing as a movie, but there's a short fan film called Something Real: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET8IFxPo61w If I remember correctly, Banks wasn't opposed to someone making a MMORPG based on Culture, I don't know how he felt about films. Maybe it's better Hollywood didn't touch it, the feel of Culture could probably be pulled off only in anime form.

I've heard rumours of rights being purchased etc, however not to Consider Phlebas. I think given the nature of cgi these days, it wouldn't be that hard to pull off a big budget version of Excession. Which, as I've just noticed was written in 1996. Is it really that old?

Most of the plot in Excession is however done in space-IRC logs and space-emails between Minds, so I'm not sure it would lend itself well to movie form. Player of Games is similar example, lot of what's happening is metaphored using games and would be hard to transfer to screen without breaking the show-don't-tell rule of good movies.

Consider Phlebas would work, I think even Banks himself said that from the Culture series, it's the most Movie-like book. And I think we have some directors crazy enough to do Use of Weapons right, though it would require John Murphy for music ;)

I'm feeling really sad about this. His culture novels in particular had a big effect on me. Right now it seems like the world just got a little bit less interesting and less fun.

This is a sad day... the world, hell the universe, had become a greyer place... Rest in peace Mr. Banks. Your books saved me from depression&suicide.

I spent six weeks in London for a college exchange class the summer of 1990 and discovered Banks and the Culture; I believe it was Consider Phlebas. One of the best parts of that summer. I remember the delays in releases of books once back in the US was agonizing.

Fuck cancer.

So quick :(

I hoped he would have a bit more time to enjoy his newly wedded state.

Thanks for all the wonderful stories.

Maybe a little more science for science's sake, and less science that starts with "how many patients and how much money will it make us" and we'd have a much better chance at beating cancer.

We're allowing gene sequence patents FFS.

Which is why I left academic science in the 90's and became an engineer - my brain is still stimulated but my blood pressure is way (WAY) lower.

Damn. I literally just finished reading Use of Weapons two days ago. I had no idea he was ill :-(

A list of Culture spaceships: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_in_the_Cultu...

I propose that if Scotland does get independence that we adopt Culture ship names for our future (tiny) navy.

I rather like the idea of a fishery protection vessel called the "Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall".

> I rather like the idea of a fishery protection vessel called the "Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall".

I'd go with the Me, I'm counting.

What a wonderful idea - less intimidating than the UK's use of SkyNet for UK satellite systems, but unfortunately far less likely to happen.

In the meantime we can always use ship names for online avatars ;)

I would have thought the prize for intimidating ship names goes to HMS Vengeance, one of the UK's Trident missile subs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Vengeance_%28S31%29

NB I've always assumed Iain's fascination with ship names was related to his father being in the Navy - like his fascination with Really Big Things was influenced by living in North Queensferry as a kid.

So Much for Subtlety.

I'd vote for a political party called The Culture, with policies to match, in an independent Scotland.

But if you had a Culture party succeed, the benevolent Minds heading it would just take over. You'd vote away democracy, basically.

Very far off tangent: I do not know who the author is, but in reading the first paragraph I thought that "The Crow Road and Complicity" was a single book because of the exclusion of the Oxford Comma and titles do not capitalize words like "and." I would assume that the BBC used the Oxford Comma (according to this article, they do not), does the author?

The Oxford comma isn't taught in the UK, at least when I was a lad. There was a strict rule - you don't use commas before the word 'and'.

Interesting, and thanks for the reply. I did see in the Wikipedia article that there is a divid on its usage in British practice.

The downvotes on my original comment is interesting. I'm certain that a writer would like talk of his craft after his demise, just like programmers would like to see comments about if he used ternary operators, why/why not.

Sad, if not unexpected, news.

My only other comment would be to encourage folk to go read his books. All of 'em - not just the "M". Too many geekish folk only pick up his Culture books - and they're missing out on some really great reads.

a man of taste. damn good writer too.

Welp, I'm now contractually obligated to go read his books.

Yeah, like I needed an excuse to read more scifi /s.

Such a sad day.

He managed to create better Kafkian Castle than Kafka himself in his second novel "Walking on Glass". He left a lot of pages to enjoy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com