Iain Bankss Culture lives on

The place we might hope to get to after weve dealt with all our stupidities Iain Banks on the Culture stories. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

If the death of Iain Banks last summer left a giant, Culture-shaped hole in your life, it is really worth sampling these hugely detailed and lengthy interviews with the late, great man. Conducted by Jude Roberts for her PhD in 2010, the interviews have just been published by the excellent speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons, as part of a funding drive that has raised more than $15,000 (9,500) to pay for the magazines 15th year of publication.

The full, strident, and often playful answers he gives here are entirely characteristic of his writing and persona more generally, says Roberts; and its true, many of Bankss answers are a joy.

Many critics and reviewers have claimed that the Culture represents the American Libertarian ideal. Given that this is clearly not the case, how do you characterise the politics of the Culture? asks Roberts. Really? I had no idea, replies Banks. Lets be clear: unless I have profoundly misunderstood its position, I pretty much despise American Libertarianism. Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness? I beg to differ.

We also learn that Banks started work on a Culture-English dictionary. I was doing it as a laugh, as a sort of tiny hobby, for a brief while. It was quite fun working out how much information you could pack into a nonary grid but it was always going to be too big a job, and it all felt rather arbitrary, just pulling phonemes out of the air and deciding, Right, thats what General Contact Unit is in Marain (something like Wukoorth Sapoot-Jeerd, if memory serves).

And that the Culture stories are me at my most didactic, though its largely hidden under all the funny names, action, and general bluster. The Culture represents the place we might hope to get to after weve dealt with all our stupidities. Maybe. I have said before, and will doubtless say again, that maybe we that is, homo sapiens are just too determinedly stupid and aggressive to have any hope of becoming like the Culture, unless we somehow find and isolate/destroy the genes that code for xenophobia, should they exist.

It emerges that Banks doesnt think much of work by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, or Emanuel Levinas (or any other continental philosophers). The little Ive read I mostly didnt understand, and the little I understood of the little Ive read seemed to consist either of rather banal points made difficult to understand by deliberately opaque and obstructive language (this might have been the translation, though I doubt it), or just plain nonsense. Or it could be Im just not up to the mark intellectually, of course.

Theres more so much more. Its got me itching to crack open my old copy of Consider Phlebas, and start the whole thing all over again. Although, is my favourite Culture novel The Player of Games? Decisions, decisions.

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Iain Bankss Culture lives on