As a representative writer of the Scottish Renaissance during the 1980s, Iain Banks is certainly a remarkable name. Apart from his "serious" writings, he also publishes a series of "New Space Opera" works under the name "Iain M. Banks," where he introduces a galactic, post-scarcity, and anarchosocialist utopia "Culture." This is usually considered the dawning of the "British SF Boom" emerging since the 1990s. In Iain M. Banks, as part of the "Modern Masters of Science Fiction" of University of Illinois Press, the author Paul Kincaid anchors his argument on the doubleness of Banks's writing. He starts from R. D. Laing's "Divided Self" theories, demonstrating the left-winged political appeals embedded in Banks's novels, while amplifying his influence on contemporary Scottish literature in general.

Iain Banks  /  Paul Kincaid  /  New Space Opera  /  Scottish Renaissance  /  British SF Boom