Iain Banks R.I.P.

Today the country lost two of its greatest modern novelists in the body of one person. Iain Banks's modern-world fiction was formidable and clearly influential on the likes of Christopher Brookmyre, Kate Atkinson or Richard Milward, to name just a few, but his impact on science fiction was immeasurable, probably greater than anyone since the age of Dick or Asimov. The universe of The Culture was unlike anything anyone had ever conceived of in its complexity and breadth of imagination. The scale of his loss is impossible to fathom.