When he has a question, he will release a wasp into the Factory, and depending on how it dies, he draws a different conclusion.

Frank relates to the reader how he killed three of his relatives in the same manner used for talking about the weather or what you bought from the supermarket. He completed a first novel, The Hungarian Lift-Jet, at 16 and a second, TTR (also entitled The Tashkent Rambler) in his first year at Stirling University in 1972. A project to publish Banks's unseen early drawings, maps and sketches from the Culture universe alongs with his writings and notes on the setting was underway in February 2018.

An extract from Banks's contribution to the written collection Generation Palestine: Voices from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, entitled "Our People", appeared in The Guardian in the wake of the author's cancer revelation. You can hardly breathe for fear of missing a symbol, or a fine phrase, or a horror so chilling that your hair stands on end. The book opens with the news that Eric has just escaped from the hospital, and is making his way back home. His brother Eric is, he tells us, "crazy" and lucky to have the affection of "somebody sane" - himself. Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different reasons than I'd disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim.

It was also characteristic in another way: Banks had a large web-attentive readership who liked to follow his latest reflections as well as his writings. The couple's wedding certificate shows that Banks, 59, of North Queensferry, married 42-year-old Miss Hartley at the five-star hotel [Inverlochy Castle Hotel, The Highlands], in a short humanist ceremony on Good Friday. My friend Tiffany McDaniel, who recently released her brilliantly, compelling first novel The Summer that Melted Everything, suggested that if I needed something to read while in Scotland to pick up The Wasp Factory.Banks's The State of the Art, adapted for radio by Paul Cornell, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2009 with Nadia Molinari producing and directing. Enter – if you can bear it – the extraordinary private world of Frank, just sixteen, and unconventional, to say the least. What exactly are the Sacrifice Poles and the Skull Grounds, not to mention the titular Factory itself?