I must have read pretty much all Iain Banks... I cannot think of a more enjoyable writer... Canal Dreams would make a terrific move. It is just as topical now as it was when it appeared, perhaps more so. There is a love story, along with terrorists and hostages, great locations - mostly in the great lake in the middle of the Panama Canal - and it was thrilling -- Sam Neill * Guardian *
Extraordinary, brilliant, bloody * Fay Weldon *
Currents of dark wit swirl through Banks' writing, enriching its buoyancy... and, like Graham Greene, he can readily open the reader's senses to the 'foreignness' of places * Scotland on Sunday *
Short, compact and brilliantly crafted * Scotsman *
His technical facility with language now matches his instinct for storytelling, and the combination makes him one of the best British novelists * Guardian *
What makes Banks a significant novelist is the love and effort that go into his works, and his acute sense of the ways in which people can suffer * Independent on Sunday *
Banks is a phenomenon: the wildly successful, fearlessly creative author of brilliant and disturbing non-genre novels (The Wasp Factory, Complicity), he's equally at home writing pure science fiction (like Feersum Endjinn) of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance. I suspect we have actual laws against this sort of thing in the United States, but Iain Banks, with the "M" or without, is currently a legal import * William Gibson *

Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. He gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both his mainstream and his science fiction novels. Iain Banks died in June 2013.