06-11-2013, 08:09 AM
At one point, I seem to recall, literary analysis determined that Banks was using the largest vocabulary of any major writer in the UK. This may have been helped by the segment in Excession where the Minds start using deliberately obscure (but real) words for comic effect.
He was astonishingly clever - in 2006 he won Celebrity Mastermind on the same day his team won Celebrity University Challenge (he was, of course, the captain).
He was famous as an author in three, almost orthogonal fields; SF, mainstream literature, and non-fiction about whisky. Once I sat next to someone reading Raw Spirit on an aeroplane; I was reading The Algebraist, and my neighbour was unaware of Bank's other writings.
He was astonishingly clever - in 2006 he won Celebrity Mastermind on the same day his team won Celebrity University Challenge (he was, of course, the captain).
He was famous as an author in three, almost orthogonal fields; SF, mainstream literature, and non-fiction about whisky. Once I sat next to someone reading Raw Spirit on an aeroplane; I was reading The Algebraist, and my neighbour was unaware of Bank's other writings.