I quite enjoyed The Business myself, though I think Whit is my favourite (after The Wasp Factory). A Song of Stone hit me pretty hard, but I couldn't say I enjoyed it. I'm still not sure what I think of it. The other Banks I've read was The Crow Road, which never really grabbed me. It felt rather bland compared to his other work.

Love Banks, particularly The Crow Road, which could only have hit me harder if I had actually grown up in Scotland, instead of being part of the diaspora. Another of his non-M books that I really like (in a creepy, obsessively horrible -- him, not me, kind of way) is Complicity. I've quite enjoyed his Culture books (most of the M ones), but for the last couple, I've been feeling like he needs to turn on the style again, as he did in the early books. I'm still enjoying them, but feeling a little jaded. The Culture (M) book which kicked my ass the most was The Use of Weapons, but The Player of Games is the favourite of folks I know who read M.

Using his middle initial is ghettoizing? Pseudonyms are useful as a kind of branding, and adding an "M." is about as transparent as you can get. It's as much for the people who want to read SF as the ones who don't.

I dunno. There's worlds of difference between Steve Martin and Steve M. Martin, director of Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey. There's a few writers like that, too, but I can't think of their names right now.

Maybe he's not ghettoizing his work, but his website splits his books between "fiction" and "science fiction". How many other writers add a middle initial to distinguish genre writing?

Maybe he's not ghettoizing his work, but his website splits his books between "fiction" and "science fiction". How many other writers add a middle initial to distinguish genre writing?

He's the only one I know who does it. It seemed kinda edgy and cool 20 years ago when he did it first. The Wasp Factory was treated as serious litrachure in the UK when it came out. He may have wanted to clearly distinguish the SF for the Sunday Times crowd. He doesn't make a big fuss about it, as far as I can tell, it just is what it is.

Banks trivia from wiki (I'd heard this before):

While a student at Stirling University, Banks appeared as an extra in the final battle scene of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which was filmed at the nearby Doune Castle.

So, I finished The Historian last night. It's SO not a short story. There's too much everything in it, other than sense-making.

Now, this book was aimed at me. There having been a couple books I've read, where it's like the author took everything stored in my brain, everything I've been exposed to or interested in, and used it to write a book. One was House of Leaves, and The Historian was certainly another. It's about Dracula, and historians, and the love of old books, and is set in the Balkans. I think there were two locales I haven't visited and explored myself, and one of them was probably made up. I should've either loved it or hated it.

In fact, I'm "eh" on it. There were some great ideas, and some great images, but the writing sucked the life out of them (sorry). It was often like reading a history dissertation, or the summary of someone's research.

And what's up with the big reveal? The inciting incident is the appearance of a mysterious book among a scholar's things, and we find that similar books have magically appeared to other people. Why and who left the book was the big mystery to me, not "Where in the World is Vlad Tepes?" and when it transpired that Drac left them because he wanted someone to catalogue his library I said "Lame!"

3 stars. Good for the Dracula completist.

Raq, I agree. It was ok. Interesting in parts, but overall, a lot of "What was IT? WTF?!"

Donald Westlake has quite a few pseudonyms. And now publishers do things like this because even if you know Stark and Coe and Westlake are all one person, those names are a handy way to identify the kind of story you're about to read. Almost all of his writing is either mystery or SF; he's not trying to avoid a genre stigma. But there's a world of difference between a Parker story and a Dortmunder story, even though they both may get shelved in the crime/mystery section.

There are other reasons to use pseudonyms, like with a writer who's really prolific, or because multiple publishers are involved. But again, when the name change is as transparent as this, I assume it's branding.

...Aha. Google knows all:

"It was a mistake," he says, "It seemed like a good idea at the time ... I put in the manuscript of The Wasp Factory as Iain M. Banks, and my publishers then, Macmillan, thought the M. was a little fussy, and would I mind losing it. It didn't bother me in the least, so I did. But then I got grief from my family - 'Are you ashamed of being a Menzies, then?' When the first science-fiction novel was coming out I had thought of using a pseudonym and then decided against, but I had what I thought was a good idea and said, 'let's put the M. back.' There's a sort of historical precedent: Brian W. Aldiss puts the W. in when he's writing non-SF. But I regret doing it, intensely now, because I'm always answering questions about it, and also because it passes on ammunition to the literary snobs who just assume that I make the distinction because I'm writing down when I'm writing science fiction."

[link]

Donald Westlake has quite a few pseudonyms.

His dark fantasy short story "Nackles" about an anti-Claus is a favorite of mine.

Thanks for the info on Westlake's pseudonyms. I've passed them on to a friend of mine who likes his books, but probably hasn't researched him.

The Historian didn't grab me, I'm afraid. I made it about 150 pages in, looked at how far I had to go, and decided that there were other books I'd rather be reading. Pity, because I liked some of it. Just not enough.

I made it about 150 pages in, looked at how far I had to go, and decided that there were other books I'd rather be reading.

See, my other book when I hit that point was I Jonathan Strange which I'd just given up on to start reading The Historian. So I tried Strange again, and then went back to Historian as the lesser of the two boredoms.

Oh, yeah, I really liked Nackles. Quite a few of his short stories are sort of Dahl-esque.