I have nothing much to say that I didn’t already say.  He wrote some of my all-time favorite books.  I envied the scope and depth of his creations.  If I imagined what kind of work I wanted to write in my ideal world, Banks’ Culture  stories would be one of the examples.

He went much too soon.  He thought he’d have more time.  We thought so, too.

One of the pitfalls of science fiction is that we can read about all these wonderful places and times where things like this can be dealt with and the world is more at our command than it is, but when the book is finished and we close the cover, we still live here.  And here we lose people every day to things we know we should be able to beat.  Because we’ve seen that future, laid out for us by fine writers and great minds.

Some day.  Writers like Iain Banks showed us.  Some day.