Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr

Kirtley. Hello and welcome to episode 2009 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Simone Karate.

He holds a PhD in comparative literature from Purdue University and works as course director

for science fiction and fantasy at Folsale University.

He's also a senior research scientist at the Astro Sociology Research Institute

and author of the book The Generation Starship in Science Fiction and we'll be speaking with

him today about his new book the culture series of Ian M Banks a critical

introduction. The Culture Series is one of my favorite science fiction book series and I'm very excited to be able to

speak with Simone about it and I also want to thank listener Rory Carroll for letting me

know about Simone's new book and so now here's our interview with Simone Karate

all right so we're interview with Simone Karate.

All right, so we're here with Simone Karate.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, thank you for having me.

Hello everyone.

Okay, so your book paints a picture of Ian Banks as being this really colorful character.

So could you just tell us a bit about his personality? Just what was he like?

In a sense, I think, there were several sides to him which is one of the reasons why I found him fascinating as a as a personality.

On the one hand there was the crazy Ian Banks who once in 1987 at a science fiction

convention decided to scale the building I mean the the side of the hotel he was he was staying at where the convention

was was taking place because that's how he had decided he wanted to go to his

...