Finding out one of your heroes is dying is different to finding out your Mum or Dad, or a family pet, is dying. when your hero dies you feel lost, bereft, and somehow cheated; no more books/music/movies, it's a terribly selfish set of feelings.
Today I found out that my favouritist Sci-Fi author and one of my favourite fiction authors is going to die. Iain Banks and Iain M Banks have been diagnosed with terminal cancer of, well, pretty much everything between neck and groin. I felt all of the above, and lost. Lost because Iain made a significant contribution to the entity known as me. Me.
Several years ago, having had a disastrous relationship with a girl, while living in /Edinburgh, I picked up a copy of Complicity. In the protagonist I found an empathic twin, a like minded soul (with the same taste in music and pastimes). It's a strange coincidence that that protagonist was going to die of cancer too! Crow Road came next and then I made a blinding discovery, this was the same man who wrote 'Consider Phlebas', a sci-fi book that made me jump up and take notice. Iain Banks and Iain M Banks were one and the same, and not some legally definable pair. Since that time I've jumped on every book he's written, drank in his contemporary, Ken MacLeod, who borrows quite heavily from the same pool Banks uses to fund his stories of social inclusion/exclusion and technology driven societies, and had innumerable drunken conversations about the relevance of Culturenomics as applicable to us on Earth.
Iain has less than a year to live, according to his statement delivered with typical gallows humour today, proposing to his girlfriend with the words 'would you do ne the honour of becoming my widow?'. The details of his illness can be found elsewhere.
So the outpouring of grief has been massive and widespread and there'll be all kinds of shenanigans surrounding his slow demise. We all feel desperately sorry for him and his soon to be new widow-in-waiting, Adele. (A cynical part of me suspects he is putting legal safeguards in place as to the disbursement of his estate, he seems that practical about things!). No doubt the literary world will tell Iain what he already knows (he's been told it often enough by his legions of fans) and, who knows, he might even get an award, which is often mandatory for the dead or rapidly approaching. What happens at the end is, quite frankly, none of my bloody business. Suffice it to say I hope the family Banks doesn't go through too much heartbreak over the loss and I hope they all come through the other end in one piece.
Personally? I'm fucking annoyed that my all-time favourite Sci-Fi writer is leaving and that one of my top five fiction writers is going too. Because, you see, I'm human and selfish, and while I can understand what his family are going through, cancer and death have thoroughly stalked my family, I'm sure Iain will also be frustrated at not being able to give us more of what he obviously loves doing, giving us a glimpse into the warm, loving, caring and utterly reprehensible landscape that is the human race.
You will, absolutely, be missed!
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