Iain Gray: I was a secret member of the Culture club

I WASN’T allowed to admit I liked science fiction, but now I can reveal Iain M Banks is my favourite writer, says Iain Gray

Politicians return to parliament this week after Easter recess. For party leaders and the like, one of the signs of summer’s approach will be newspapers asking them to reveal their “summer reading”. For busy politicians this may pose a problem, since it is not that long since they provided their “books of the year” and they may not actually have struggled through too many volumes in the intervening weeks.

For their advisers, though, this is an opportunity to emphasise their principal’s intellect, depth, empathy, erudition or instinctive grasp of the zeitgeist. There is the chance for a bit of back-scratching too, by picking another politician’s effort for a free plug. So beware of politicians’ lists which include weighty economic tomes, parliamentary diaries or novels which actually only make sense to the under-30s.

For Scottish politicians, of course, this is a chance above all to show how Scottish you are. It can be history, biography, poetry or literature, and your copy can be suspiciously pristine, but it had better be Scottish. Just as every one of Alex Salmond’s desert island discs were Scottish (with Dolly Parton a “guilty pleasure”), I defy anyone to find a book choice he has made that is not Scottish too. It is a narrow approach to life and literature, but we all fall into line.

Thank goodness then for the likes of Ian Rankin and Iain Banks, who can be relied on to publish something new, and excellent, right on cue. Indeed, Banks has just brought out Stonemouth, which I confidently predict will appear in many colleagues’ summer lists. Had I still been Labour leader, it probably would have featured in mine. Yet the truth is that I was far more excited to learn that the writer is currently in his Iain M Banks persona, well into his next science-fiction novel in the Culture series.

I love the Culture novels. On at least two occasions I caused apoplexy amongst my advisers by trying to submit one of them as my “book of the year”. Last year it was the harrowing, mind-blowing Surface Detail. However, those around me felt that admitting to enjoying science fiction would be political suicide. As it turns out, there are other ways to do that which are all too real. Anyway, I just enjoy the books. It is not as if I dress up as Captain Kirk and attend Star Trek conventions. I read other books too. What is more, there is a Scottish track record here, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and a socialist one with HG Wells, Fabian and author of The Time Machine.

In spite of his own reported Trekkie status, the First Minister seems to be with my advisers. He interviewed Banks at last year’s Edinburgh Book Festival, encouraged perhaps by the author’s declared support for independence and antipathy to the Labour Party. His opening gambit was “Why is it Iain M Banks for the science fiction and Iain Banks for the good books?” Some of the less charitable bloggers in attendance speculated that Alex appeared not to have read any of the books in question, but I do not believe that. I just think he is wrong.

In my view Iain Banks is brilliant, but Iain M Banks is world-class. The depth and range of imagination he brings to these novels is constantly breathtaking, as good as and better than anything the likes of William Gibson or “new weird “writers such as China Miéville can do. The Culture is an imagined civilisation greater than Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, which sparked my interest in this genre when I was a child, and the philosophical questions Banks explores are every bit as profound as those pondered by Arthur C Clarke.

Banks also creates a powerful emotional connection between the reader and a universe which can only just be visualised. The Culture is a hedonistic, anarchic, liberal and yet highly organised Utopia which the author himself describes as “wishy-washy but militantly wishy-washy”. I want to live in the Culture – and for my fellow politicians concluding that my advisers were right all along – in the same way you want to be in The West Wing (or Borgen for the younger set).

Wishy-washy or not, the Culture is not entirely benign, and the novels focus on the darker, or at least ambiguous, side of their society. In particular, characters wrestle with the morality of intervening in other civilisations to accelerate evolutionary growth or avoid societal catastrophe, even at the cost of death and destruction now to avoid worse later. This must be a deliberate meditation on the central foreign policy question of our time, and yet the Culture does intervene, on a galactic scale, while Banks was always a vociferous opponent of the Iraq War and will, I think, never forgive Labour for supporting it. All of which just makes the context of the series as interesting as the works themselves.

With its impossibly well balanced and well rounded citizens who seek new experiences and dangerous pursuits simply for the pleasure, satisfaction and enlightenment they bring, the Culture reminds me of nothing less than Aldous Huxley’s Island – but with intergalactic travel, artificial intelligence and an imaginative sweep which even Huxley’s experiments with peyote did not afford him. Iain M Banks really is as good as that, and my conscience is now clear because, unencumbered by high office and the concerns of image, I can reveal that my best summer read in 2008 was Matter and in 2011 was Surface Detail. We should celebrate Scottish writing this good.

What did I say at the time? Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving and Back from the Brink by Alistair Darling. Well, everyone needs friends, and it really is a good read too.

• Iain Gray is Labour MSP for East Lothian