Iain M. Banks: Time Is Short

Iain Banks, the brilliant Scottish novelist, has announced that he has been informed that he only has months to live and that The Quarry will be his last book.

In a post on his website titled "A Personal Statement from Iain Banks," the author writes that he is being felled by cancer:

The bottom line, now, I'm afraid, is that as a late stage gall bladder cancer patient, I'm expected to live for 'several months' and it’s extremely unlikely I'll live beyond a year. So it looks like my latest novel, The Quarry, will be my last.

Banks, born in 1954, wrote mainstream novels as "Iain Banks" and used the cleverly secretive moniker "Iain M. Banks" for his science fiction books, many of which featured the far-future galaxy-spanning drama of the Culture civilization. Banks' most recent Culture novel is The Hydrogen Sonata.