When a Middle Initial Has Transatlantic Significance

Mr. Iain Banks is a Scottish author with two personas. As Iain Banks he writes mainstream, if slightly edgy, novels. As Iain M. Banks he writes science fiction novels, including the Culture series, which deals with a vast and sprawling interstellar utopian civilization. The M is important here. Without it you know you’re getting a mainstream story. With it, you know you’re getting sci-fi. But not in the USA apparently.

While wandering around Newark Liberty airport in New Jersey, I came across what I thought was a new Iain M Bank novel in the Borders concession. So, M. Sci-fi. It even has the by now standard endorsement from William Gibson telling us that this is “science fiction of a peculiary gnarly energy and elegance“.

So, M. Sci-fi. Right? Apparently not quite.

Paul Miller tells me on Twitter that in the UK this is an Iain Banks novel. No M. Not sci-fi. A quick cross check between Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk shows that Paul’s right. So what’s going on here? I’ll have to read the book to try and work out what’s happening but for now at least, it appears that for Iain Banks’ middle initial it’s a case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary

Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.

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