A deadly gift from the stars

By Oliver Morton

The odds against getting cancer are hardly astronomical. The causes, though, can be. Iain Banks, a gifted Scottish author and a friendly acquaintance of mine, was killed this summer after some of the cells of his gall bladder ran amok. In the science fiction that made up about half of his work, Banks had a taste for the cosmic, building artefacts the size of planets or solar systems, chronicling weapons of war capable of destroying suns. And that was the context he chose for the disease which killed him.

"Do you know that I know what caused the cancer?" he asked his friend Stuart Kelly in a last interview for the Guardian. "Cosmic ray. I won’t brook any contradiction; it was a high-energy particle. A star exploded hundreds or thousands of years ago and ever since there’s been a cosmic ray—a bad-magic bullet with my name on it, to quote Ken Macleod—heading towards the moment where it hit one of my cells and mutated it. That’s a science-fiction author’s way to bow out; none of this banal transcription error stuff."