(Alternate headline: Iain Banks: The Other Nerd World Interview.)

If you’ve never read Iain Banks, go here and here and then come back. If you want to know what I think about Iain Banks, it’s this: he’s one of the greatest science fiction novelists working today. He’s a very funny, very dark writer who favors space opera and extreme tech. His skill at thinking up names for spaceships is a thing of wiki-legend.

Banks’s new book Transition deals with a group of operatives who can hop between the innumerable branching timelines of the multiverse, nudging and altering events as they see fit. This group is called The Concern. A faction, led by one Mrs. Mulverhill, has splintered away from the Concern and is opposing it. Battle is joined, and the battlefield is the infinity of possible earths.

Below Banks and I chat about Transition, the hotness of Mrs. Mulverhill, and what he was doing scaling the outside of a hotel at Worldcon in 1987.