Free whisky, tongue-in-cheek rage for everything from opera to Thatcher, lots of profanity - it must be the bard of South Queensferry.

'Art is entertainment for intellectuals', Banks tells us, after a rant about opera singers. He also suggests developing a third alias and writing porn under the name Iain X Banks. Transition, he tells us, was about 51% mainstream and 49% science fiction.

Chair Al Senter mentions the anger which comes across in Banks' most recent novel, and also the rather adventurous sex.

Of the anger, Banks says that he's been cheesed off (that's not the word he uses) since 2003, and recent political events haven't quelled his rage. He talks at length about the way he approaches the subject of torture in his work, asserting the idiocy of the argument frequently repeated in some parts of the world: that if it were possible to save lives by torturing someone, wouldn't it be justified? He suggests that having no leeway in the law would effectively create a moral compromise, in that a torturer wouldn't risk their own punishment unless the cost was extremely high.

Of the sex, Banks says that when using a new technology or psychic power in a novel (in this case the ability to enter another person's consciousness), the two obvious questions are 1) What are the possible military applications?, and 2) Can you use it for sex?

There's some talk of Thatcherism, which Banks tells us he has not grown more tolerant of with age. There's also some talk of Banks' decision to stop sales of his work in Israel for political reasons. An alert audience member asks if there are any circumstances under which Banks would withdraw his sales from the US.

This is the only of Banks' answers which I feel falls short, with the author telling us that he expects better of the state of Israel than he does of the US, with the former having a strong intellectual tradition and the latter being a world super-power. The implication here seems to fall into the realms of science fiction, in the sense that a large state is naturally inclined to ill-will and should therefore be excused.

I'm more impressed with his answer to a rather twee question about which novel he enjoyed most during the writing. The author tells us that with the exception of Dead Air, which was 'just a bunch of ranting', he regards the 65,000 word mark in each novel a sort of milestone, because that was the length of The Wasp Factory.

He also tells us that there will be a really cool spaceship in his next book.