Iain Banks blew my mind. I read The Wasp Factory as a teenager when it came out in 1984, and I’d simply never encountered anything like it. I devoured it in an afternoon.

Until then my library had consisted pretty much solely of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy books – brilliant and funny and quietly profound, but essentially lightweight stuff. The most “adult” literature I’d tackled was Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, an agonisingly painful experience that took nearly six months of teeth-gritted determination to plough through, one hideous chapter at a time, waiting for a promised epiphany of knowledge and understanding that never arrived. It single-handedly gave me a dislike of hippies that endures to this day.

The Wasp Factory was a revelation. Dark, disturbing, but funny and ultimately uplifting, it was at once both palpably Scottish and nationless. I hovered outside bookshops waiting for Banks’ subsequent releases – Walking On Glass, The Bridge, Espedair Street. Every one was utterly different from the last, united only by the warm, optimistic spirit of humanity underpinning them. I’m a natural misanthrope, but every time I read one of Iain Banks’ novels I’m turned away from despair towards hope again.

I made sure I took them with me when I left home, and they sit in my bookshelf still, growing more well-thumbed with the years. And when Banks moved into science-fiction, I came along for the ride. His undramatic, matter-of-fact depiction of an enlightened “post-scarcity” galactic Utopia – the Culture – was beautiful and politically thrilling, and as a young videogame obsessive the author’s clear connection with and understanding of the alternative worlds offered by games reached out to me in an incredibly direct and personal way that Douglas Adams’ work hadn’t.

(Also a characteristic of my other favourite Scottish author, the wonderful Chris Brookmyre, who I suspect would cite Banks as a major influence and inspiration.)

A few years later when working as a videogame developer, I paid my own small tribute by naming a level of Cannon Fodder 2 “Feersum Endjinn” after one of his sci-fi novels, though I continued to prefer his “normal” books because I’ve always been more attracted to culture based in something close to reality. I’m a Grand Theft Auto sort of guy, not a World Of Warcraft one, because it’s always felt cowardly and lazy to me to retreat to fantasy worlds where magical superpowers are the answer to all problems, rather than the harder, dirtier, unglamorous work of using humanity’s own abilities.

(That view is also a large part of the reason I believe Scottish independence represents the only practical hope of a better society, rather than desperately clinging to the cold, stiff corpse of the post-war British social-democratic consensus that was battered to within an inch of its life by Margaret Thatcher and then left to die on a trolley in a cold, draughty hospital corridor by Tony Blair.)

But I’m rambling. I’ve never met Iain Banks, but the news this week of his terminal cancer felt like the terrible impending loss of a friend. The writer was a supporter of Scottish independence for all the right reasons, and a line in a recent interview was made almost unbearably poignant in the light of developments.

I hope so much that this is one of those occasions when doctors get it wrong, and someone given months to live is still walking around years later. (We’re not short of a high-profile recent example in Scotland, after all.) If there’s any sort of justice in the world at all, Iain Banks will live to see the 19th of September 2014, when his country stands up and announces the proud resumption of its place among the nations of the world, and starts on the journey to building its own terrestrial version of the Culture.

But if not, I want to say these words now, in case he should ever stumble across Wings Over Scotland somehow: I can’t thank you enough for the huge part your books played in making me the person I am today (or at least the good bits of him), and for the enjoyment and enlightenment you brought me in doing it. And I promise that even if you’re heartbreakingly not here to see it, I and the other people who write for this site will devote ourselves every day to fighting for the goal you sought, for what I truly believe are the same good, decent and honourable reasons you sought it.

We hope you’re still here to reach it with us. But if not, we’ll do it in your name.