Iain Banks is a bestselling writer of fiction and science-fiction. His books include The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road and Complicity, which is currently being made into a $10m film with Jonny Lee Miller. His book Inversions comes out in paperback on Orbit in June.

What was your introduction to computers?

The Wang [word processing] system used by my employers. After that it was a gigantic L-shaped one-and-a-half-desks-size Hewlett-Packard with three eight-inch floppy drives and a weird sliding half-depth monitor with buttons mounted along the screen's bottom edge. A friend of mine worked for the City branch of Credit Lyonnais; they were throwing this out so we salvaged it, he wrote a simple word processing program for it and I used it to write a couple of books until the screen gave out. Then I bought an Amstrad PCW512.

Do you use a PC or an Apple Mac?

Power Mac 4400/200 at the moment.

Are computers important for your work? for the world in general?

Absolutely vital for me: I hated doing second drafts on a typewriter. Computers and word processor programs made my life a lot easier. For the world? This is a rhetorical question, isn't it?

What do you use the machine for?

Writing books and letters. Plus I have a rather under-used music processing program called MDTU Freestyle, linked up via Midi to a mixer and various sound and FX modules, including my Fender Stratocaster, which I very bravely took an electric drill to in order to fit the Midi pick-up. Oh, and sometimes I dip into Claris's drawing facility to design fantasy houses.

Any particular favourite software?

Civilization 2 (until I realised I was spending all the time I should have been reading books playing Civ, and threw it in the bin); and Sim City 2000, until I ditched that too.

Anything you'd like but can't have yet?

A combination of the Oxford English Dictionary and Roget's Thesaurus immediately accessible from Claris. This may well exist, but I'm not organised enough to know.

Any favourite websites?

Having discovered, thanks to Civ 2, how addicted I can become, I have cunningly stayed off the net. This is due to change when my parents move in next door; we'll keep the net-linked machine over there.

On a desert island, a human or a computer for company?

As usual, depends on the human. The computer would have Civ 2 on it, wouldn't it?

What do you see in the future for computers?

Ubiquity. And consciousness.

Are you worried about the Y2K bug?

Us smug Mac owners aren't personally worried - though we are as much at the mercy of infrastructure chaos as anybody else. So, a little.

Professionally, what's taking up your time?

A couple of publicity tours: one for the paperback of Inversions in June, and one in August for the new mainstream novel, The Business.

Iain Banks fanzine