The Wasp Factory

The Wasp Factory is the first novel by Scottish writer Iain Banks, published in 1984. Before the book came out, Banks had written several science fiction novels that had not been accepted for publication. He decided to try a more mainstream novel in the hopes that it would be more readily accepted, and wrote about a psychopathic teenager living on a remote Scottish island. According to Banks, this allowed him to treat the story as something resembling science fiction—the island could be envisaged as a planet, and Frank, the protagonist, almost as an alien. Following the success of The Wasp Factory, Banks began to write full-time.