Iain Banks' Feersum Endjinn to be released as SF Masterworks edition

Gollancz, an imprint of Orion, is to publish an SF Masterworks edition of Iain M. Banks’ novel Feersum Endjinn.

The Masterworks edition of Feersum Endjinn will be published in hardback on 14th April in 2016, and will include a new introduction by Ken MacLeod. The hardback licence was agreed with Gollancz’s sister imprint, Orbit, the SF imprint of the Little, Brown Book Group, which will continue to publish Feersum Endjinn in paperback.

Feersum Endjinn was originally published in 1994 by Orbit. It won a British Science Fiction Association Award in the same year.

The book is set on a far future Earth where the uploading of mindstates into a world-spanning computer network is commonplace, allowing the dead to be reincarnated, either physically or virtually, in the crypt.

The SF Masterworks list includes more than 100 books and contains "many of the finest voices" in British and world science fiction. The list was founded by the chairman of Gollancz, Malcolm Edwards, with the help of leading science fiction writers and editors and the goal of bringing important books back into print.

Edwards said: "Iain was immensely supportive when we launched the SF Masterworks, giving us an enthusiastic endorsement which appeared prominently on all the books, so it’s a particular pleasure to see him join the list."

Banks is the UK's best-selling science fiction author of the last two decades, the publisher said. He came to widespread public notice with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory (Abacus), in 1984. His first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas (Orbit), was published in 1987. Banks died in 2013.