A real shame, far too young.
Big loss. Some of his books are among my favourites. Very sad to see him pass.
I'm not huge into hard sci-fi but his books always seemed to fit stuff in there that's completely breathtaking. Very sad.
If you aren't keen on sci fi, his other books are great. Wasp Factory is well loved, my favourites are Espedair Street and The Crow Road.
Reading Banks's Complicity was why I started writing in the first place, when I was fourteen. What a loss. Inversions was also one of the first sci-fi books I ever picked up. Any man who can write a work as clever as that one really is gone too soon at any age.
The Wasp Factory remains all of his that I've read, but there are others on the list. Very sad news... I have every intention of picking up some of his sf at some point because I really don't have a lot of that, and he seems like more than a solid bet as a good place to get some more. Glad to hear at least that his passing was easy.
It's very sad. The release he wrote when he came forward about his cancer was absolutely heartbreaking, but it seemed that he and his new wife were at peace with what was to come. Its a big loss. I've never read his sci-fi (though Bang is always pushing it on me, and I have intended to for awhile) but The Wasp Factory and Espedair Street are just fantastic novels, and he took a totally different approach to writing, that made me have to think about those books for a long time before making decision about how I felt about them-- in a good way.