One gets a bit tired of all those stripes."Goodbye Mog, which will be published on 21 October by Collins Children's Books, tells how Mog was so "dead tired" she decided she wanted to sleep forever.But although Mog does indeed die in the eyes of her family, a little part of her stays awake to see the arrival of a new baby kitten and to help her replacement settle in.. IT TOOK Iain Banks just six weeks to write his latest, 400-plus page novel, Dead Air. He still looks slightly bemused by the speed, almost six months after he completed it "It just went really, really quickly," he says, laughing. "I just kept going with the pace and finished it, embarrassingly quickly." It took Iain Banks just six weeks to write his latest, 400-plus page novel, Dead Air. When we meet in an Edinburgh pub, just before he is due to appear at the Book Festival, I almost miss him. Looking for the wild, hairy man-of-the-hills in publicity photos, I pass over the almost professorial, bearded gentleman sitting quietly reading a newspaper and drinking iced water.

What, no beer? No biker leathers? Can this be the author of violent, controversial books like The Wasp Factory and Complicity? The SF fan with a host of websites dedicated to his Utopian "Culture" novels?Perhaps success does bring its own sheen, and Banks has been more successful than most. Not one to spend hours alone in a garret, squeezing out words in authorly anguish, Banks is refreshingly breezy about his art. "Whenever I hear other people complain about writing, I just think, 'Get another job, for God's sake!'" He laughs again "I enjoy writing." So he should As he admits, writers are in a highly privileged position. They can respond to whatever happens, and people pay attention.

Never more so than with Dead Air (Little, Brown, £16.99), which opens with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre."Once 11 September happened, I just felt it was something I had to acknowledge," he says. "It's not something you can gloss over or just mention in passing. It did alter the balance of the book in a way." Much of Dead Air was already planned, and the first chapters pretty much written in his head before the attacks "That's OK, because it altered everybody's lives in a sense. The fact is it was such a huge, symbolic thing."It was also something that felt – to a writer famous for creating alternative worlds – like some "Orson Welles type spoof. I honestly thought that for a second I had been bounced into this weird Star Trek-style alternative reality I'm getting goose-bumps now even thinking about it. I remember waking up the next morning with that feeling you have when something huge has happened, like someone you know has died or something, and wondering, was that real? It was almost a sci-fi moment. I wanted to say, OK, stop the simulation now."The attacks encapsulated this collision of fantasy and reality.