Iain Banks

Not one of his ten planets sits in an earth sign. Water takes four, with three each in fire and air, and four of the ten are fixed with four mutable. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind, and it is loose: nothing in it comes inside a degree of exact. The record says Banks wrote literary fiction as Iain Banks and the Culture science fiction novels as Iain M. Banks, and refused to treat either as the lesser one, and that he announced his terminal diagnosis publicly and married his partner weeks later.

A chart with nothing inside a degree is a chart with very little to say, and saying so is better than widening the net until something turns up. The closest contact is Mars at an awkward angle to Uranus at just under a degree, action without warning: recklessness, abrupt breaks, and a temper that arrives with no build-up at all. For a novelist the record describes as working under two versions of one name and refusing to rank them, abrupt breaks is not the reading that meets it, and nothing tighter is on offer.

What the chart does have is two wide contacts about the same thing. The Sun sits in easy contact with Neptune at a degree and a third, imagination available without cost: creative facility, and a natural, undramatic kind of empathy. The Moon sits a fifth of a turn from that same Neptune at a degree and three fifths, empathy that costs nothing. Two separate contacts to the planet of imagination, in a writer who published in two genres and defended both, is a result worth having at those orbs and nothing more than that. The Moon's sign is certain at twelve degrees of Leo.

Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. He died at North Queensferry on 9 June 2013, at fifty nine. The Moon stood in easy contact with his natal Sun at twelve hundredths of a degree that day and Jupiter in easy contact with his natal Neptune at under a quarter, reaching the pairing this entry leaned on above. The Moon was new and one per cent lit, and the standing reading for that phase is that it starts things without waiting to see the whole of them. The last fact in the record is a marriage a few weeks after a terminal diagnosis, so the phrase happens to describe the final thing the record reports. That is a lunar cycle coinciding with a calendar, and it is printed here because it is true rather than because it explains anything.