> I read sci-fi but not fantasy
I used to be the same. Ask yourself why.
Harumi Marukami and Han Kang count as fantasy. (I’d argue so does Ian Banks.) Read Tolkien with a hard eye towards rules, meanwhile, and you find a universe that is largely consistent in the Unseen over the Seen, which pretty neatly maps to invisible physics guiding visible phenomena.
I think the technological focus of Banks makes a lot of his novels firmly scifi, but he also certainly toyed with the overlap, with fantasy-like settings for parts of the plot in some novels, as well as "Inversions" being effectively intentionally a fantasy novel where only the readers (potential) external knowledge of The Culture sets it in an SF setting.
I have not read Iain Banks books, but Iain M. Banks wrote Scifi
> but Iain M. Banks wrote Scifi
Why? Because there’s technology somewhere? Why doesn’t magical realism through a cell phone, for example, count?
The line between sci-if and fantasy is often arbitrary, with a lot of it coming down to readers’ self-perceived identities than anything having to do with the text. What counts as tech or magic, moreover, comes down to priors and perspective. (Harry Potter and Star Trek are on similar levels of technobabble, for instance.)