Posted 12:24 pm by Ken

Two odd visual effects

If you look at uneven snow (heaps thrown aside when clearing pathways is good, but a partially-melted smooth snow surface works too) through a vertical-horizontal grid, such as the fine wire one-centimetre mesh embedded in reinforced glass windows and doors, you may see the lumps and bumps as tilted blocks or pyramids.

If you look with one eye covered at a photograph with vivid colours and strong depth cues you may see it in 3D. The effect is quite unmistakable and was a complete surprise to me when I first noticed it. I was drinking coffee while reading New Scientist, and the raised mug got between the sightline of one eye and a picture on the page, and the picture suddenly sprang into a 3D image. I almost spilled the coffee.

These two effects may be well-known but I've never heard of them.

Labels: amazing things

Posted 1:04 pm by Ken

Notes towards a class analysis of the economic conjuncture

Contains strong language. (Via.)

Labels: Marxism, squibs

Posted 6:12 pm by Ken

If the Greenland ice sheet slides into the ocean ...

... as the mystics and statistics say it will, I predict I'll still be laughing at this picture, until I've paid my final power bill.

Labels: climate, squibs

Posted 6:15 pm by Ken

Mark Bukumunhe interviews me at Novacon 40

Photographer, SF fan, and all-round nice guy Mark Bukumunhe interviewed me at Novacon last month, and the results are now here:



Also on Vimeo.

I do in fact lighten up a bit as the interview proceeeds. And in case anyone is wondering, the paperback of The Restoration Game is of course due out in April 2011, not 2010.

Labels: self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 7:45 pm by Ken

Sputnik Caledonia: or, the parallel worlds of SF and literary fiction

This isn't a review of Sputnik Caledonia, the very fine novel by Andrew Crumey, who chaired and spoke at the Newcastle Parallel Worlds event a couple of months ago. It's had some very good reviews already, and I have nothing but my own enthusiastic recommendation to add.

I'm just thinking about why it isn't SF.

An outline can make it look like SF. Here's a novel that starts in early-60s Scotland, in the life of an imaginative, space-and-SF-obsessed boy whose father is a factory worker, a socialist, self-taught and firmly opinionated. One subject the father holds forth on is the contingency of history. After some strange experiences hinting at alien contact, and after a sort of blackout, the boy finds himself a few years older, a young soldier, in an alternate Scotland which has become part of a communist-ruled socialist Britain in the course of the Second World War. He's a volunteer for a secret space programme, which is even more secretly preparing to contact an alien intelligence that has just entered the solar system. Intrigues, betrayals, contacts with dissidents, and an ascent into space follow, with an unexpected and satisfying ending that ties the strands together and enough unexplained to leave us thinking.

So, yes, it looks like SF. But it can't be read as SF.

For a start, the text denies us almost all of the specific pleasures of alternate history. It does eventually reveal the hinge on which history turned, and it's the only place where I heard an echo of an SF text, in a possible allusion to a specific incident and a general mood in Graham Dunstan Martin's Time-Slip. But it doesn't elaborate on this history. There's plenty of detail about daily life in this alternate socialist Britain, convincingly grim and shabby and riddled with secret privilege, but there's no time-line to reconstruct from planted clues, and hardly any figures from our history to recognise (ah-ha!) in new roles.

SF examples of all this abound, but to take another book published as mainstream: In Kingsley Amis's The Alteration, set in a 1970s world where the Reformation failed, there's some sly fun with a Cardinal Berlinguer, a Monsignor Sartre, and numerous other likewise impossible historical characters, and a purely SFnal delight in imagining subtle consequences.

Or, to lower the tone (and the bar) a lot: my novella The Human Front has some of the same themes as Sputnik Caledonia: Scotland, aliens, 1960s boyhood, alternate post WW2 history, socialism. It's a far slighter work than Crumey's in every way, but it has more of the above alternate-history tropes in its seventy pages than Sputnik Caledonia has in over five hundred, and it does more to rationalise its blatantly handwaved (flying saucers, come on) physics. Crumey could easily do that - he knows a hundred times more physics than I've ever forgotten - but he doesn't. He uses physics in a quite different way, as metaphor.

And that's the key. SF literalises metaphor. Literary fiction uses science as metaphor. In Sputnik Caledonia, the parallel world is a metaphor of what is lost in every choice. That's why the book is literary fiction and not SF, and is all the better for it. 'What might have been' functions in SF as a speculation. In Sputnik Caledonia, as in life, it's a reflection that we seldom have occasion to make without a sense of loss.

Labels: reviews, skiffy, writing

Posted 1:48 pm by Ken

Scotland at standstill as strange white substance falls from sky

Transport links across Scotland have been severely disrupted today by an overnight fall of an unknown substance from the atmosphere. Lying several centimetres deep over much of the country, it has made roads, railways and airport runways dangerously slippery and often impassable. As an emergency interim measure while authorities and scientists struggle to identify the phenomenon, schools have been closed.

The mystery material is initially white in colour, and is said to sometimes resemble salt. Attempts at closer comparison have failed because salt has - also overnight and unexpectedly - disappeared from all retail outlets.

Local sci-fi writer Ken MacLeod, who had to cancel plans to meet his daughter for lunch because of the transport chaos, blamed the lack of preparedness on 'cultural snobbery towards science fiction'.

'I'm not asking for some sort of instant readiness for anything,' he said. 'That would be utopian. But I do think that reading a few catastrophe novels or even watching the odd disaster movie on TV would open minds to the possibility of unprecedented events.'

A source at Edinburgh City Council accused the writer of having his head in the clouds. 'All we can do now is wait for the scientists to come up with something, which could take months. And keep watching the skies.'

Labels: climate, local, Scottish politics, squibs

Posted 2:41 pm by Ken

'I split the universe!' Prof's shock claim divides audience

I haven't been blogging much lately because I'm busy writing Sin Bio, a novel set in a near-future dystopia where citizens can be casually and clinically tortured, wars are as endless as they're senseless, and winters keep getting longer and colder because of global warming. It takes a lot of work to make such a society remotely plausible. But in between racking my every imaginative resource, I've been taking part in a few events.

The most alarming, perhaps, was at the Newscastle Arts event on Parallel Worlds, where Professor Ian Moss gave a very informative lecture on different physical theories of parallel worlds: island universes, M-theory, Many Worlds, etc. Towards the end he explained that he had two different possible final sections of the lecture, and he was going to deliver both simultaneously: one in one universe, one in another. He asked an audience member to look up an online site which delivers random numbers (it may have been some quantum random number generator, or what Moss called the most dangerous book ever published, A Million Random Digits, which apart from generating many amusing Amazon reviews creates a new universe every time someone bases a decision on it). He then based a choice on this number, using some simple algorithm, and told us which of the two alternative concluding sections he was going for. In another universe, of course, he delivered the other.

I'm not sure how well this dangerous demonstration of macro-scale quantum effects came across, but it could fairly be said that the audience was evenly divided.

The most surprising and encouraging was Cockermouth Cafe Sci, where I gave a talk on why Craig Venter's synthetic cell was, on balance, a good thing. I came along prepared for the usual objections, and dealt with them in my talk, but nobody from the audience followed these up or raised any of their own. Instead they took all that for granted and asked mostly technical questions. I was very glad to have retired cell biologist John Lackie, who chaired the event, standing by to give the answers. Later he and his wife Ann told me that as the audience for Cockermouth Cafe Sci are mostly farmers (who use reproductive technology all the time) or nuclear workers, there ain't much of a hearing for alarmism in these here parts. Maybe the countryside will surround the cities after all.

Labels: amazing things, evolution, genomics, self-promotion, writing

Posted 3:07 pm by Ken

What if the equations are the fire?

I'm feeling metaphysically happy, having come across a complete explanation of life, the universe and everything. I encountered it first as a quick-and-dirty outline at the atheist blog AIG busted, and mulled it for a few days until I came up with a formulation that made intuitive sense to me. Me being me, it's probably wrong, but here's how it went:

Valid equations are trivially and necessarily true.
There is a system of equations that describes every physical interaction.
Including those in our brains.
That system of equations is a timeless necessary truth.
Yada, yada.
Therefore we necessarily exist.
Hail you, necessarily existent being!

Today I looked for more on the work of Gary Drescher and found that the basic idea is called the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, and has been elaborated by real philosophers and physicists with degrees and everything.

I think this hypothesis is what Spinoza was getting at, so that's another ground for confidence. Greg Egan probably agrees too. I'm not saying I completely understand it, but throw in some blind faith and fanatical enthusiasm, and the world is ours.

Labels: amazing things, atheism, evolution, squibs

Posted 4:20 pm by Ken

New on Human Genre Project

Just up on the Human Genre Project: a piece of light verse by Enid Nicholson, Let's swap genes, and Joyce Swan's reflection on growing up ginger, Simply red.

Labels: genomics, Human Genre Project

Posted 2:05 pm by Ken

Sense of wonder

How well I remember sitting up late one night in March 1986 to see the first images of a cometary nucleus from Giotto. The TV screen slowly filled with inch-wide pixels giving an image whose shape and colours resembled a Cubist rendering of a fried egg. 'Well, I reckon little Giotto's had it,' a friend remarked, somewhat prematurely, after the image had stayed the same for what seemed like hours.

Now look at this! (Via, surprisingly.)

The mission has its own website, cleverly titled The Daily Comet.

Labels: amazing things

Posted 12:14 pm by Ken

The uncanny valley just became a gravity well

NASA is about to send up the first humanoid robot in space.

'Feel free to recall your favourite sci-fi robots,' says the BBC's science correspondent, Jonathan Amos.

Well, yes.

The rationale for specifically humanoid robots in space given in The Night Sessions - that they're ergonomically suited to the same tasks as humans, while being better suited (so to speak) to the conditions - is much the same as that given by NASA. I have to admit though that in the novel it was more a case of a solution looking for a problem: the society already had humanoid robots, and they turned out to be unwelcome almost everywhere, so they were desperately searching for a useful niche.

There are, of course, darker possibilities, which Charles Stross has had fun with.

Labels: amazing things, self-promotion, skiffy

Posted 8:02 pm by Ken

'Without the Martians, who would have heard of Woking?'

'The Future Will Happen Here, Too', my apologia for all the catastrophes, wars, revolutions and runaway Stross singularities I've fictionally inflicted on Scotland, has just been published in The Bottle Imp, online magazine of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, in an issue devoted to science fiction and fantasy in Scottish literature.

Highlights of the issue include Stuart Kelly on David Lindsay, Hamish Whyte on the SF poetry of Edwin Morgan, Martyn Colebrook on the dichotomies of Iain (M.) Banks, and Caroline McCracken-Flesher giving a critical take on Scotland as Science Fiction.

All in all, a very welcome acknowledgement and celebration of SF/F as part of the main stream of Scottish literature.

I still feel a little embarrassed at the tally of awful things I've done to Lochcarron.

Labels: local, reviews, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 7:06 pm by Ken

The One O'Clock Gun Anthology

The One O'Clock Gun is a familiar fixture of the Edinburgh scene, more regular than clockwork, but that doesn't stop it now and again making visitors to the capital jump out of their skins when they come across it in the pub. I refer, of course, to the free quarterly A2 broadsheet, ingeniously folded, charmingly illustrated (by the internationally renowned artist Lucy McKenzie) and minutely printed. It always made a diverting read on the bus or train home, and for all the days afterwards it took to finish it.

The house style was mannered, sometimes to the point of archness, but the style and substance of the contributions ranged widely, and the contributors came to include many famous names. Now there's an anthology, handsomely produced, of the Gun's first four years (2004 - 2008), from Leamington Books. Readers will differ on which item or items - from obituaries to squibs via short stories and poems - make it worth the tenner, but most will agree that some significant subset does. This is a collection for dipping into and sampling according to mood, like the single malts in a well-stocked bar.

Labels: local, reviews, writing

Posted 7:28 pm by Ken

Science fiction is the first human literature

[Note: This year's Novacon is less than a month a way. I'm not sure work and family commitments will allow me to attend, but while rummaging about for some reminiscences of Novacon 36 for this year's Programme Book, I came across my 2006 GoH talk. Here it is.]

The business of writing often begins with days of staring miserably at a blank screen or a smudged sheet of paper with a few pathetic scrawls on it. Well, it does for me, and I imagine it does for many other writers. And then, when the story comes into shape, we spend weeks and months bashing away at a keyboard. And what do we produce? Mainstream fiction writers produce stories of things that never happened. Science fiction writers produce stories not only of that but of things that never will happen. Why do we do it? What's the point of SF? What good does it do?

At the Edinburgh Book Festival earlier this year [2006] I was on a panel with Charlie Stross, and he did a very impressive Charlie-style riff on how SF is actually the agitprop department of an early 20th-century totalitarian movement that never made the big time with the flags and uniforms and revolvers and never got a mound of skulls to call its own. Technocracy, the movement in question, has dwindled to a handful of old men in Oregon, busy putting the Northwest Technocrat on the Web after decades of cyclostyling, but SF soldiers on. It's as if collectivization and the Five-Year Plan had never happened but there was this genre, socialist realism - SR - that kept going on and on and on about tractors.

Now as it happens a few days earlier I'd been at the Book Festival interview with Lewis Wolpert, who was plugging his latest, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. One of the many things Professor Wolpert said that struck me as interesting was 'Causal belief is what makes us human'. And, he said, an understanding of cause and effect is itself a cause and a consequence of tool-making. Now that is distinctively human. As Douglas Adams put it, for all the rest of you out there, the trick is to bang the rocks together. Whatever may be said for the tool-making abilities and causal cognitions of African Grey parrots, New Caledonian crows, octopuses, and your cat, not to mention the dreaded six-fingered opposable-thumbed moggies that Leslie Fish is supposedly breeding to have a back-up race that shall rule the sevagram and do all the technocratic stuff in case the human race snuffs it, the fact of the matter is that humans have this ability and this cognition in a way and to an extent that no other species on Earth has.

More importantly, in humans the ability is cumulative, it's self-critical, it's a runaway feedback, it's progressive, and the chains of cause and effect are indefinitely extendable. We build on the work of previous generations, and when we don't we build on their ruins. I mean, I really hope I don't need to labour the point that there's a qualitative difference between a beaver dam and the Hoover Dam. You can make all the claims you like about how intelligence is required by the beaver, but the Hoover Dam or a watermill for that matter is a product of something more. It's what Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen call extelligence. We have it in spades.

So what I was thinking as I was listening to Charlie hold forth so plausibly and amusingly on SF as the pamphleteering of Technocracy was: No! Science fiction is far more significant than that! Let's not sell ourselves short, especially not in front of a Book Festival audience. In fact, let's make the most extreme claim we can think of for science fiction. And my candidate for the most extreme claim is this:

Science fiction is the first human literature.

What I mean is that science fiction is the first literature that is primarily about what is most distinctively human, in the sense I've just described. Not to be too disparaging of mainstream literature, but the mainstream is mostly about things we share with other animals - love and hate, war and peace, dominance hierarchies, sex and violence. Science fiction of course includes these but they are not what it's about. It's a literature of causality, a literature of consequence, a literature of human activity and human agency. It's not primarily about science and technology, but about 'if ...then'. Of 'what if ...?' and 'what about ...?' and 'suppose ...' and 'if this goes on ...'

And it goes about it in a particular and distinctive way, which is itself tool-using and problem-solving, a hands-on can-do approach to the universe, which is why SF's impulse can be mistaken for technocratic, and why it is not mistaken to call it American. 'In the beginning all the world was America,' John Locke said - a new world, and in the end it is all a new world still. If the basic attitude of science is, to quote Douglas Adams again, that 'any idea is there to be attacked', the basic attitude of science fiction is that any problem is there to be fixed. If it deals with a problem that can't be fixed, that is almost always seen within the story as a defeat, a failing, a crushing even, but not as a tragedy or an inevitability or, God help us, a vindication of the story's philosophical premises about the nature of existence. If the problem can't be solved it's because we got the chains of causation wrong, we had mistaken causal beliefs, or the problem was so big it simply overwhelmed us. Better understanding or greater power could, in principle, have overcome it.

I would suggest by the way that this is the real distinction between SF on the one hand and on the other mainstream literature set in the future or on other planets or about technological developments and scientific discoveries. Every SF reader knows, I think, the disappointment, the sense of something missing, when they read a novel like that, usually about clones. Some chromosome hasn't been copied correctly. It's not the material, it's the attitude to the material. Margaret Atwood could write about talking squids in outer space and still not be writing SF. So I don't resent that defensive response, that cloud of squid ink as they jet away, from mainstream writers as much as I used to. We have to acknowledge that yes, they aren't writing SF and they are across the road from our gutter, coming from somewhere else and going somewhere else.

As another aside it may be that the same attitude prevails in certain other genres such as crime fiction and sea adventure stories, which may explain why they are popular with SF readers.

Now I need to make some caveats here. There's a danger of that attitude slipping into a sort of glib optimism about personal and social problems, a danger that has been quite rightly high-lighted by Mike Harrison. Come to think of it, there's a danger of that attitude slipping into glibness in general, in a way that is damaging to serious thinking about serious problems, a danger high-lighted by the Mundane SF school and memorably by Geoff Ryman tearing a strip off an inoffensive and bewildered American rocket entrepreneur and would-be space colonist at last year's [2005] Worldcon.

But having said that word of caution I will now throw caution to the winds and emphasise how radical and new the SF attitude is. For thousands of years literature has shown us man as a fallen creature, man as a rational animal, man as a political animal - all those definitions handed down to us from the philosophies and scriptures of antiquity. It's just over two hundred years since Benjamin Franklin said that man is a tool-making animal, a definition that Marx quoted approvingly in Capital. It took the Industrial Revolution to make Franklin's claim not just credible but obvious. And it's less than a hundred years since Hugo Gernsback smashed together some already existing genres - scientific romances and air adventure stories and future war stories and so on - and created a literature that takes seriously Franklin's definition of the human.

And by doing that, it actually changes human beings' conception of themselves. One of the first things we learn, back at the bash the rocks together stage, is that the changes we make in the world change us. This applies to our literary and imaginative productions too. Patrick Nielsen Hayden is quoted in the current Ansible [232, November 2006] as saying: 'The book is the source code, the brain is the compiler, and the experience produced in the reader is the executable.'

What, then, is the effect of science fiction on the reader? By focusing on humanity as homo faber, man the maker, it implicitly downgrades all distinctions between human beings that are irrelevant to that capacity: those of nation, race, sex, religion and class origin. Class as a position within the production process can be relevant, as can the relationship of that process to the rest of society and to the rest of nature, and these all figure in SF - hence all those engineers and entrepreneurs harried by bureaucrats or mobs.

At a party recently a former SF fan told me about how SF had affected her life. She was, she said, a happy child until the age of nine, when her family moved to a town where the first question she was asked by the first kids she met was: 'Are you a Protestant or a Catholic?' She didn't know, so she went home to ask her mother. Back she came to the park with the answer: 'We're Christians.'

This was the wrong answer.

Around about this time she discovered 1950s SF, and she soon figured out that although much of it was ostensibly about aliens, it was really about black people and white people and women and men. And it gave her the hope, she said, that somewhere in the world we could be free of all this bigotry.

I found her story quite moving, and quite salutary, in that it shows how SF with all its failings and blind spots can still be a force for good. In my experience, both personally and in years of talking to other SF readers and fans, I think the reading of SF instills a certain ideology. It's not at all difficult to identify what that ideology is. It's humanism, Jim, but not as we know it. It's often favourable to various opposed kinds of universalist politics - liberal or libertarian, socialist, even conservative - but seldom to identity politics or nationalist politics. (In fact, where it is nationalist it pretends to be universalist.) It sees humanity as potentially united in the face of an indifferent or hostile universe. It's not friendly to religious fundamentalism of any kind, though it's open to religious belief and indeed to piety, as witness the novels of Orson Scott Card and Gene Wolfe. I suppose it would be possible to write scientific creationist science fiction - Sci-Cre sci-fi! - but it's hard to imagine, let alone to imagine its being any good. Likewise it's hard to imagine explicitly racist SF: the notorious exception, The Turner Diaries, is utterly marginal.

Finally, and I want to make this point particularly to this audience, is that I've found that SF fandom by and large really does reflect the attitudes I've described here. It's what makes fans such good people and such interesting company! There is much more to be done, of course, in terms of broadening SF fandom and making it more open. There is even more to be done in terms of developing the potential of a great literature that, I have argued, we see the beginnings of in SF. But if these things are done, they will be better done if they, too, are done consciously - and that means with an understanding of what SF already does right.

Labels: self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 9:16 pm by Ken

Cockermouth Cafe Sci

Tomorrow (Tuesday 12 Oct) evening I'm doing a gig at Cockermouth Cafe Scientifique, on 'The Synthetic Kingdom'. My pitch:

Craig Ventner's creation of a bacterium with a synthetic genome is a technological breakthrough. But the first response of many was to warn against hubris or hype. Neither warning is justified. We should 'play God', and hype is -- like it or not -- part of the cycle from promise to progress.

The event was organised by one of the Forum's current visiting fellows, the writer and broadcaster Ann Lingard, who is also involved in the sci-art initiative SciTalk.

Labels: coming attractions, genomics, self-promotion

Posted 10:42 am by Ken

Pyr to publish The Restoration Game in the US next year

Well, the news is out: my novel The Restoration Game is to be published in the US in 2011 by Pyr. The cover will be by Hugo-nominated and (inter alia) BSFA Award-winning artist Stephan Martiniere, whose covers for four of my books published by Tor (the 'Engines of Light' trilogy and Newton's Wake) have been magnificent works of SF art, some of them visualizing scenes from the novels not only vividly, but more accurately than I'd imagined them myself.

Needless to say, I'm very happy about all this.

In related news: Jesse Walker has a brief but enthusiastic review at glossy libertarian monthly Reason.

Labels: self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 10:08 am by Ken

Poetry Competition

The Genomics Forum's poetry competition, organised by Pippa Goldschmidt, is doing well, with around a hundred entries so far from all over the world.

Deadline: 7 October. So there's still plenty of time to enter. (When the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig was asked how long it took him to write a poem, he answered: 'Two cigarettes.')

Labels: genomics, writing

Posted 7:50 pm by Ken

That iffy skiffy science ...

Over the past few years I've got a lot of mileage (quite literally - one presentation of it was used to finagle funding for a trip to Australia by a science fiction academic speaking at the same conference) out of a talk I first gave to a Communicating Science class at Glasgow University. One of the points I make in that talk is how rare good science is in - not written SF, which, I argue, is largely kept honest by the sharp teeth of the well-read, ravening hordes of SF fandom - but SF in other media.

Especially (as you know, Professor) the movies.

The biological, and specifically evolutionary, element of this endlessly replicating, spawning, proliferating nonsense gets a well-deserved dissection on groovy skiffy website io9. The smack-down also swipes one example from written SF - one I used myself in that lecture, as it happens. (Via the great PZ, who knows what he's talking about.)

Hollywood, it's safe to say, won't reform its ways any time soon. So what can a good science communicator do? There are only so many times you can re-run Gattaca, after all. One innovative approach is taken by the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics, along with sociology institute Cesagen, in Cardiff: at their initiative, Cardiff sciSCREEN, they hang serious discussions off popular and classic movies without trying to use the scientific content of the movies as educational tools - for example, using the recent blockbuster Inception 'to explore the psychology of lucid dreaming, business ethics and intellectual property, representations of urban environments, and the ownership of mental states'.

Next up: Der Golem, a Halloween special followed by a 'discussion featuring academics with interests in the Gothic, in the philosophy of vitalism, and in folklore, myth, and Jewishness and Judaism on film.'

Way to go!

Labels: coming attractions, genomics, skiffy

Posted 1:45 pm by Ken

Parallel Worlds

At 7 pm this Friday evening I'm on a panel at Newcastle's amazing Centre for Life with acclaimed author Scarlett Thomas, as part of Newcastle University's project Parallel Worlds: Literature and Science.

From the blurb:

Ideas from physics, computing and philosophy have increasingly fed into the work of novelists, not only in science fiction but also "mainstream" fiction. Concepts such as virtual reality, alternate history or the "multiverse" have influenced popular culture and contemporary literature in diverse ways. This series of events brings together leading writers and thinkers to reflect on their "parallel" disciplines and explore possible bridges between them.

The event is introduced by novelist, former physicist, and creative writing lecturer Dr Andrew Crumey.

Labels: coming attractions, self-promotion, writing

Posted 8:35 pm by Ken

Has Karen Armstrong ever read Feurbach?

In her best-selling and widely praised The Case for God Karen Armstrong contrasts the recent New Atheists with the good old atheists who at least understood theology:

In the past, theologians have found it useful to have an exchange of views with atheists. The ideas of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886 - 1968) were enhanced by the writings of Feuerbach ... But it is difficult to see how theologians could dialogue fruitfully with Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, because their theology is so rudimentary.

Feuerbach's best-known and most influential work, The Essence of Christianity, is a somewhat forbidding book at first glance (and at second glance, when you find that the standard paperback has as its introduction a lecture on Feuerbach by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886 - 1968)). That was probably why I put the copy I'd picked up and glanced through back on the returns trolley of Brunel University Library in 1976, thus missing out on 34 years of enlightenment. (I really kick myself because the University's Anglican chaplain materialised beside me as I was looking at it, and enthusiastically recommended it as a thorough demolition of orthodox Christian theology, particularly the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. You don't believe any of that? I asked, incredulously. Of course not, he said. What do you say to your colleagues who do believe it? Oh, he replied, they don't believe it either.)

Anyway, a month or so ago I eventually got around to reading Feuerbach, and you know, Frederick Engels and the vicar were right! 'The spell was broken; the ‘system’ was exploded and cast aside, and the contradiction, shown to exist only in our imagination, was dissolved. One must oneself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it.' If I'd read it back then I'd have been spared a lot of puzzlement about Anglicans, and also about Marxists. At the time I thought I was one myself, but what I didn't understand was all the other Marxists I knew. Why were they so confident? And why were they so fucking busy? Obviously I had missed the meeting where everyone had read Feuerbach:

The atheism that fears the light is an unworthy and hollow atheism. Such atheists have nothing to say, and that is why they are afraid to speak out. The cryptoatheist says only in private that there is no God; his atheism is summed up in this one negative statement, which stands all alone, so that his atheism changes nothing. And it is perfectly true that if atheism were a mere negation, a denial without content, it would be unfit for the people, that is, for man or for public life; but only because such atheism is worthless. True atheism, the atheism that does not shun the light, is also an affirmation; it negates the being abstracted from man, who is and bears the name of God, but only in order to replace him by man’s true being.

[...]

Let us then leave the dead in peace and concern ourselves with the living. If we no longer believe in a better life but decide to achieve one, not each man by himself but with our united powers, we will create a better life, we will at least do away with the most glaring, outrageous, heartbreaking injustices and evils from which man has hitherto suffered. But in order to make such a decision and carry it through, we must replace the love of God by the love of man as the only true religion, the belief in God by the belief in man and his powers – by the belief that the fate of mankind depends not on a being outside it and above it, but on mankind itself, that man’s only Devil is man, the barbarous, superstitious, self-seeking, evil man, but that man’s only God is also man himself.

But to return to Karen Armstrong: the real irony of her recommendation of Feuerbach is that Feuerbach's argument (meticulously reasoned and documented, as Barth admits through his teeth) that 'God' is nothing other than human consciousness unaware that it is describing itself is above all applicable to the mysterious, ineffable, indescribable, elusive, ungraspable 'God' for which Karen Armstrong makes her case.

We see nothing of the mind's working
except what comes on screen
and goes on keyboard. What's between
the two, behind the one -
the self that knows the self we know
and
all the self knows -
we don't know.

Labels: atheism, Marxism

Posted 11:24 am by Ken

The man who stared at dolphins

Even when I was a rather credulous teenager who took seriously the writings of Carlos Castenada, Colin Wilson, Timothy Leary, Teilhard de Chardin and R. D. Laing, all it took was one flick through a snazzy paperback of John C. Lilly's The Centre of the Cyclone for me to conclude that the author was out of it. Just how far out is detailed here.

Needless to say, he had NASA and Naval funding. Was there any part of the counter-culture that didn't start as a black op?

Via, with a juicy taster quote and the fine understatement: This is by no means the strangest part of this article.

My own favourite paragraph, however, is this:

To appreciate the rings of significance that widened from this laboratory scene, it is critical to understand that in the 1950s no one thought of whales and dolphins as “musical” or “intelligent” or—of all things—“spiritually enlightened.” At that time, the large whales were generally regarded as huge kegs of fat (useful for making soap), meat (good to feed to chickens), and fertilizer (best thing to do with what was left after you took the fat and meat), and the smaller dolphins and porpoises were mostly just a nuisance to fishermen—though bottlenose were sometimes actually hunted, since the fine oil in their jaw ducts was considered a superior lubricant for precision timepieces.

How times have changed.

Labels: amazing things

Posted 10:34 am by Ken

' ... for then we would know the mind of God'

Stephen Hawking famously concluded A Brief History of Time with these words. Now he has no need of that hypothesis.

My talented brother James responds:

Labels: atheism, squibs

Posted 7:26 am by Ken

Queen Victoria's Terraformers

In effect, what Darwin, Hooker and the Royal Navy achieved was the world's first experiment in "terra-forming". They created a self-sustaining and self-reproducing ecosystem in order to make Ascension Island more habitable.

Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way".

.

Labels: amazing things, climate, evolution

Posted 9:02 am by Ken

Filling a much-needed gap

One of the major problems for writers is that the machine we use to write is connected to the biggest engine of distraction ever invented. One can always disconnect, of course - there's even software that locks out the internet and email for selected periods - or use a separate, isolated computer, but I think something more elegant as well as radical is needed.

What I'm thinking of is some purely mechanical device, that took the basic QWERTY keyboard with Shift and Return keys and so on, but with each key attached to an arrangement of levers connected to a physical representation of the given letter or punctuation mark. These in turn would strike through some ink-delivery system - perhaps, though I'm reaching a bit here, a sort of tape of cloth mounted on reels - onto separate sheets of paper, fed through some kind of rubber roller (similar to that on a printer) one by one. The Return key would have to be replaced by a manual device, to literally 'return' the roller at the end of each line. Tedious, but most writers could do with more exercise anyway.

Corrections and changes would be awkward, it's true, but a glance at any word processor programme gives the answer: the completed sheets could be, physically, cut and pasted.

Someone more patient, less easily distracted, and more mechanically savvy than myself would have to develop such a device, and maybe already has - for all I know, the patent may be gathering dust. Now, its time has come. There's a huge gap in the market for it.

I tell you, someone's going to make an absolute fortune from this.

Labels: squibs

Posted 2:32 pm by Ken

The man who knows what it is like to be a bat

The Genomics Forum's third Book Festival event was last night, and it was excellent.

Skillfully chaired by SF writer Justina Robson, who has herself given a lot of thought to transhuman themes, this discussion on transhumanism and what human enhancement could do for - or against - human beings ranged widely. Forum Director Professor Steve Yearley opened by pointing out that, even in popular media discussion, transhumanism was a conspicuous exception to the kind of risk-centred approach to almost all other bio-technological developments (a recent example being the ludicrous panic over milk from a cloned cow). Against this he pointed to the worries expressed by Fukuyama in Our Posthuman Future, principally that the acceptance of human universality, of human equality at a very basic level, could be undermined by the emergence of individuals and even 'races' who were demonstrably, inarguably superior to the baseline human.

Professor Kevin Warwick of Reading University took the view that a far more dangerous situation would be brought about by AIs surpassing humans, and that human enhancement was the best way for humans to keep ahead of the game. He extolled the possibilities - adumbrated, he claimed, by his own well-known self-experiments in neural-computer interfacing - of having more senses, broader bands of communication, networked memory and so on.

SF writer Iain M. Banks was in lively form, surprisingly less sanguine than Kevin Warwick about human enhancement, but rather more hopeful about the possibility that AIs would show moral as well as intellectual superiority to ourselves. It was on a re-iteration by Iain of this cheerful prospect, after some discussion from the floor and between the panel members, that Justina brought the conversation to a close.

I have to say that in person Professor Warwick quite belies the carping about his penchant for self-publicity: he came across as a warm and sincere guy and passionate researcher who has done a lot of serious work. Over dinner he amazed some of us with his account of what it was like to experience ultrasound as an immediate and precise awareness of the distance between himself and nearby objects. It wasn't like sight or hearing or any sense with which he was familiar. It was something new in his head. Perhaps he's the only person who has some idea of what it is like to answer Thomas Nagel's famous question: 'What is it like to be a bat?'

Labels: amazing things, genomics, local, skiffy

Posted 12:35 pm by Ken

All right on the night

The Word Power event on Red Plenty went very well. The space was filled to capacity, and almost everyone in the audience stuck around for an hour and a quarter of often quite demanding discussion, with good contributions from the floor. The two speakers shared - across a broad political gap - an enthusiastic and informed interest in the subject. I managed to fumble the introduction by (a) garbling the name of the Word Power Edinburgh Book Fringe (b) failing to introduce myself and (c) failing to explain what the subject of the discussion was and why it was worth discussing.

What I should have said was, of course, that the current economic crisis has re-awakened interest in possible alternatives to capitalism and even the market, and that Spufford's book and Cockshott's research have in different ways given deep, critical examinations of one already failed alternative: the Soviet planning mechanism in general, and in particular the attempt in the early 1960s to reform and rationalise it through the use of sophisticated and pioneering mathematical techniques implemented on computers to optimise output.

Thanks to the miracle of market-developed computers, Paul Cockshott recorded the whole thing (mercifully missing most of my introduction) on what looked like a Blackberry, and has made the recording available here. (Don't be put off by the first minute or so - the sound quality does improve, though you may have to turn the volume up.)

Neil Davidson, who was speaking at a another event later that evening, remarked from the floor that looking at the Soviet economy as if optimising the production of consumer goods was a major objective rather missed the point that military competition was the real driving force. Francis's rejoinder that of course they were in an arms race, but this was a 'deforming effect of the Cold War', didn't really seem to answer that. It wasn't just the Cold War: responding to and shaping the international military situation dominated priorities (though not always direct military spending) from the first Five-Year Plan to the last. Another speaker from the floor brought up a different critical theory, that associated with the long-running journal Critique. One of the strengths of Francis's book is the way in which by focussing on facts (albeit through fiction) it forces reflection on the theories of what was actually driving the system, without itself explicating any.

[Picture credit: Scottish Comment]

Labels: local, Marxism, Scottish politics, self-promotion

Posted 10:52 am by Ken

Red Plenty reminder

This afternoon at 5.30 I'll be introducing and chairing a free event at Word Power, where author Francis Spufford and computer scientist and economist Paul Cockshott will discuss Spufford's well-received new book Red Plenty. I've already enthused about this book, as has Paul Cockshott - who has himself worked for many years to bring to academic and political attention the significance of the historical and theoretical questions that lie behind the story. This promises to be a lively and engaging event, so if you have a chance, please come along.

Labels: coming attractions, libertarian, local, Marxism, self-promotion, skiffy

Posted 12:26 pm by Ken

Another reminiscence

An Audioboo of me at the Edinburgh Book Festival yesterday.

Labels: local, self-promotion, writing

Posted 12:43 pm by Ken

Contrivances

I met Ian Rankin at the Book Festival and mentioned that I'd read Ian McEwan's Saturday on holiday.

'Gangster novel,' he said. 'Brain surgeon scrapes thug's car. Thug threatens him. Brain surgeon notices ...' He summarised the plot in a few brisk sentences.

'If guys like us came up with contrivances like that,' he concluded, 'the critics would throw stones at us.'

'From Dover Beach!'

'Or Chesil Beach.'

All that needs to be said about Saturday was said some time ago.

Labels: local, writing

Posted 2:34 pm by Ken

Blogging for beginners

On Wednesday David Shenk and I led a discussion on blogging as a tool for science communication. The session was organised by Edinburgh Beltane, which is not as you might think a group of young people recreating the antics of our illustrious blue-painted heathen ancestors but a 'beacon' (geddit?) for public engagement with science. Some notes from the discusssion are here. Probably my best line was: 'Remember that anything stupid, foolish or misguided you say will last as long as civilisation.'

[Addendum: given that I was supposed to be encouraging science communicators to blog, perhaps amplifying that remark with 'People will be laughing at you on the starships' was not the way to go.]

Labels: genomics, local

Posted 4:30 pm by Ken

Edwin Morgan, 1920 - 2010

Yesterday I heard the sad news that Edwin Morgan had died. Douglas Gifford's obituary in The Scotsman is perhaps the most comprehensive of many that have appeared today; the most poignant, surely, is that in The Independent, by Angus Calder, another giant who himself passed away two years ago.

When I first met Edwin Morgan I told him of how I'd sat watching a documentary about his life, and enthusing to my wife about his poems on love, and it only slowly dawning on me as I watched what his own love was, and what I'd learned from that.

'It's the same emotion,' he said.

Posted 11:23 am by Ken

Differentiated from a doormat

'I myself have never been able to find out precisely what Feminism is: I only know that people call me a Feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.'

This quotation from Rebecca West is quite familiar. I've seen it loads of times, often shortened by ommission of the opening phrases or the last three words. But until today I've never come across the context in which it was written: a socialist, trade unionist, internationalist polemic against an article by G. K Chesterton.

As I dislike intensely the condescension with which he slaps the working man on the back I rarely read his political articles. But last week I was sent “The New Witness” of October 30 which contained an article called “I Told You So.” There is no sentiment in that article which would not be a credit to an inhabitant of heaven: in fact it makes one desire to send Mr. Chesterton thither at once. The conclusions of that article are corruptingly foolish and wicked.

The subject is that recent incident in Dublin, when the strikers’ children who were being sent over to English or Belfast homes were assaulted by priests and “Hibernians,” and prevented from leaving the city. This incident seems full of quiet beauty to Mr. Chesterton.

Rebecca West would have been a formidable blogger.

Posted 11:01 am by Ken

Blatant Brotherly Bleg

My brother James, hard-working history professor and talented cartoonist, has an entry (No. 10) in the UCS cartoon contest.

If any readers should be kind enough to vote for his entry, he would be very grateful. And so would I.

Posted 3:27 pm by Ken

Poetry competion: the new and improved human

The Genomics Forum and the Scottish Poetry Library have announced a poetry competition, open to all, deadline 10 October 2010, on the theme of 'improving the human'. Details here.

'A selection of the winning and shortlisted poems will be published in a special publication of the Forum in 2010.

The Scottish Poetry Library will host an evening of poetry readings based on the winning entries.

First prize is £500, second prize is £200, and third prize is £100.'

Labels: coming attractions, genomics, writing

Posted 8:38 pm by Ken

The Only Reality

Re-reading Frederick Engels's Ludwig Feurbach and the End of Classical Geman Philosophy (as one does) I was struck by the following much-quoted statement:

the material, sensuously perceptible world to which we ourselves belong is the only reality.

Engels describes this as a realization to which Feuerbach (a German philosopher who greatly influenced Marx and Engels while they were working out their own ideas) was 'driven', but he plainly agrees with it.

Engels was, of course, well aware that some aspects of the world are 'sensuously perceptible' only indirectly, through instruments and what have you, and he would have been far more delighted than surprised if he could have seen such instruments as the Hubble Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider. Numbers, logical categories and other abstractions he regarded as 'reflections' of the same material world, produced by the activity of the material brain: our consciousness and thinking, he goes on to say, however supra-sensuous they may seem, are the product of a material, bodily organ, the brain.

So we know what Engels had in mind when he talked about reality: the reality we inhabit. This, he says, is the only reality.

Now, you may ask how he (or Feurbach) knew this. But the question that occurred to me as a result of Engels's confident statement was this: where did the idea come from that there could be another reality? I'm fairly sure that for the Greeks and Hebrews - or at least, for Homer and the Bible - everything is part of the same reality. The gods really do live on Olympus. God really is in heaven. And heaven really is up there in the sky, as celestial as the stars. Sheol or Hades really is down below, as material as magma. Spirit really is breath. Spirits (ghosts and gods and so on) are sometimes visible, usually invisible. But so is water vapour.

So where did the idea of a reality outside 'our' reality (but not outside in space, outside in some unknowable way) come from? Did it all come from Plato and some muddle along the lines of: because we can understand numbers, where the numbers live is where we go when we die?

Labels: atheism, Marxism

Posted 9:30 am by Ken

'We don't agree with his extremism and starting the second world war'

At last the tiresome expression 'Somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan!!!' actually has a referent.

It is, by any standards, an extraordinary choice. Under Hitler, Soviet prisoners of war who appeared Mongolian were singled out for execution. More recently, far-right groups in Europe have attacked Mongolian migrants.

It's all about maintaining ethnic purity, apparently.

Posted 1:33 pm by Ken

Ghosts

Scenes from the Great Patriotic War superimposed on recent colour photos from the exact places where the original photographs were taken. Sometimes subtle, sometimes less so, always haunting. (Via.)

Labels: amazing things, history

Posted 12:53 pm by Ken

Onward and upward

My son Michael MacLeod (aka Young Master Early, but I'll have to stop calling him that) has a new job. Needless to say, I'm very proud of him. He's worked hard to get there: studying for his HND at Telford, slogging his guts out on the Wee County News, being a founding reporter on the Allanwater News, and then working two years with the Deadline Press and Picture Agency in Edinburgh - where his stories and photos have appeared in major UK dailies. Along the way he's seen a lot of life, including some of the worst of it, without ever becoming jaded or cynical. He's built up an impressive range of contacts and has a good nose for stories - and a good eye for pictures.

So ... congratulations, Michael!

And watch this space.

Labels: coming attractions, local

Posted 5:07 pm by Ken

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943

What it says. Go look.

Thanks to Shawn Raiford for the pointer.

Labels: amazing things, history

Posted 7:46 pm by Ken

Plaster of Salt Lake City

In Iain Banks's difficult second album, the novel Walking on Glass, there's a passing reference to 'plaster of Salt Lake City' - like plaster of Paris, but less exciting. Samuel R Delany's review of the book was titled, if I remember right: 'Like science fiction, but less exciting'.

The most cutting review so far of The Restoration Game describes it as like 'Iain Banks, some of his older mainstream fiction, with one big downside, it wasn't as good.'

I think I can live with that.

Liviu Siciu at Fantasy Book Critic also references Banks, but has a much more positive take on the book: ' ... after reading the book, I have to say that it quite surpassed my expectations. [...] I found myself hooked by the narration of Lucy Stone and I *knew* this was the book I must read before anything else.'

James Lovegrove at FT.com: 'MacLeod’s latest reads like something Le Carré might write if he’d gorged on the works of Philip K. Dick.'

I'm sure my editor at Orbit will be rubbing his hands at that one. He's already picked out some good quotes from the reviews, and in the same post includes this very, very serious video interview with me:

Labels: self-promotion, skiffy

Posted 2:16 pm by Ken

The SFX Book Club

I've just had an acceptance for my fourth contribution to this series of 700-word reviews of SF classics: this time, it's on James Blish's Cities in Flight. You can read PDFs of all 49 of the series so far here, and they're pretty addictive. And if you're looking for a reading list of classic SF, this is a good place to start - though it could do with a lot more of (and by) women writers.

Labels: self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 12:50 pm by Ken

Something to brighten your day

Eerie video animation of nuclear explosions from 1945 to 1998. [Added 17/7/10] There are a lot more of them than you probably think.

Posted 7:06 am by Ken

Implausible television series

Now that we're all stuck in the one with the Black president and the flying killer robots, there's a certain melancholy comfort in realising that earlier generations had to live through even more unbelievable story arcs. (Via.)

Labels: squibs, WoT

Posted 1:04 pm by Ken

Two reviews of The Restoration Game

I'm very pleased to see that SFX, whose self-description as 'the Earth's greatest sci-fi and fantasy magazine' is far too modest, has a very nice review of The Restoration Game. (One small spoiler.) The Green Man Review is likewise enthusiastic.

And here's a better link to the Scotland on Sunday review by Stuart Kelly, who says:

Stornoway-born Ken MacLeod's The Restoration Game, like his previous novels The Execution Channel and The Night Sessions, are works of science fiction so worryingly close to reality that he may well be hailed as a prophet on Lewis.

I think a symbolic rather than a literal reading of this particular sentence is called for. Being hailed as a prophet on Lewis could be quite disquieting.

Oh, and if you'd like a signed/personalised copy, Mike Calder at Transreal has the goods, so drop him a line.

Labels: self-promotion, skiffy

Posted 1:08 pm by Ken

Cat vacuuming? I don't even have a cat!

Last Thursday Mrs Early took a well-deserved long weekend away. I'm well within deadline on my next book, but well behind my unofficial target for it, so a few days on my own might seem to be a good time to go at the writing full tilt. The only other things I definitely had to do was fill in my author comp tickets form for the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and pick up two pet gerbils to look after while young Master Early & his beloved swanned off to a Greek island for their well-deserved break. I duly picked up the Early vermin on Sunday, in good time to pop a can of Pepsi Max and chomp Doritos while watching England v Germany in the World Cup. No gloating from me - one of our neighbours had a German flag up, but I wouldn't do such a thing. Enough of my family and friends are England supporters for me to feel a twinge of sympathy for the fans if not for the team, as well as a twinge of that feeling the Germans have a word for. Through the open window I could hear singing. Is 'Deutschland Uber Alles' still the German national anthem?

How-evah ... whenever Mrs Early is away I feel a strange, guilty urge to do something that will impress her when she gets back, and these days ironing her work uniform isn't enough. Besides, I was still smarting from having exposed to the world the state of my workroom, on my very own shiny new webcam at that. Before she left I'd mumbled something about tidying the workroom.

But, you know, first things first. Back to Friday morning. There was writing to be done. One kitchen floor wash and one cooker-hob cleaning later, interspersed with occasional updates on the state of the world as mediated by the blogosphere, I was fit for nothing but finishing reading Iain Banks's The Steep Approach to Garbadale, a worthwhile project in itself. Smelling faintly of whisky and household cleaning products, I went to bed at the crack of dawn on Saturday.

I woke up ready to tackle the workroom. I began, logically enough, with the teetering stacks of books. Turning these into stable stacks with the spines facing outward led to the rediscovery of books I'd forgotten I had. Some of these I'd picked up in charity shops on the off-chance. I had to pause to consider whether each one should be added to the stack just outside the workroom to go to the charity shop. Sometimes I had take a quick look inside, just to check. Did you know that Journey to the Centre of the Earth is really quite good? For one thing, it's got one heck of an opening hook.

Then there were the books I'd read, and appreciated. But. If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity, or school metaphysics, for instance The Penguin Guide to Modern Theology, Vol 3: Biblical Criticism, let us ask, would I ever want to read it again? No. Commit it then to the charity shop.

(You see how I did that? I couldn't lay my hand on A Treatise of Human Nature so it's just as well I never chucked out my copy of Language, Truth and Logic, which quotes that passage. Otherwise I'd have been looking for the Hume book all day. Oh, there it is, on the inner stack on a bookshelf.)

So much for the books. Now the magazines. There's the stack of copies of New Sceintist from 2008-2009. That stack was the result of a previous tidying. No problem. Move the stack into the hallway and ring up the school librarian on Monday, to see if she wants them. (She didn't. Anyone?)

And that leaves the heap of paper and jiffy bags and plastic bags and cardboard boxes (empty) in the middle of the room. It swirled before my eyes like a pool full of sheets of paper and plastic bags does when it swirls. I started by pulling out all the empty boxes, and the grubby jiffy bags, and the cardboard, and putting them all in the biggest box. And then there's the packing material and the plastic bags. An entire bin-bag's worth of balled-up newspaper that someone used as packing material. Time for a coffee, and time I checked my email.

The heap took days. Hot, humid days. The trouble with the heap is how it accretes. The process starts with the workroom tidy, and new magazines and mail and kipple severely excluded from it, instead piling up on the end of a dining-table bench, on the coffee-table, under the ... anyway. The workroom is tidy. Then someone comes to visit, or we have a party. All of this gets swept up in armfulls and carried upstairs and stacked in the workroom. And once there's one stack, it gets added to. Then there's another stack. Then they fall over. Then I do my tax return. Then there's a heap.

So sorting through the heap involves lots of new and exciting discoveries. And decisions. What on earth is that Sunday supplement from 2005 doing there? Was there something interesting in it? I scan it carefully to check. Nope. But by now it's practically a historical document. A museum piece. Can you believe people dressed like that back then? A shame to ... nah. Into the recycling bag with it. Oh, so that's where that form went! They still owe me for that talk ... Eventually I have a stack of magazines I want to keep, and everything else. This eventually becomes a stack of proof pages, typescripts, conference and con programmes and notes (several new paperbacks from the goody bags go into the charity shop pile) and everything else. I go looking for a box to put the everything else in, and find all the boxes are full of all the packaging stuff. I take that to the garage, because you never know.

Then I see the box of author copies of The Restoration Game, all of which are spoken for. Good grief! I'd better get in touch with all the people mentioned in acknowledgements, and ask for their snail-mail addresses so I can send them their copies.

So now I have an empty box (and a neat stack of copies waiting to be sent, but I'll get round to that in a day or two). I put the unsorted kipple in the empty box, and that's it done. I check the stack of books for the charity shop, remove a few items including The Penguin Guide to Modern Theology, Vol 3: Biblical Criticism from it and put them back on the new neat stacks, and take the remaining dozen or so books to the charity shop. I managed not to buy any more books while I was there, though it was a close thing.

Then I whizzed around with the hoover, admired the wide open spaces of the workroom, and ironed a work uniform for Mrs Early, due back that evening. I picked her up at the airport late last night, after I'd been in and out of town for the City of Lit salon evening in the Wash Bar, where Nick Barley, the director of the Book Festival, announced their new Unbound programme of free evening events. I remembered that I still had to fill in my author comp tickets form. I took the Unbound programme and the Filmhouse programme home with me and laid them carefully on the end of a bench in the dining-room.

Labels: coming attractions, local, skiffy, squibs, writing

Posted 7:51 pm by Ken

Reading in The Illicit Still

Yesterday's West Port Book Festival went well. I did a reading from The Restoration Game, followed by a brief Q&A and a signing session. About 15 people turned up, not bad for a sunny Thursday afternoon, the questions were well chosen and a good half dozen books were sold and signed. (Advance copies are still available at Edinburgh Books until Wednesday.)

Pictures can be found here and here (from which the above pic by chrisdonia is taken under Creative Commons Licence).

This is only the second time I've done a reading from this book. The first time, at its sort-of-pre-launch, I stayed on the safe side by reading from a section that's the diary of a male character whose accent is more or less mine. This time I dived straight in and read from the first chapter, a first-person narration by the heroine, Lucy, whose only dialogues in the chapter are with other female characters. The audience seemed to take this in their stride despite my age, accent and sex being completely different from Lucy's, not to mention her mother's and grandmother's. I think it's called imagination.

Labels: local, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 8:52 am by Ken

'... we might as well just call them all literature'

Scotland on Sunday books editor Stuart Kelly reviews Adam Roberts' New Model Army, China Miéville's Kraken, and my The Restoration Game.

He points to 'one of the great ironies of contemporary literature: the books that ask the deepest and most profound questions tend to be situated in the most marginalised of genres.'

Labels: coming attractions, skiffy, writing

Posted 9:46 am by Ken

On Bloggingheads.tv with Annalee Newitz

On Thursday I did my very first webcam interview, for Bloggingheads.tv - I had to buy a webcam to do it. Now the world can see how tidy my workroom isn't. io9's Annalee Newitz and I talk about my books and about politics, Craig Ventner's synthetic organism, Scotland, The Night Sessions and The Restoration Game, near-future and far-future SF, and galactic princesses.

Labels: atheism, coming attractions, far left, libertarian, Scottish politics, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 8:32 pm by Ken

Dates for your diary [updated]

Tomorrow evening (Wednesday 9 June 2010) at 7 p.m. I'm kicking off a discussion for Edinburgh Interdisciplinary Discussions on Science & Literature: is science fiction the missing link? at Sofi's Bar, 65 Henderson Street in Leith.

Details:

Science fiction is a literary genre that identifies itself with popularising science and imagining the social consequences of scientific and technological change. It might seem an obvious focus for overcoming the mutual misunderstandings of the ‘two cultures’ of the arts and the sciences. However, it’s often seen as an embarrassment to both: using illiterate writing to spread inaccurate science.

Is there any truth in this charge, or is it a symptom of ignorance and disdain for science in the arts establishment? Can science fiction writers and readers contribute to overcoming these divides?

We ask Ken MacLeod.

Ken MacLeod is an award-winning SF novelist and current writer-in-residence at the Genomics Forum. He will tell us about his experiences of addressing science and politics - in his own writing and in the work of the Forum - and will guide the discussion.

Join us for dissidence and revelry.

At 4 p.m. on Thursday 24 June 2010 I'm doing a spot at that fine pub The Illicit Still as part of the West Port Book Festival. They say:

The Night Sessions is Ken MacLeod’s latest novel, set in an Edinburgh under threat; ‘A bishop is dead. As Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson picks through the rubble of the tiny church, he discovers that it was deliberately bombed. That it’s a terrorist act is soon beyond doubt…’ Ken will be reading from his work, as well as telling us about the science and philosophy in his mind-expanding fiction. We are also chuffed to be pairing up with the Illicit Still: a pint, a sandwich and science fiction make for a heady afternoon in the West Port.

[Update 10 June] The West Port Book Festival is pleased to announce that they have an exclusive 20 advance copies of The Restoration Game for sale at this event, and that I'll be reading from that book. Be the first to get a signed copy! [end update]

On Sunday 22 August I'll be on a panel with Adam Roberts at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (details TBA).

And finally ... alongside the official book festival, Edinburgh's radical bookshop Word Power runs the lively (and free!) Edinburgh Book Fringe, and on Wednesday 25 August at 5.30 p.m. I'm chairing an event with author Francis Spufford and computer scientist Paul Cockshott on Francis's latest book, Red Plenty, which I've already enthused about a couple of posts below. Details:

For almost two centuries, many socialists have claimed that a planned economy can do better than the market. Economists such as Mises and Hayek argued that this was impossible. The fall of the Soviet Union seemed to settle the question.

But what if it didn't? In the 1960s, a team of reformers led by the mathematical genius Kantorovich fought for a new system of planning that would use computers to optimise output. They won favour with Soviet leaders in the wake of Khrushchev's bold claim that the USSR would achieve abundance beyond the dreams of capitalism by 1980. Red Plenty is the fascinating story of this project, and how and why it was abandoned after Khrushchev's fall.

Could Kantorovich's plan have realised Khrushchev's dream of a red plenty? Or was it always a doomed and flawed vision? Francis Spufford (author of the widely-acclaimed Backroom Boys) discusses this intriguing history and its implications for the future with computer scientist Paul Cockshott, one of the best-known advocates of a new - democratic and cybernetic - socialism for the 21st Century.

In my pitch to Word Power for this last event, I claimed that it would be of interest to SF fans, socialists, economists, computer scientists, social scientists, and students. Everyone I know in Edinburgh in any of these categories is going to hear from me over the summer ...

Labels: coming attractions, genomics, Marxism, self-promotion, writing

Posted 3:43 pm by Ken

Diana Comet Presents...75 Years of Fabulous Writers

Sandra McDonald has put together this brilliant periodic table of women in science fiction and fantasy. She writes about them here.

Labels: skiffy, writing

Posted 8:19 pm by Ken

The apparat of Capital

In my novel The Sky Road the heroine, Myra, sees the skyscrapers of New York as housing 'the apparat of capital'. I've just found again the passage that inspired this:

Take the word bureaucracy literally, it refers to those working in bureaus or offices. The observable fact about the socialist economies is that they employed far fewer people in bureaus or offices than capitalist economies at a comparable stage of development. Capitalist cities are high-rise, their skylines dominated by office tower blocks. Socialist cites were low rise, dominated by the long sheds of industry. Material production not information processing dominated their economies. In fact it is capitalist economies that are dominated by, choked by a constantly rising overhead of unproductive bureacratic work, for what else is the banking, insurance, sales and marketing that fills the tower blocks?

Discuss.

Labels: Marxism, writing

Posted 1:54 pm by Ken

Red Plenty

I recently got a review copy of Francis Spufford's new book Red Plenty, and, like Brad DeLong, immediately dropped everything to read it. It's a fictionalised account, or a non-fiction novel, about the project in the early 1960s to use computers to plan the Soviet economy. A key figure is the genius Kantorovich, who invented the mathematical technique of linear programming in 1938. (We follow his mind as the idea dawns on him, on a tram.) He and other real characters such as Kosygin and Khrushchev mingle with fictious characters - some based on real people, some not, but all convincing.

It's a bit like reading a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson, or Ursula Le Guin - or maybe a mashup of all them; full of arguments between passionate and intelligent people, diverting (in both senses) infodumps, and all about something that actually happened - and, more significantly, about something that didn't happen, and why it didn't.

Computer scientist Paul Cockshott, a prominent advocate of cybernetic socialist planning, has written a comprehensive and enthusiastic review:

This is a marvelous and unusual book. It sits in a remarkable way in between science popularisation, social history and fiction. The author describes it variously as a novel whose hero is an idea and a fairytale. The hero idea is that of optimal planning. The idea of running a planned economy in just such a way as to ensure that resources are optimally used in order to deliver the ’red plenty’ of the title.

[...]

The author shows real skill as a science populariser, explaining such diverse topics as how the Pentode valve logic of the early BESM computers worked, to the molecular mechanics of the carcinogenesis mechanism that eventually killed its designer. He vividly portrays the enthusiasm and self confidence of the USSR in the late 50s when Khrushchev’s boasts that they would overtake the USA by 1980 and achieve communism seemed plausible. He gives a good didactic account both of the basic mechanisms of the Soviet Economy, and, through the lives of incidental characters paints a picture of its real operation that is more detailed and convincing than any academic history.


He traces the idea of cybernetic economic management from the hope of the 50s and early 60s to its sidelining under Kosygin, and the eventual relegation of Kantorovich to the less ambitious task of optimisating steel tube output for the oil and natural gas industry. Ironically, says Spufford, as growth rates slipped in the 70s, it was only the exploitation of petroleum for export that allowed Soviet living standards to rise.

[...]

All in all, let me say again, this is a book that should be read by anyone with a serious interest in economic alternatives.

Labels: Marxism, reviews, skiffy

Posted 9:16 pm by Ken

Why 'playing God' is (in principle) a good thing

I have some initial thoughts about the first synthetic cell up on the Guardian's Comment is Free. Feel free to comment, there or here.

And hey, I'm chuffed, and grateful to Andrew Brown for asking me to write it. He phoned me about 4 o'clock yesterday, sent me the article announcing the breakthrough, and I worked on my piece that evening and this morning. It was the first time I've seen embargoed news - it broke at 7 p.m. UK time yesterday - and I can well see how being in the loop like that can become addictive.

Labels: evolution, genomics, self-promotion

Posted 5:39 pm by Ken

I agree with Tony Blair

The man of blood and son of perdition is, in this instance, right. Stand by the son of the manse (pictured left). Vote strategically, not tactically: vote Labour. The Lib Dems will cheerfully bank any tactical votes from Labour supporters as votes for them, and use the resulting diminished Labour vote as an argument for coalition with the Tories. So it makes sense to maximise the Labour vote, even where (as in the constituency I live in) the Labour candidate has no chance, and even in Lib Dem/Tory marginals where a Labour vote might let the Tory in. (Yes, I am that tribal - about the Lib Dems. It's an old North Islington Labour Party thing.) I have lots of reasons to detest New Labour (and Old Labour, come to that) but Labour is still the only party that the British working class has come up with, so there you go.

And hey, Captain Picard!