Posted 10:48 am by Ken

War with the Newts

Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) set the agenda for the robot in SF, not least by naming it. Its 2011 republication in the Gollancz SF Masterworks series (in one volume with Capek's 1936 novel War with the Newts, and informatively introduced by Adam Roberts) gives us a fresh opportunity to look at this taproot text. We all know the story: robots are created to serve humanity, and after some time they rise up and destroy their human masters. If we've read a little more about the play, we know that Čapek's robots aren't mechanical but quasi-organic: what in later SF would be called androids or replicants. Few of us have actually read it. More of us should.

I didn't know until I read the play a few weeks ago that it's funny. And I'd never reflected on the significance of its place and date of publication: Prague, 1920. When the risen robots issue a manifesto to all the robots of the world, propagated in leaflets by the shipload, the echo of the Russian revolution is loud and clear. Other aspects of the rebellion evoke a slave - or colonial - uprising. From their first clunky steps, robots in SF have carried a heavy freight of human anxieties.

A month ago I spent three days in Amsterdam, as a guest of the International Conference on Social Robotics 2011, where I gave the closing keynote. The opening keynote was by a much more consequent speaker: the academic, inventor and entrepreneur Tomotaka Takahashi, who charmed and amazed us all with his cute and accomplished humanoid ROPID and his energetic toy robot Evolta (of Panasonic battery ad fame), and gave us an intriguing rationale for creating small humanoid robots: small for safety, humanoid because we can talk to them without feeling self-conscious, thus making them an ideal interface for all the other gadgets we have around the house. But the best reason, he said, was 'creating new fun', as Steve Jobs did with the iPhone.



There was much fun to be had: social robotics is a new and thriving field, looking at the integration of robots into society through a cluster of lenses, from the technical through the sociological to the cultural. Papers presented ranged from empirical studies of human-robot interaction to such wonderfully speculative flights as the pressing question of whom (or what) to sue if a sexbot AI steals your partner's affections. There was a lively exhibit of work-in-progress posters, some accompanied by demonstrations of actual robots. The programmable Nao robot has become a test platform for much research, and has even been used in robot theatre and stand-up. (I suggested to Heather Knight, the impressario of these events, that a production of R.U.R. with Nao robots would be screamingly funny, but she didn't think it feasible.) Some intrepid engineers are even working on general-purpose humanoid household robots, and pit their creations against each other in the competition RoboCup@Home (inspired by the robot football competition, RoboCup) with sometimes hilarious results.

My impressions, from the exhibits and from the entries in the competition which I took part in judging, are that some of the most immediately applicable work is being done with unwell children and the frail elderly. Children with autism, in particular, seem to benefit measurably from interaction with friendly, cuddly robots. These robots are sophisticated, but remotely controlled in real time by concealed operators - what's known as the 'Wizard of Oz' approach, which is also widely used as a quick-and-dirty method of gauging human-robot interaction.



I find myself wondering whether we'd be working with humanoid robots at all, let alone mentally and verbally classifying them with mechanisms as diverse as autonomous vaccum-cleaners and industrial arms, if it weren't for SF, through Dick and Asimov and all the way back to Čapek. Just as well, perhaps, that intelligent marine creatures haven't crawled ashore - yet.

Labels: amazing things, skiffy

Posted 11:15 am by Ken

Year's Best SF 29

The table of contents for Gardner Dozois's 2012 anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection is now online, and I'm very pleased to say that I have two stories in it: 'Earth Hour' and 'The Vorkuta Event'.

Given the eldritch viccissitudes that the latter story went through before its eventual (and still viccissitude-dogged) truly splendid publication, I am even more well chuffed than you might expect.

Labels: coming attractions, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 12:56 pm by Ken

The word from a silent sky

Yesterday I read Karl Schroeder's post on a new paper on the Fermi Paradox. Karl makes the interesting suggestion that if aliens exist, their technologies are indistinguishable from natural objects. Karl had come up with the idea of a technology indistinguishable from nature in the quite different context of trying to imagine the future development of our technology. He takes the apparent absence of aliens as at least consistent with this projection: if it holds true for us, and if we are not alone, and if we are a typical intelligent species, then a Galaxy swarming with alien civilizations would look (to us, now) just like a Galaxy with no aliens at all. So what we see (and, more to the point, don't see) is just what we would expect.

It strikes me that the arguments over the existence of aliens have an interesting structural similarity to certain arguments over the existence of God. There's a type of atheist argument that says, in so many words, that the non-existence of God is manifest by just looking out of the window: if God existed, we would know about it. There's a type of theist argument that says if God exists, his existence is necessarily hidden from us, and the world outside the window - a universe that looks as if it works all by itself - is just what we would expect.

Discuss.

Labels: amazing things, atheism, evolution

Posted 8:34 pm by Ken

Observing the Leonid Meteor Shower

I'm sure my talented brother James could do a better job of this, but here it is anyway, on a rainy night in South Queensferry.

Labels: local, squibs

Posted 5:49 pm by Ken

Where do you get your (Battle of) Ideas from?

As I mentioned below, I attended and took part in this year's Battle of Ideas, an event I also took part in two years ago.

(In case anyone doesn't know: Battle of Ideas is an annual weekend festival of controversy that is itself controversial because of the connections of its organizers, the Institute of Ideas, with a long-disbanded far-left organization and its successors, currently represented by the online current affairs magazine spiked. For a somewhat bemused but balanced liberal account, see Jenny Turner's article in LRB; for a critical conservative appreciation of the group's development, check this article; and if you want the full-on left-wing conspiracy account, PowerBase, SourceWatch, and LobbyWatch will keep you entertained for hours.)

For me, a highlight of the weekend was a discussion on mind-body dualism, featuring Raymond Tallis, Richard Swinburne, Stuart Darbyshire and Martha Robinson, and chaired by Sandy Starr.

My initial sympathies in the debate were with Martha Robinson, a neuroscience PhD student and naive mechanical materialist, up against: a polymathic professor and self-professed neurosceptic; a distinguished philosopher of religion (defending, in this instance, the soul rather than God); and two dialectical materialists. (Derbyshire and Starr are both frequent contributors to spiked.) Just to confuse matters, Stuart Derbyshire referred disparagingly to Martha Robinson's view as 'materialism', while himself elaborating (as I pointed out from the floor, to no avail) a materialist view.

His contribution went like this: Consciousness is not a separate substance, but neither is it a product simply of the brain. The brain is necessary for it, but looking for consciousness in the brain is like looking for sunshine in a cucumber. In individual human development, consciousness arises from and goes beyond the infant's natural mental endowment when the infant learns language. Language liberates consciousness from elementary mental functions, allowing the use of abstraction and symbol rather than simple stimuli. Mind arises within a social process, originally in the interaction of the infant and its care-givers, and subsequently broadening out to include the whole of society. You didn't work out the Periodic Table, but you know it; likewise much else that's in your head. Not many of us, after all, coin new words, at least not words that come into general use. In a sense, your conscious experience doesn't belong to you, and that's why consciousness seems ghostly and weird.

I didn't agree with this at all, or even understand it, but while heading for King's Cross on the Tube the following day I was thinking it over while idly observing my fellow passengers reading or talking or staring into space and it clicked. Consciousness is social, it's uniquely human, it's not just going on in our separate heads but between them, in our interactions.

But ... wait a minute ... if that's the case then ... social consciousness is really important.

And it changes - and can be changed by - every individual.

Ideas matter.

Uh-oh.

When I got home I checked out the recommended reading for the event, and found right at the end a link to a work of Soviet psychology, and from that a whole archive of links to the works of Vygotsky and the school of thought he founded and the astonishing and inspiring humane applications that it led to, and the terrible vicissitudes of this school of psychology before and after it made its way to the West. Strangely enough, the very same view of consciousness that Vygotsky pioneered and that I heard Stuart Derbyshire outline can be found in all the boring Brezhnev-era textbooks of dialectical materialism.

By what a frail aqueduct did the fallen empire convey to a future civilization that most surprising discovery of Marxism-Leninism: the individual human consciousness, the soul!

Labels: libertarian, Marxism

Posted 12:27 pm by Ken

Now available!

Earlier this year, world-famous economist Brad DeLong asked 'Why is there no ebook of Ken MacLeod's "The Restoration Game"? This offends the order of reality, somehow... '

The order of reality has now been saved by Barnes and Noble, so feel free to get on with the reality of ordering.

Elswhere, Solaris Rising: the New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, in which I have a short story titled 'The Best Science Fiction of the Year Three', has just been released, and is available on Amazon in the UK, the US, and Canada. There's already a favourable review at Locus Online (along with a likewise favourable review of Technology Review: Science Fiction.

(Pic and links via Richard Salter, a fellow contributor.)

Labels: self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 11:05 am by Ken

Orwell's other island

At the beginning of October I spent a week on Jura, courtesy of the Scottish Book Trust and Jura Single Malt Whisky. The Jura Lodge is easily the most wonderful house I've ever stayed in: imagine the holiday home of a wealthy family with improbably good, if eccentric, taste and a magpie's eye for Victoriana and natural history. At first I thought that's what it was. I was surprised to learn that it was all a recent fabrication, designed by a talented interior decorator. Lots of writers have stayed there under various versions of the scheme, and I'm grateful for my week. All I have to do in return is write a short SF story set on Jura, to be published exclusively on the company's website and (in hard-copy) in a collection in the Jura Hotel. I'm not even expected to say a good word for the whisky, though I will: Whyte & MacKay is one of my favourite blends, and the 16-year-old Jura single malt could quite aptly be labelled Revelation (alongside the Jura distillery's two other labelled expressions, Superstition and Prophecy) though it isn't.

I spent a lot of time outdoors, often getting thoroughly cold and wet, but I also had plenty of time and space to read and write. And naturally enough, in this cheery environment I thought about the gloomiest writer who ever stayed on Jura. I'd recently re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the SFX Book Club, and - in dark evenings and the odd torrential afternoon - on Jura I browsed through The Penguin Essays of George Orwell, as well as the informative locally-published booklet 'Orwell on Jura', and an essay on the same subject by Bernard Crick in a nice little collection, Spirit of Jura: Fiction, Essays, Poems from the Jura Lodge, copies of which are liberally scattered around the house.

There's a common misconception about Orwell on Jura: that he went there to die, and that in going there he more or less deliberately made sure that he would. This is usually accompanied by a mental image of Jura as a remote, cold, wet, wind-swept miserable place, more or less ideal for writing a grey dystopia and then pegging out. Not a bit of it! Jura's climate, though indeed wet and windy, is mild. Palm trees grow in front of the hotel. Lizards live in the drystone dykes. The island is only remote in the sense that it's a (breathtakingly scenic) trek to get there. It's less than a hundred miles west of Glasgow. As Bernard Crick put it, Orwell didn't go there to die, he went there to write.

Re-reading his essays brought me to a thought that rather surprised me:

If George Orwell hadn't written Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he'd be remembered as the author of a few depressing novels. Selections from his non-fiction would now and again be reprinted by AK or Pluto Press, with kindly introductions by Michael Foot or Tony Benn. The political right would have no interest in him at all.

He's always a pleasure to read, but as a political thinker he was neither original nor important. His criticisms of the left were sometimes unfair, but hardly unique. On the rare occasions when he put forward a positive programme of his own, or endorsed that of others, there's not a cigarette paper between him and the state socialists. Considered purely as a platform, 'The Lion and the Unicorn' shares a surprising number of planks with 'The British Road to Socialism' though to be fair the latter doesn't look forward to blood running in the gutters and red militias billeted in the Ritz.

Orwell's writings have an odd place in British culture. For many people, Orwell's essays and books are the only political writings from the 1930s and 40s they'll ever read. A fair bit of Orwell's political writing from that time consists of disparaging other political writing of the period - particularly the writing of the left. From 'Politics and the English Language' you can get the impression that such political writing consisted mostly of crass apologetics in dreadful prose. The result is that nobody bothers to read it, and Orwell's view reigns unchallenged.

'If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.'

I wish.

There's no necessary connection between political truth and verbal clarity. Let's take some writers whose politics Orwell would reject. Nothing could be stronger than Orwell's detestation of Fabianism and Stalinism. George Bernard Shaw stood for the first and more or less endorsed the second, yet The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism is a delight to read. Not all the Communists and fellow-travellers were hacks. (Orwell's citation of a rant from that quarter is tellingly under-referenced: 'Communist pamphlet' - I ask you!) T. A. Jackson and A. L. Morton wrote their best-known books in clear and vivid English. John Strachey was at his most lucid when he was at his most wrong. Professor J. B. S. Haldane's science essays are still read for pleasure. The Trotskyist C. L. R. James wrote one literary masterpiece; Trotsky himself was constitutionally incapable of writing a dull page, and in Max Eastman he found a translator worthy of his style. On the democratic, non-Marxist left, Lancelot Hogben, one of whose lazier paragraphs Orwell's famous essay holds up to scorn, was the author of Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen - he was no Isaac Asimov, I'll give you that, but mastering these two books can set you up for life (or university, at any rate) which is more than can be said for Asimov's Guide to Science, fine volume though that is. Hogben's two big books sold hundreds of thousands. His style can't have stood in many readers' way.

That's not to say Orwell didn't have a point. I've always relished this passage from Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism:

By contrast [with Marx's published work], the extreme difficulty of language characteristic of much of Western Marxism in the twentieth century was never controlled by the tension of a direct or active relationship to a proletarian audience. On the contrary, its very surplus above the necessary minimum quotient of verbal complexity was the sign of its divorce from any popular practice. The peculiar esotericism of Western Marxist theory was to assume manifold forms: in Lukacs, a cumbersome and abstruse diction, freighted with academicism; in Gramsci, a painful and cryptic fragmentation, imposed by prison; in Benjamin, a gnomic brevity and indirection; in Della Volpe, an impenetrable syntax and circular self-reference; in Sartre, a hermetic and unrelenting maze of neologisms; in Althusser, a sybilline rhetoric of elusion.

What can you say?

Well! - what you can say is that if you work your way through Anderson's egregious collocation of vocables (and yes, I have looked up 'egregious') every word of this makes sense, and for all I know may even be true.

Labels: amazing things, far left, Marxism, politics, writing

Posted 1:31 pm by Ken

Battle of Ideas 2011

This Saturday I'm taking part in a discussion on 'Sci-fi and the future' at Battle of Ideas 2011. Having been at this annual event a few times already, I'm expecting a hard-hitting and focussed discussion, and a lot of other interesting debates over the weekend. It's one of the few conference or festival-type events I've been to where almost every discussion you overhear or or join in the corridors and bars is about ideas.

On Thursday evening I'm hoping to meet some SF fans for a few drinks in a pub in the Covent Garden area. If you'd like to join us, please email (address at left) or DM me on Twitter today.

Labels: coming attractions, politics, self-promotion, skiffy

Posted 9:10 pm by Ken

Lenin on the BBC

Unless you have a phobia about dodgy plumbers or timeshare scams, The One Show isn't the sort of programme you watch to be scared. It's a cosy after-dinner easy-watching chat-show. In tonight's episode [update: now available here for a week], Justin Rowlatt interviewed an economics commenter (whose name I didn't catch) who gave what Rowlatt called 'an extreme view' of what's at stake in the euro crisis. She said that 'if the euro goes down' Britain is in for 'a long, dark recession' which could lead to massive civil unrest and ... wars. Since the UK is already involved in three wars against in underdeveloped countries, I think she meant wars between advanced countries. You know, proper wars, like those your parents or grandparents fought in and didn't talk about much.

Jeremy Paxman, also interviewed tonight, looked withdrawn and thoughtful during the brief studio discussion that followed. He didn't look scornful or sceptical. But then, he was there to talk about his new book, on the British Empire.

Now, until I know who the economist was, I have no way of judging her credibility. [Update: Louise Cooper, who seems a well-qualified financial analyst as well as 'popular pundit'.] Leaving that aside, though, it's the first time I've heard this idea - that a crisis of capitalism can lead to revolutionary situations and/or inter-imperialist wars - even mooted in the mainstream media. Is a non-apocalyptic WW3 even possible? It's hard to imagine something between, say, the break-up of Yugoslavia and the cataclysmic Cold War visions of the final war (though I've tried). That strikes me as a good reason why we might be well advised to consider other possible responses to the crisis. Devising a feasible socialism is demonstrably not beyond human capacity, though finding a party advancing or even discussing anything of the sort is beyond mine.

But, as usual, the programme didn't leave us to wallow in gloom. Our spirits were lifted by a cheery little item about the proud welders and engineers and electricians of Barrow-on-Furness, building Britain's latest nuclear submarine.

Labels: Marxism, politics, revolution

Posted 10:39 am by Ken

The near future arrives this week

A few months ago I was asked to contribute a story to a special science fiction issue of MIT's Technology Review. The idea was that each story would reflect one of the site's regular channels: business, computing, biomedicine, etc. I chose 'Materials' because I had a small and now distant background in the subject. After some hasty thumbing through The New Science of Strong Materials and other battered Pelicans on my shelf I thought of and discarded several ideas, and only came up with one when I turned to the site itself and came across a recent development in light-bending metamaterials. Aha! I brainstormed some ideas with Pippa (who like like myself remains affiliated with the Forum and sometimes hotdesks in its offices) and came up with 'The Surface of Last Scattering' - which, I'm happy to say, seems to me one of my more satisfactory stories, one that works as a short story as well as as SF.

That story was accepted, and is now out in very respectable company. Copies of the anthology are available for pre-order, and hit the newstands on Tuesday 4 October, with digital editions soon to follow. (Via.)

Labels: genomics, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 6:55 am by Ken

Whose View of Life? Men and Monkeys Revisited [now updated!]

Tomorrow nite, folks, for one night only! A dramatic lecture on the most basic questions of human existence! With a star cast of actors and readers Peter Arnott, (Genomics Forum/Traverse Theatre Resident Playwright 2011) dramatizes Darwin, hassles Huxley, and re-opens the Monkey Trials! Tickets only £6!

7:30 p.m. Friday 30 September at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. Details and tickets here and here. Don't make a monkey of yourself - be there!

[Update: Sunday 2 October] Well, I went, and had an entertaining as well as enlightening evening. The Genomics Forum's resident playwright, Peter Arnott, had written and set up the show as a 'dramatic lecture', in which he was the presenter and two actors from the Traverse Theatre's company performed various speaking parts, against a backdrop of projected images. This form matched the content, which was about two dramas: the Scopes Trial itself - which Peter said was itself a staged event (in that the ACLU set up the situation to test the law) - and the play and film from which many people form their impression of it, 'Inherit the Wind'.

Peter filled in the background, and the actors read from trial transcripts of key moments, and then from the same moments as dramatized in the play, showing a rather striking contrast. Peter went on to argue that the Scopes Trial wasn't a confrontation between scientific freedom and biblical literalism, but a culture clash over the supposed nihilistic implications of evolution, and that Bryan's concerns on that point were not without justification. Later such clashes - the Dover trial, for instance - had some of the same roots, but the creationist side had in the meantime upped the ante a good deal with the 'Wedge Strategy' and the like.

A spirited discussion followed. By this time, everyone involved - especially those under the lights on the stage - was sweating almost as much as the original participants in that hot Tennessee courtroom, so the discussion was adjourned to the bar - where it continued.

Labels: coming attractions, creationism, evolution, genomics, local

Posted 7:28 am by Ken

Another good review of The Restoration Game

Astronomy site Astro Guyz has a very enthusiastic review of the US edition (Pyr) of The Restoration Game:

The Restoration Game is a smart cyber-thriller that runs an interesting course of alternate history. Part of what makes the story a true gem is not where it’s going plot wise, but how it gets there. Its world is as timely as the latest I-Phone release, and Krasnia, while fictional could be a page right out of Soviet 20th century history. Will Lucy and crew come back for a sequel? There’s certainly lots of room in the quantum universe of alternate histories out there waiting!

A sequel? I hadn't thought of that ...

Labels: reviews, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 11:38 am by Ken

A metaphor for the mundane

Kim Stanley Robinson wrote, in his introduction to Nebula Awards Showcase 2002, that science fiction stories are 'statements about the way we live now, coded'. In the age of pioneering (and then mass) aviation, we had space stories. In the era of Cold War paranoia and dread we had post-apocalypse and aliens-among-us stories. Or to use the example Stan gives: in the decade when we encountered the internet, we had mind-uploading stories.

For me, the most haunting metaphor for the way we live now is Robert Charles Wilson's 1998 story Divided by Infinity. The narrator is given a pseudo-scientific book that argues, on the basis of the Many Worlds Interpretation and quantum handwaves, that you never die. Other people die, but (from your POV) you don't: subjectively your consciousness continues in a less likely infinity of possible worlds. As you get older, the world around you just gets weirder, and weirder, and weirder.

Labels: amazing things, skiffy

Posted 5:14 pm by Ken

If the second time was farce, what's the third time?

There's a certain kind of comedy that depends on the actors remaining deadly serious even as the audience is doubled up laughing. It restores one's faith in human nature to catch some of the actors smiling behind their hands. The only evidence of a sense of humour I've ever seen from Western Maoists was a reference (on Kasama, of which more later) to portrayals like this of their Five Great Teachers as '"history of shaving" pictures'.

Back in the 60s and 70s, many thousands of young Americans, radicalised by the Vietnam War and the Black struggle, were inspired by those socialist states that at the time militantly resisted the US: Vietnam, Cuba, China. They began to study what Ho, Fidel, Che, and Mao had to say, and thus found their way to Lenin and Stalin. They also re-examined the history of the CPUSA, which by then was for many young people a quite uninspiring organization, and found 'a usable past' in its early-30s militancy and its mid-30 to mid-40s popularity. The task was to do what the CPUSA had done in its glory days, but this time do it right.

And so the 'new communist movement' was born. Never was the adage 'the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce' more tragically and farcically apt. The strains of applying tactics drawn from the Stalinist line-changes of the past to the even more neck-wrenching lurches and swerves of 70s Maoism were more than enough to reduce the entire squabbling motorcade to roadside wreckage by the 80s. When you find yourself urging US imperialism to take a stronger stand against the Soviet threat, the suspicion must dawn on the dimmest that you're doing it wrong.

Some of the wheels that had dropped off kept trundling on. Some drivers kept walking forward with a steering-wheel clutched in their hands and encouraging imitations of engine noises from the passengers limping behind them.

Now these remnants are being joined by a small but growing crowd. One manifestation of that is Kasama, where posts and discussions are a random mix of sharp analysis, philosophical obscurantism, and Maoist baby-talk. Another is the recent rash of Maoist and Hoxhaist blogs. Despite being divided on whether China is now or has ever been socialist, they often link to each other, striving as of old to unite all who can be united against the main enemy: Trotskyism.

It would be interesting to know, from anyone better placed than I am, how much this reflects anything going on on the ground. Is the American radical left doomed to do the 60s and 70s over again?

We know how it ends, and it ain't pretty (Update: thanks to bensix in comments for the link.):



(This picture, which I think I found on Blood and Treasure is a lot more sinister than it looks. If anyone can remind me of the link, I'll be grateful. Update:, ah, found it.)

Labels: far left, Marxism, revolution, squibs

Posted 7:43 am by Ken

Sci-Fife

Fife Libraries have been running a series of SF events, cleverly titled Sci-Fife.

On Thursday 6 October I'll be doing a reading and interview/discussion at:

Dalgety Bay Library
Regents Way
Dalgety Bay
KY11 9UY

Date:06 Oct 2011
Time: 19:30
Duration: 1 hour 30 minutes
Charge: £3.50 (£3 Premier/Super Fifestyle)

Details here. [Added 1 October: major update here.]

Labels: coming attractions, local, self-promotion, writing

Posted 12:43 pm by Ken

From the shores of Lake Orcadie

I'm just back from a week in Orkney as a guest of the 21st Orkney International Science Festival. The Festival is an impressive achievement, with a wide-ranging programme and a solid embedding in the locality: events were held in Kirkwall's large, modern and well-used community centre, the town hall, the cathedral, a local church and the hall of another church, and extended to outlying islands: tiny North Ronaldsay got an astronomy weekend to itself, and other events took place on Eday, Westray, Stronsay, Sanday Soulka and Hoy. The Reel, a cafe, bar, restaurant, and music centre hard by the cathedral, turned itself into a festival club in the evenings, to raucous and convivial effect. Selena Kuzman, who designed the festival's flyers and posters, had an exhibition of her pictures in a warehouse of the nearby Highland Park distillery. The topics ranged from astronomy to archaeology by way of quantum physics and psychology, with items on the skills of distilling and fermenting providing a local flavour in more ways than one. All this was covered in detail and in depth by the islands' weekly paper, The Orcadian - it was slightly disconcerting to find my own opening talk reported over almost half a page, and a relief to find the reporter had mercifully omitted my jokes and asides.

That talk was sponsored by Loganair, who covered my (and Carol's) return flights. Never having visted Orkney before, we were grateful for the opportunity to do a bit of exploring around the islands as well as attending events. Orkney is a place where history and prehistory are scattered liberally over the landscape, from the neolithic village of Skara Brae to the rusting guns recovered from Scapa Flow. The land is mostly low, undulating, and green, with the horizon sometimes just yards away, as you were if on the surface of an improbably terraformed asteroid. Underlying it is sedimentary rock, megayears of Devonian deposition exposed on every cliff-face and rocky shore, and the spoil-heaps left by the ice piled in heathery knolls at the foot of glens. Having all this pointed out to us, on a tour of Hoy with geologist Dr John Flett Brown (you can see him in very characteristic action here) was one highlight of a memorable and enjoyable week.

It wasn't until some days after I'd met him that I learned that Festival organiser Howie Firth had not only founded the Orkney Science Festival, he'd also a few years earlier started the Edinburgh Science Festival, and is in general for Orkney and Scotland what in SF circles is called a SMOF. No doubt there's a word in Orcadian dialect for this sort of person, but like Howie they're too modest to mention it themselves.

Labels: amazing things, self-promotion

Posted 10:56 am by Ken

Found in Translation

After enjoying the 'Nothing but the Poem' event on Sorley MacLean, I couldn't miss Wednesday's major session on his work at the Book Festival, marking the centenary of his birth. Again the event was packed and all the tickets sold out; again the proportion of Gaelic speakers in the audience was low, and again the audience was mainly of an older rather than a younger generation. Aptly enough, a great deal of the discussion concerned the pitfalls of translation and the parlous situation of the Gaelic language.

Read the rest and comment over at Genotype.

Labels: amazing things, bookfestival, local, Scottish politics

Posted 11:23 am by Ken

'How do the cells know about the jungle?'

Joan Bakewell is a speaker who needs no introduction, and in this capacity she's been introducing and interviewing speakers on key ideas for the 21st Century. Yesterday's topic was numbers, and the speaker was Ian Stewart. She introduced him by saying that of all the topics in her series, she found mathematics the hardest to understand, but that Ian Stewart was the best person to explain it.

Professor Ian Stewart is one of the great science popularisers - and not just in his own field of mathematics. Some of his many books on science were written with Jack Cohen, reproductive biologist and oft-invited speaker at SF conventions. In recent years, the two have teamed up with the wildly popular fantasy author Terry Pratchett to write (so far) three books on 'The Science of Discworld', which cleverly exploit the contrast between the eponymous flat planet (which runs on the rules of magic and the caprice of gods) and our universe (which doesn't) to explain an astonishing range of serious scientific points ... including the ways in which magic does work in our world, through the human propensity for Story.

Read the rest, and comment, over at Genotype.

Labels: amazing things, bookfestival, genomics

Posted 9:26 am by Ken

Total Recall

The problem of personal identity - of what makes you, you - has for a long time been investigated through thought experiments. John Locke asked us to imagine what it would mean to say that your immortal soul had in a past life been that of a warrior who fell at, say, the seige of Troy - given that you have no actual memories of being that warrior, and only the most coincidental resemblances in personality, outlook, knowledge, and beliefs. Leibniz asked us if we'd agree to 'become' the Emperor of China, on the sole condition that we took with us no memories of our present actual life. In this way, they tried to bring into focus our intuition that what matters in personal identity is continuity of memory and personality, and that our belief or lack of it in any immortal spark is strictly irrelevant.

But the self itself may not even be a mortal spark.

At a session chaired by Steven Gale, Julian Baggini spoke yesterday (Monday 22 August) on his book The Ego Trick, in which he explains the 'bundle theory' of personal identity, long familiar in the teachings of Buddhism in the East, and first explicated in the West by Hume.

Read the rest here.

Labels: bookfestival, genomics, local, skiffy

Posted 2:30 pm by Ken

A Treatise of Humean Nature

When the hero of Alastair Gray's Lanark was a typically tormented teenager, he happened to open a book. The book began:

All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS.

As he read on, he found that the text soothed his mind by lifting him right out of his problems, and giving him something else to think about. This is one way that philosophy can be applied to everyday life. Another, of course, is by mining the great philosophers for nuggets of practical wisdom. Not many of us have time to do that, or have any idea where to begin prospecting, but thanks to the division of labour (you'll find that in Adam Smith) someone else can do the mining for us, and package the result in a book you can read on the bus.

Read the rest here.

Labels: genomics, local

Posted 3:41 pm by Ken

A Close Reading at the Book Festival

I have a new post up at Genotype, on taking part in a close reading and dicussion of two poems by Sorley MacLean. I recommend the experience.

Labels: local, writing

Posted 7:34 pm by Ken

Cory Doctorow interviewed at Edinburgh Book Festival

On Sunday I interviewed Cory Doctorow, and the video (in two parts - I'm still learning) is now online at Genotype.

Labels: amazing things, local, politics, skiffy, writing

Posted 3:25 pm by Ken

Alan Warner, heard over echoes

My first post from the Book Festival is now up at Genotype: an account of a reading and discussion by Alan Warner of his forthcoming book, The Dead Man's Pedal.

I've just started reading his first book, Morvern Callar, after years of enthusiastic recommendations by informed friends. I wish I'd taken their advice earlier - the book is amazing.

Labels: coming attractions, genomics, local, writing

Posted 9:37 am by Ken

The Revolution Will be Followed by a Signing Session in the Adjacent Tent: Blogging the Book Festival

This year's theme for the Edinburgh International Book Festival was decided last year. With what was described at the launch party as uncanny prescience, the theme was 'revolution'. For the sixth year running, the Genomics Forum is a sponsor, and this year it's supporting three very topical debates. Along with Pippa Goldschmidt and the Forum's new Resident Playwright, Peter Arnott, I'll be blogging from the festival at Genotype, the blog of the Genomics Forum (cross-posted to the Festival's own blog). I'll post links to these here as they come in.

Former Guardian Edinburgh BeatBlogger Michael MacLeod (sometimes referred to in the distant past of this blog as 'Young Master Early') is blogging the book festival on a more professional basis for the Guardian.

Labels: amazing things, coming attractions, genomics, local, writing

Posted 7:10 pm by Ken

When I were a lad, this were all fields

Over the past few days I've had a worse sense of insecurity and instability than I had after 9/11, and far more unsettling than I anything I felt when I was actually, ah, present at scenes of considerably more consequent rucks, not to mention rocks. Seeing Lewisham's clock tower on the telly had me thinking along the lines that when I was that age we knew what we were fighting for. There's probably a blue plaque there in our memory.

On Monday evening I watched The Grand Experiment, a documentary in a series on Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words - their words to, and on, the BBC: which institution, we are reminded, was a grand experiment in itself. I spent the rest of the evening and too much of the small hours watching BBC News 24 on the riots, the night Croydon burned.

The Grand Experiment was, of course, the postwar Keynes-Beveridge full-employment welfare state. Supported by the main parties of left and right, by the end of the sixties it was coming under attack from both flanks: you can see Tariq Ali calling for the abolition of money and the power of the soviets, and Milton Friedman calling for the ascendance of monetarism and the freedom of the markets, and in the middle some floundering mouthpiece of the consensus, such as poor old Lord Balogh marching into the lions' den of Chicago to defend the Labour Government.

It seems obvious now that the postwar settlement had reached its limits by 1979. But I sometimes wonder if a more rational left than I was part of could have carried it forward, rather than helped to bring it down.

I blame the parents, and the parents were us.

Labels: far left, history, libertarian, Marxism, politics

Posted 3:09 pm by Ken

Seeing like a state

A political definition for the ages:

Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy.

Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police.

I hope someone's already designing the T-shirt.

Labels: libertarian, politics, War on Terror

Posted 4:04 pm by Ken

Lighter notes

I've written a piece (to be published in SFX issue 214) on Nineteen Eighty-Four for the SFX Book Club, and discussion of the book itself is now open.

My short story 'The Surface of Last Scattering' has been just been accepted for the September special SF issue of Technology Review. And from what editor Stephen Cass tells me, it's going to be one very special issue, and well worth looking out for.

Labels: coming attractions, self-promotion, writing

Posted 3:27 pm by Ken

Hope not Hate

This photo is from the Norwegian AUF (Labour Youth League)'s page about the Utøya summer camp, which makes very painful reading today.

You can sign an online book of condolence and solidarity here. Please do.

Posted 11:32 am by Ken

Gates of Oslo

Fascism is defined by its function, not its ideology. Its function is to attack and, in a severe enough crisis, to destroy the organised labour movement. Its ideology depends on time and place. Many ideas we traditionally associate with fascism have lost traction. The Third Reich and the Corporate State have as drawbacks their detractors, their admitted downsides, and above all their defeat. Nobody worth recruiting gives a toss about the Jewish conspiracy - except Islamists, and you don't want to go there, though some have tried. Ranting about Black people might get you a hearing in parts of the US, but the idea doesn't really travel. And yet, there's a niche for fascism, waiting for fresh ideas to fill it.

The Blind Watchmaker of the memes looks down, blindly, and tinkers ...

The confessed perpetrator of the Norway massacre has given us the thinking behind it. (Via.) Gramsci, 'Cultural Marxism', the Frankfurt School, feminism and political correctness as the root of the problem, the EU apparat as its enforcer, Muslim immigration and Islamist terrorism as its consequence or indeed as its weapon ... now we're getting somewhere.

An ideology for justifying violence against racial minorities, the Left and the labour movement has been developing in plain sight, rather than in the underworld of NSDAP re-enactors. It has now led to a massacre of the children of the one of the most moderate labour movements in the world.

Two things have to come out of this: first, the mainstream left and labour movements have to take seriously security and self-defence; second, the mainstream right must be made to pay a heavy political price for this atrocity.

As Gramsci wrote 90 years ago, in a world now lost: War is War.

Labels: Marxism, politics

Posted 8:09 pm by Ken

From unidentified flying objects to the speeches of Brezhnev

Things change, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. When they change enough, whether slowly or suddenly, they may change into something else. Things are connected to other things, to an extent that we can't imagine but can find out, and we won't go far wrong if we imagine that everything is connected to everything else.

In other words, everything has a history, and everything has a context. For practical reasons we may have to think about things as if they weren't changing, and as if they were separate things, just there by themselves. But when we're trying to really understand how the world works, we have to remember that our ideas about things may have been formed by leaving aside the changes going on in them, and the connections between them. And we have to bring history and context back into our thinking about the things, and that may mean changing our ideas about them.

And that's dialectical materialism. No scientist would disagree with it, though scientists (like other people) often forget it. I get outraged by the way some Marxists think they can pronounce, on the basis of their supposed all-embracing philosophy, on particular questions of science. They're behaving exactly like clerics of a church that thinks its theology is the queen of the sciences.

When did Marxists start behaving like that? Marx and Engels themselves certainly didn't. One Marxist who was also a scientist, the Dutch astronomer Anton Pannekoek, argued that the rot started with Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Reading a piece by Adam Buick about Dietzgen and Pannekoek many years ago got me on to reading Dietzgen, and introduced me to a very different take on dialectical materialism than the one you find in the standard manuals, and one that I found actually useful in thinking about scientific questions, and indeed in thinking in general. Both Marx and Engels, though they had some criticisms of Dietzgen, agreed that he - a tanner by trade, entirely self-taught - had figured it all out, more or less independently of themselves.

Earlier this year, after I'd written a post about how some Marxists have misunderstood the notion of 'the selfish gene', I decided to read or re-read half a dozen popular introductions to dialectical materialism. I could have saved myself the trouble. When you've read one, you've read them all. It didn't make any difference if the writers were Trotskyists or orthodox Communists. They all use the same arguments and the same illustrations. They're hard to tell apart, and it's hard to take from them anything that makes you think - hey, that's useful, I could use that! They don't provide any intellectual tools, of the kind you can find in any introductory philosophical textbook - Simon Blackburn's Think, for instance - or in Dietzgen's recently reprinted The Nature of Human Brain-Work.

Not that I didn't learn anything:

'All man-made cosmic bodies are the products of scientific thought. And as thought need not necessarily be unique to earth-dwellers and there may be other beings in the universe who may well be our intellectual superiors, it is natural to suppose that other cosmic bodies whose origin is so far not clear to us may also be the products of thought. Then why not suppose that the Earth with everything there is on it is also a product of thought?'

That intriguing passage is from the second page of the first chapter of ABC of Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975 (English translation, 1978). It is, of course, the opening gambit in an argument that the Earth is not, in fact, the product of thought. The argument wends on and on, through the whole history of philosophy, to culminate in a quotation from Leonid Brezhnev about the freedom, social equality and justice of Soviet life. This compact hardback of 510 small pages has outlasted the state in which it was printed. The paper and binding are good enough to outlast quite a few more. But I can already see the faint traces of brown at the edges. Like all paper, it's burning, very slowly. Some day it'll crumble.

Labels: Marxism

Posted 3:21 pm by Ken

Cult books

What are the requirements for writing a cult book? Readable style, significant subject-matter, and reckless assertion. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. The Female Eunuch. Chariots of the Gods. The Phenomenon of Man. The Teachings of Don Juan. And, of course, The Outsider, by Colin Wilson.

Consider Wilson on Roquentin, the narrator of Sartre's novel La Nausée:

'Roquentin feels insignificant before things. Without the meaning his Will would normally impose on it, his existence is absurd. Causality - Hume's bugbear - has collapsed; consequently there are no adventures.'

It's the aside - 'Hume's bugbear' - that does the trick. Years later, you'll read Hume and marvel. Likewise the capitalization of 'Will'. This isn't any old will, you see, the kind that gets you and me out of bed in the morning - no, it's the Will of Schopenhauer's Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, to whose 'formidable dialectical apparatus' Wilson has given a nod and a passing wave a few pages earlier.



In his long, frank and often (sometimes intentionally) funny autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose (Arrow, 2004), Colin Wilson explains the genesis of his extraordinary first book, published when he was twenty-five years old and a complete unknown who had left school at sixteen. He really had read all the books he cites, and thought about them at length. He'd written about them, in his journals and notebooks, for over a decade, meanwhile endlessly drafting and redrafting his first novel. In the process, he accomplished in passing the key requirement for becoming a publishable writer: write a million words. ('Of crap', I sometimes add, by way of encouragement, because that's what mine were.) The Outsider was an overnight success, but the high-brow critics who'd praised it to the skies soon woke up with a hang-over. Wilson, it turned out, wasn't Britain's answer to Sartre and Camus. None of them, as far as I know, put their finger on what he actually was. Far from being a charlatan, Wilson was an intelligent and sincere young man who read more than enough to put most undergraduates to shame, but who'd never had what a university education could have given him: a training in critical thinking. Instead, he tried to make everything he read fit together and make a coherent story. I did the same myself at the time I read The Outsider, at the age of sixteen. Many of us do.

Wilson went on writing, about a hundred books, about everything: astronomy, crime, the occult, psychology, philosophy, sex, wine, music, UFOs ... always with the same theme as his first. He enjoyed a second success with The Occult, sometimes with the same critics, who this time should have been even more ashamed of themselves afterwards, but weren't.

I've always admired him; for his optimism, his enthusiasm, his energy, his self-belief. In one of his many books he says that it's better to think you're a genius when you're not than to think you're not when you are. There's no doubt on which side he falls. His autobiography is genuinely engaging and inspiring. If I could sincerely write a cult book a tenth as good in its way as The Outsider I'd do it in a heartbeat, if only for the money - another subject on which Wilson is eloquent, and unsparing of his own blushes.

Ideas, people, ideas! What's the world waiting to hear about from me?

Labels: amazing things, reviews, writing

Posted 11:22 am by Ken

Religion and SF

My contribution to the Guardian discussion on SF and religion is now online.

If science is the theology of nature – with the wilder reaches of physics standing in for its scholastic philosophy – SF is its mythology, its folklore, its peasant superstition. Television, film, anime and computer games supply the statues and holy pictures, which (this time) really do move.

Labels: atheism, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 8:50 pm by Ken

Cultural Differences

The second part of my interview with Polit.ru is now available. The interview has a rather odd structure, in that it was built around questions sent in by the site's readers. I'm sure my delightful interlocutor, Anna Sakoyan, did a fine job of translating it into Russian. One question was about artificial intelligence, and I gave Google Translate as an example of its everyday emergence.

Here's how Google Translate repaid the compliment:

They say you are interested in the subject of earlier artificial intelligence. And now?

Too, but doing it is not so hard as before. I think the reason is that in the 1990s among Internet users and geeks was the craze for artificial intelligence and its development prospects. Particularly interested in the prospect of the human mind to move neuron by neuron in the format of the software. I like this idea seemed a little unrealistic. This is discussed in my first novel "The Stone Canal» (The Stone Canal) and the "Cassini Division": The Problem of superhuman intelligence feed was the main issue. From these calculations it was fun to play. And then we were arguing about what the philosophical significance of this phenomenon.

Incidentally, I had long been convinced that artificial intelligence can not in principle have consciousness. But there is a touching detail: the reason for this belief was wrong understanding of dialectical materialism (which is probably familiar to some readers of "Polit.ru"). I draw this conclusion from the wording of that consciousness - is a highly organized form of matter in motion, that is has under a biological basis. For some reason I then decided that only the physical brain can be conscious. And I did not immediately realize that the cause of the difficulty in movement, in complexity, so to speak, of the material, rather than what it is this material. Once I finally decided to his satisfaction, that question, I stopped to think about artificial intelligence.

When I see him, I believe in him.

In an interview with "Polit.ru" Bruce Sterling said that in his opinion, "the researchers continue to lose interest in this issue" because "it refers to an outdated paradigm." What do you think?

Interesting look. I think so.

When a creation of artificial intelligence to understand reproduction of the human mind as a program - it's a waste of time because the human mind we are already there. It would be nice, of course, if we had some superhuman intelligence, but in practice, technology and science, particularly cognitive science and computer science, do not seek to recreate human intelligence, and to simulate a much more primitive processes.

For example, computer video seriously progressed after attempts to mimic the human left eye and turned his eyes to the device insect, found it much more productive model for development. Actually began the process by which things around us become more "artificially intelligent", and we, in general, not particularly concerned about this. I was surprised, for example, how fast Google-developed translator. I have the feeling that he is improving constantly, and I think that this is due to the use of algorithms, in fact dictated by the principle of natural selection. And so machines become more intelligent without being holders of artificial intelligence, which is described in science fiction.

When I see him, I believe in him.

Labels: amazing things, self-promotion, skiffy

Posted 10:20 am by Ken

Psalms from Saturn

'What can SF teach us about God?' This burning question is the Guardian's question of the week, and yesterday Roz Kaveney kicked off with a nice brief introductory survey of how SF has dealt with religion, touching not just the familiar bases (Blish, Miller) but some lesser-known (and intriguing) examples.

In the series pitch, my own work is described as 'powerfully atheistic'. I'm not sure I see it that way myself, but I'm delighted with the description. I'd wear it on a T-shirt, at least at a con. My own contribution to the series - in answer to the less loaded question, 'So how does [SF] help us think about our place and purpose in the universe?' - has been accepted and will appear later this week. It'll probably be described by some as 'feebly faitheist', but I can live with that. For background reading, look here for a time when Church of Scotland (and Free Church!) ministers got a great sugar rush about the possibility of pious aliens.

Labels: atheism, coming attractions, self-promotion, skiffy

Posted 9:01 pm by Ken

Cultural Learnings

There's part one of an interview with me over at Polit.ru, transcribed from a Skype phone call and translated into Russian. Thanks to the magic of technology, many non-readers of Russian can translate it back into their own language. In English, you get passages like this:

I am a citizen of the country's position, namely Great Britain, which regularly participates in the harassment of other countries. So the standoff of the attacks, at least in words, this is one of my tasks.

And this:

You use your book as a platform for intellectual experiments?

Yes, I like to think of things in detail. And artwork is a very interesting way to explore opportunities. For example, in my first Theatrology autumn revolution (Fall Revolution) I considered market libertarian type in comparison with the Soviet Union and socialism; I then, in particular, about the theme of moving left to politics of identity. And from the very beginning, I was faced with the ideas of anarcho-capitalism, with ideas to build a fully market-oriented society. I immediately introduced myself tells the guys with guns who rush — fun everywhere this fantasy, of course. Write about this, of course, is not the same that face it. I think some of the readers "Polit.ru" something knows this. But all this is included in the narrative.

It's better than the original, really.

If you prefer something a little less challenging, there's a nice short email interview with me in Public Service Review: European Science and Technology 10.

[I]n SF fandom – the communities that form around a shared interest in SF – there are a few scientists, but almost all fans are interested in science. Any scientist with an ability to speak in public can draw a capacity crowd at a SF convention, and get a lot of informed and intelligent questions. And the great thing about SF fans is that they talk a lot to anyone who will listen, so they'll spread what the scientist spoke about to all their friends and relations.

At least in words, this is one of my tasks.

Labels: amazing things, self-promotion, writing

Posted 6:15 pm by Ken

News about stories

My short story 'Earth Hour' is now available to read at Tor.com. And my short story 'Sidewinders', in The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories has been nominated for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.

Both of these stories can be seen as 'pilot episodes' for novels that I may write in the future (and that, in some other present, I already have).

Labels: self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 7:20 pm by Ken

Why concrete smells like victory

Some time in my early teens, i.e. around 1970, a friend's family had to move house. They'd lived until then in a tenement flat which I recall dimly as maybe a little cramped for two parents and two boys, but perfectly respectable and comfortable: the father was a train-driver and the mother a housewife with a part-time job. But the building was being knocked down because a big new container port was being built just across the street. They moved to a maisonette in a newly-built block a couple of miles away, where blocks just like it were spreading up and over the hill. That Saturday, I helped them move, lugging chairs and boxes down the old stairs and up the new stairs time after time, and enjoying the van rides in between. The estate had a fresh raw feel: new-laid turf, new-planted beds, and the stairwell smelled of concrete. By evening the move was complete, more or less, and I suppose I had a cup of tea amid the cardboard boxes and went home. The next time I visited, everything was in place and it was great: bright and airy, with wide windows and central heating and wall-to-wall carpets and room, and probably rooms, for everybody.

The stairwell still smelled of concrete. There was plenty of green space around, but you knew that the new housing had just been built where a year or so before there had been nothing but green space, grass and gorse. For me at that age there was a thrill in the thought that this hectare or two of habitat had just been hacked out of raw nature. That increment of suburban sprawl felt like a frontier.

In the past few months I've seen documentaries about that time - a series about Scotland on film, a piece on Harold Wilson - and remembered what it was like when visible, tangible progress just kept happening. We didn't appreciate it enough, and I think I know why. Millions of people moved out of much worse places than my friend's family's old flat, out of slums and ruins and into new towns and suburbs. For the generation who'd been through the Great Depression and the Second World War - our parents - this and all that went with it was as good as socialism. For them the war was the revolution. This was their victory, this was what they'd fought for. It was their kids who didn't appreciate it.

Some guy who'd grown up in a New Town - it may have been Pat Kane, talking about Cumbernauld - said that it was a great place for young families with young children, and a great place to be a kid. You could scoot out the door on your bike and ride for miles and never worry about traffic, because the pedestrian lanes swooped over and under the roads. The school buildings were new and as bright and airy as high-tech factories and office blocks, which they often looked like. But once you'd grown up a bit and stopped being a kid and became a teenager, the new towns and suburbs had a lot less to offer.

My friend and I and the rest of our clique spent a lot of teenage Saturdays up in the hills above the town, looking down on the new high school and the gigantic IBM factory just a mile along the valley from it, loftily despising those of our cohort whose highest ambition was to move from the one to the other, and to live in one of the little boxes on the hillside. Most of us made haste to live in bedsits and squats and inner-city tenements, until we had kids and jobs ourselves and of course moved out to the suburbs, where ...

I want to breathe that air again and the smell of concrete and victory.

Labels: amazing things, Scottish politics

Posted 8:18 pm by Ken

Paging Lucy Stone

Pyr now have a page up for The Restoration Game and it reminds me of how it all began. In September 2006 Carol and I were waiting for a flight, outside Queenstown airport in New Zealand, when we heard several calls over the PA for a passenger called Lucy Stone. We wondered who she was and why she hadn't turned up and who was looking for her.

Carol looked at me and said: 'That sounds like the start of a novel.'

Being a writer, I wrote it down in a little black book.

That incident is not the only one in The Restoration Game that's based on something that actually happened. Here's another.

In the second chapter, 'The Caucasian Heiress', there's a party in a flat in Edinburgh in 1979, which actually happened three or four years earlier, in Glasgow. A very different long conversation took place on that very sofa in the front hall, between me and Carol. I was really taken with her, but Carol was going out with someone else at the time, and I was just getting over someone, and ... that was it, just a long conversation. I felt very down the following day. I only by chance met Carol again in London in 1979, by which time I'd long forgotten the girl at the party. We only realised a few years ago that that party in Glasgow was when we'd first met, when we were both reminiscing and independently and simultaneously realised: 'Oh! That was you!'

And in that same front hall, in a moment of idle curiosity in 1976, I'd opened a dusty brown envelope addressed to a previous occupant (long gone but ... OK, OK ...) and found to my amazement and amusement an Annual Report of the Ural Caspian Oil Company, all of whose holdings had - it said there in black and white - been 'nationalised by the revolutionary government of Soviet Russia in 1919', but which was still issuing annual reports to shareholders (Dividends for the year: £0.00, yet again) and was still holding out for getting the Caucasian oil-fields back.

I had a dark chuckle about this and thought how quaint and yet how telling it was that these shareholders - the capitalist class in the most literal, prosaic, business-like sense - still hadn't got over the Russian Revolution. They were still in the restoration game.

A little over a year later, and quite without realising it, I was in the same game. And that's in the book, too.

Apart from that it's all science fiction. Really.

Labels: coming attractions, politics, self-promotion, writing

Posted 8:18 pm by Ken

Onward into the virch

After 'The Vorkuta Event', another dark tale: my short story 'Earth Hour' is (for US readers at least) now available as a Tor.com Original, and from Amazon Kindle with a notably snazzy cover and a bargain price of all of $0.99 for 5,477 words. [Updated And free to read at Tor.com from 22 June!]

It's a dark tale because of its two or three gruesome moments, and because of that old inter-imperialist tension trope, but I like to think it's cheerful in its own fashion. It was inspired by stumbling and groping through darkened streets searching for a bar one hot Earth Hour in Sydney, an adventure that gave me bad Ayn Rand flashbacks and had me bending Carol's ear about how I hadn't seen the like since looking for a beer after 7 p.m. in Prague in 1977.

In other news, I've got a commission to write a short story for a special SF issue of Technology Review, about which I am well chuffed.

Labels: coming attractions, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 11:10 am by Ken

Curtain call

OK, I lied said 'probably' for a reason. One more poem, which I was still considering before the handover: Pseudoglyphs, by Francis Silva.

Labels: genomics, Human Genre Project, writing

Posted 3:48 pm by Ken

The Human Genre Project

Peter Arnott, the newly appointed Resident Playwright at the Genomics Forum, is now also the new editor of The Human Genre Project. This online, open-ended anthology of new poems and short prose pieces inspired by genes and genomics has drawn contributions and even some media attention from around the world since its launch two years ago. I'm proud to have initiated it and have enjoyed editing it, and I'd like to thank all those who've contributed material as well as all who've been involved in setting up, publicising and running the site: Damien Noonan (who designed it), Emma Capewell and Alison Caldecott, Claire Alexander and Clare de Mowbray. My fellow writer in residence, Pippa Goldschmidt, was more or less a co-editor in the time we worked together, as well as a fine contributor.

It's always been our intention that editorial responsibility for the site should go to the current writer in residence, and I'm very happy to pass this on to Peter. He'll bring a fresh eye to evaluating contributions, and a new range of contacts and colleagues to solicit contributions from. He already has schemes up his sleeve, so watch this space.

Which is not to say I'll stop twisting arms myself.

Meanwhile, here's probably the last of my choices for the site, Premature Beauty by Stephanie Lynn Keil.

Labels: coming attractions, genomics, Human Genre Project, writing

Posted 7:05 pm by Ken

The New and Perfect Man

This week I received from PS Publishing my contributor copy of Postscripts #24/25 - The New and Perfect Man edited by Peter Crowther & Nick Gevers, in the sumptuous signed and tray-cased limited edition, an object of extraordinary beauty; a jacketed hardcover is also available.

Truth in advertising compels me to admit that the names of a few of the authors, mine included, are missing from the signature sheets. Suffice it to say that a batch of signature sheets were irretrievably and inexplicably lost in the post between me and the next name on the list. This is all of a piece with the quite remarkable ill-luck that has dogged my own story, originally commissioned many years ago for an anthology of Lovecraftian hard SF called The Cthulhuian Singularity, whose publication encountered eventually terminal delays and ... difficulties, the tale of which is not for mortal tongue to utter. I'm inordinately proud of 'The Vorkuta Event', but the vicissitudes of its publication have often made me mutter darkly about the possibility that the story is actually cursed.

However - all's well that ends well! It's published at last, in stellar company and in a very fine edition, delightfully illustrated. If any brave soul approaches me with a copy, I'll be very happy to sign it.

With my left hand, just in case.

Details:

The latest bumper edition of the POSTSCRIPTS ANTHOLOGY - almost 150,000 words in all!

•THE NEW AND PERFECT MAN -- Carol Emshwiller (cover story, Ed Emsh illustration)
•FRIGHTENED ANGELS -- Jeremy Adam Smith
•TO SEE INFINITY BARE -- Rudy Rucker & Paul Di Filippo
•ELECTRIC BREAKFAST -- Paul Meloy
•A CRACK IN THE CEILING OF THE WORLD -- Michael Kelly
•THE DOG PARADE -- Lawrence Person
•THE LAST HERETIC -- Darrell Schweitzer
•THE STORY OF PRINCESS ROSEBUD -- Alan Peter Ryan
•THE INN OF DISTANT SORROWS -- Thomas Tessier
•A MOMENT AT THE HOUSE -- T.M. Wright
•WHISPER -- Richard Calder
•THE PRIMATE SANCTUARY -- Quentin S. Crisp
•CALL ME -- Bob Strother
•SO LOVED -- Matthew Hughes
•CONFESSIONS OF A TYRANT’S DOUBLE -- Gregory Norminton
•EUPHORIA -- Robert Reed
•TRUE BLUE -- Darrell Schweitzer
•CHRIST THE PAINTER -- Allen Ashley
•YOUR GOLDEN HANDS -- Andrew Hook
•THE GHOST OF LILLIAN BLISS -- Rio Youers
•ASHES IN THE WATER -- Joel Lane and Mat Joiner
•CHILD OF EVIL STARS -- Anne-Sylvie Homassel
•HER FINGERS LIKE WHIPS, HER EYES LIKE RAZORS -- Jay Lake
•DR. BLACK, THOUGHTS & PATENTS -- Brendan Connell
•THE ROOM BEYOND -- Ramsey Campbell
•THROWNNESS -- Adam Roberts
•IMAGO -- Keith Brooke
•THE VORKUTA EVENT -- Ken MacLeod

Labels: self-promotion, skiffy, writing