Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: kenneth dot m dot macleod at gmail dot com Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Site Works launch at Blackwell's
On Thursday 28 April at 6.30 I'll be talking with Robert Davidson, editor of Sandstone Press at a book launch event at Blackwell's in Edinburgh for his new novel, Site Works. Bob has drawn on his own experience as a civil engineer in the water industry to write this intense look into the lives of men whose hard work makes our lives liveable, yet who we usually see as indistinguishable figures knee-deep in mud.
On a wind lashed coast in the far north a group of men assemble on a construction site. The Ness and Struie Drainage Project will dominate their lives for the next few months as they toil through the daylight hours and into the night, endure hardship and conflict and – mostly - survive. Within the compound and fencelines a new, temporary world will form, bounded by sea, mountains and sky. Site Works is the story of the men and their work, transients creating something permanent and greater than they know.I'm reading this book right now and thoroughly enjoying it.
Labels: coming attractions, local, writing
Fiction to Future: The Science of Science Fiction
I should add that at 6 p.m. there's a science fiction poetry event at the Scottish Poetry Library, which is, um, about ten minutes' very fast and mostly uphill walk to the Pleasance, so if you're young and/or fit and fancy both events, well ... Tickets for this one are £5/£3 and available from the Library.
Speaking of science and poetry, the SPL has a podcast (here and here) of interviews on the subject conducted by its Reader in Residence, Ryan Van Winkle, with me and with Tracey S. Rosenberg. (Tracey makes a much livelier job of it than I did.)
Labels: coming attractions, genomics, Human Genre Project, local, self-promotion, writing
Yuri's Night
Fifty years ago today, the working class began the conquest of space. Whatever else may be said by way of criticism of that remarkable section of society, this achievement is forever theirs.Yuri Gagarin's flight is being celebrated around the world, and even off it. Glory to Yuri, and to all who followed - and to all who will, a number that will some day be millions, and that will still be the beginning.
[Image source: Museum Victoria]
The witch-child that books built: Jo Walton's Among Others
The only fairies I ever saw were quite conventional. They had cheeky faces, pointy ears, small conical caps, and they played leapfrog on the ceiling. I was eight at the time, and unwell, and I had a high temperature. I knew I was seeing something that wasn't there. The fairies didn't frighten me. They didn't seem real. The contorted faces that emerged from the wood-grain of the wardrobe door, and the great multicoloured irregular shapes that in the dark drifted through the room like paramecia under a microscope - all of which put in an appearance every bloody night - they seemed real. To me, at that age and a little older, they were real. I thought the drifting shapes, in particular, were a completely objective phenomenon. I remember getting very excited when we were told in school about germs. I thought the things I saw every night were a special kind of germs that were big enough to see.
The fairies in Jo Walton's Among Others (Tor, 2010) are like what the faces and the shapes would have been if they'd been real. From their descriptions in the book, they might be instances of paraedolia. But in this story we know they aren't. They haunt, mainly, industrial ruins. At one point, the fifteen-year-old heroine speculates that they are a sentient manifestation of the interconnectedness of the world, which is just the sort of thing this sort of heroine would think. Among Others is a fantasy about science fiction. It's a story about being fifteen in 1979 and growing up through, among other things, reading science fiction (and talking to fairies). It captures exactly the feeling of growing up in post-war, and then post-industrial, Britain, amid the ruins of giants' work: We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one. She had me at that sentence. I fell into the book and didn't come out for two days, and I missed it when I'd finished. Mori, the narrator and heroine, uses magic to find her way to science fiction fandom. This use of magic turns out to have been a mistake, but you can see the temptation.
The way that Mori uses science fiction is a kind of magic in itself. In the words of Francis Spufford's The Child that Books Built, a real-life memoir of a male counterpart of Mori:
You can see through the differences and irregularities of cases to the unchanging principle beneath, the bare grid of the idea they have in common, and the exercise of this new power is, of course, pleasurable. It makes the world a giant step more graspable - more yours.There are costs for that grasp. In Walton's book, they are paid. But as anyone who has grown up among others will tell you, it's that or the loss of self, which is the precise threat that Mori has to finally face. At that point the price is worth it. And then you grow up, or don't.
Among Others is about someone who will grow up, by someone who did; a sentient manifestation of the interconnectedness of the world.