The Early Days of a Better Nation

Coming soon: US paperback of The Night Sessions

2012-01-11T20:19:00.004Z

Via i09, I see that the forthcoming Pyr edition of The Night Sessions is now available for pre-order. The cover, by Stephan Martiniere, is just ace - I've seen it before, of course, as editor Lou Anders took me through various stages of the design process, but this happens to be the first time I've seen it walking the mean streets by itself.

The book itself is a near-future police procedural, featuring atheist detectives, presbyterian terrorists, creationist science-park animatronic hominids, a gothic lolita secret policeman, and Calvinist robots in space.

Or, as the publisher more soberly puts it:

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. It’s been a long time since anyone saw anything like this. Terrorism is history.

After the Middle East wars and the rising sea levels, after Armageddon and the Flood, came the Great Rejection. The first Enlightenment separated church from state. The Second Enlightenment has separated religion from politics. In this enlightened age there’s no persecution, but the millions who still believe and worship are a marginal and mistrusted minority. Now someone is killing them.

At first, suspicion falls on atheists more militant than the secular authorities. But when the target list expands to include the godless, it becomes evident that something very old has risen from the ashes. Old and very, very dangerous. . .

Known manifestations

2012-01-02T14:05:00.006Z

My engagements so far for 2012:

Thursday 2 to Sunday 5 February: with many other authors, as well as noted SF/F fans and artists at SFX Weekender 3, Pontin's Holiday Park, Prestatyn Sands, North Wales. It's hoped (but not promised) that pre-publication copies of my new novel, Intrusion (Orbit, 1 March 2012), will be available for signing in the dealers' room.

Intrusion is, of course, already available for pre-order in hardcover and Kindle editions. Cory Doctorow, who has kindly allowed me to quote from his forthcoming review, describes it as

a new kind of dystopian novel: a vision of a near future "benevolent dictatorship" run by Tony Blair-style technocrats who believe freedom isn't the right to choose, it's the right to have the government decide what you would choose, if only you knew what they knew. ... a haunting, gripping story of resistance, terror, and an all-consuming state that commits its atrocities with the best of intentions.

Iain M. Banks calls it a twistedly clever, frighteningly plausible dystopian glimpse.

Friday 13 April, evening: a panel on transhumanism/posthumanism with, among others, Justina Robson and Steve Fuller at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

Saturday 14 (evening) to Sunday 15 April: Guest of Honour at the lively and highly commendable annual 'fantastic weekend for readers and writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror', now in its sixth year, Alt.Fiction, Phoenix Digital Arts Centre, Leicester.

2012 - year of fell portent

2012-01-01T19:07:00.003Z

According to half-baked myth and Hollywood (but I repeat myself) 2012 is the year the Mayan calendar reaches the end of its Long Count and the old gods come from the sky and eat our brains, or whatever.

My brain, at the moment, would welcome being devoured by a feather-coated obsidian-toothed deity with a name that reads like it came from a Polish dictionary falling downstairs, but the grisly repast would probably send said deity on a hasty visit to the privy, so I'll just have to sweat this one out.

Happy New Year!

War with the Newts

2011-12-23T10:48:00.011Z

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.

Year's Best SF 29

2011-12-12T11:15:00.005Z

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.

The word from a silent sky

2011-12-02T12:56:00.000Z

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.

Observing the Leonid Meteor Shower

2011-11-17T20:34:00.001Z

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.

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

2011-11-10T17:49:00.005Z

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!

Now available!

2011-11-02T12:27:00.002Z

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.)

Orwell's other island

2011-11-02T11:05:00.011Z

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.

Battle of Ideas 2011

2011-10-26T13:31:00.004Z

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.

Lenin on the BBC

2011-10-11T21:10:00.006Z

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.

The near future arrives this week

2011-10-02T10:39:00.004Z

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.)

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

2011-09-29T06:55:00.009Z

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.

Another good review of The Restoration Game

2011-09-26T07:28:00.005Z

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 ...

A metaphor for the mundane

2011-09-24T11:38:00.004Z

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.

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

2011-09-23T17:14:00.008Z

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.)

Sci-Fife

2011-09-21T07:43:00.004Z

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.]

From the shores of Lake Orcadie

2011-09-10T12:43:00.001Z

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.

Found in Translation

2011-08-26T10:56:00.002Z

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.

'How do the cells know about the jungle?'

2011-08-24T11:23:00.001Z

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.

Total Recall

2011-08-23T09:26:00.003Z

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.

A Treatise of Humean Nature

2011-08-20T14:30:00.000Z

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.

A Close Reading at the Book Festival

2011-08-19T15:41:00.002Z

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.

Cory Doctorow interviewed at Edinburgh Book Festival

2011-08-17T19:34:00.002Z

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

Alan Warner, heard over echoes

2011-08-16T15:25:00.002Z

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.

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

2011-08-15T09:37:00.005Z

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.

When I were a lad, this were all fields

2011-08-10T19:10:00.005Z

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.

Seeing like a state

2011-08-01T15:09:00.004Z

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.

Lighter notes

2011-07-30T16:04:00.003Z

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.

Hope not Hate

2011-07-25T15:27:00.002Z

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.

Gates of Oslo

2011-07-24T11:32:00.009Z

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.

From unidentified flying objects to the speeches of Brezhnev

2011-07-18T20:09:00.006Z

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.

Cult books

2011-07-16T15:21:00.005Z

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?

Religion and SF

2011-07-14T11:22:00.004Z

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.

Cultural Differences

2011-07-12T20:50:00.004Z

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.

Psalms from Saturn

2011-07-12T10:20:00.005Z

'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.

Cultural Learnings

2011-07-06T21:01:00.007Z

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.

News about stories

2011-06-23T18:15:00.004Z

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).

Why concrete smells like victory

2011-06-13T19:20:00.007Z

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.

Paging Lucy Stone

2011-06-10T20:18:00.006Z

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.

Onward into the virch

2011-06-09T20:18:00.005Z

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.

Curtain call

2011-06-08T11:10:00.004Z

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

The Human Genre Project

2011-06-07T15:48:00.005Z

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.

The New and Perfect Man

2011-06-04T19:05:00.008Z

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

'I, Robot.' You what?

2011-05-28T13:16:00.003Z

So I'm doing an after-dinner talk about robots and AI in SF for SICSA's PhD student conference and by way of introduction I say something that I only thought of that afternoon.

Which is that as an SF writer I sometimes get asked to speak at events like this, relating SF to the actual practice of a discipline, and that it's just occurred to me that in every case SF owes that field an apology for getting it wrong. Take surveillance studies, for instance: we gave them Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is all about real-time surveillance rather than the accumulation and storage of records. This has people worked up about surveillance cameras and quite blasé about Google (etc) tracking their every move.

Or take genomics, an area in which I've been quite involved, and the technologies associated with it: genetic engineering and genetic medicine. The SF template for these has been provided by Brave New World and Frankenstein. What these works have spawned, regardless of the intent of their creators, is a great lumbering monster of reactionary anxieties.

And robotics, computer science, and AI? Yup, we did it again, from Čapek onwards (not to mention Mary Shelley's creature). And even when Eano Binder and Isaac Asimov had taken a hammer to the Revolt of the Robots cliché, almost all SF about robots and AI has dealt not with likely consequences but about, well, us: distinctively human-centred themes of labour, slavery, consciousness, identity; and the anxieties provoked when we see, or imagine, these replicated in a machine.

And then I went on to give my talk about how SF has dealt with these.

What I wonder, though, thinking about this, is whether there's any area of human endeavour or inquiry which has featured largely in SF, and that SF has handled in a way that hasn't been an utterly cringe-making travesty of what it's actually about.

Suggestions welcome.

The Restoration Game in US paperback, real soon now

2011-05-25T16:12:00.005Z

The US edition of my novel The Restoration Game, to be published by Pyr in September, is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. It has a really cool cover by Stephan Martinière, who here as elsewhere has an uncanny talent for taking scenes from my imagination and rendering them more vividly and accurately than my own mind's eye.

Flashback

2011-05-25T15:57:00.005Z

Ian Hocking's Flashback, the sequel to his recently-published Déja Vu (see below) is now available from the Amazon Kindle Store. I haven't read it yet but it looks intriguing. And with the promise of more Saskia Brandt stories to come, Ian risks becoming a writer again, which is good news all round.

38 years of unintended consequences

2011-05-03T10:42:00.001Z

In 1973 an Afghan politician called Daoud overthrew his cousin, the king, and proclaimed a republic. In this he had the help of the moderate faction of Afghanistan's communist party, the PDPA, led by Babrak Karmal. The PDPA's base was the large part of Afghanistan's small technical intelligentsia that had been to university in the Soviet Union and seen the future in the bright lights of Tashkent. Under the republic the party reunited and grew somewhat stronger. President Daoud decided in late April 1978 to crush it. Unfortunately for him, the PDPA had enough cadres in the army's officer corps to improvise a coup, and it was Daoud who got crushed. The coup was welcomed by joyous crowds in Kabul, making it the Saur (Spring) Revolution. The revolutionaries set out to reform Afghanistan's feudal countryside, but managed to alienate the peasants, to say nothing of the landlords and mullahs. Faced with increasingly violent opposition, the revolutionaries split along old factional lines between moderates and radicals. The president, Taraki, gave the moderate leader, Karmal, the job of ambassador to Czecheslovakia. Taraki then flew to Moscow, consulted with Brezhnev, and returned with the intention of dealing with the radical leader, Amin. Amin shot Taraki first, and pressed on in the teeth of an escalating insurgency, appealing all the while for Soviet military aid. The US, seeing opportunity, began arming the Afghan counter-revolutionaries. In December 1979 the Soviet Union answered Amin's appeals for aid by moving in troops to stabilise the situation, killing Amin, and installing Karmal.

The US, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia then massively stepped up their aid to the counter-revolutionaries, and organised the flow of thousands of Muslim militants to Afghanistan. One of these militants was a young civil engineer called Osama Bin Laden. One of his former colleagues said Osama was popular with the mujahadin because of his money and his construction skills, adding almost as an afterthought: 'And of course his pleasant personality!'

The cascade of unintended consequences just keeps rolling along. There seems no reason to think it will now stop.

Site Works launch at Blackwell's

2011-04-25T19:33:00.006Z

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.

Fiction to Future: The Science of Science Fiction

2011-04-13T19:14:00.004Z

Tomorrow evening (Thursday 14 April) at 7 p.m. I'll be at this Science Festival event at the Pleasance, with Iain M. Banks and Charles Stross, chaired by Andrew J. Wilson. Tickets are £3, available from the site, over the counter at Blackwell's (which is sponsoring the event), and on the door.

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.)

Yuri's Night

2011-04-12T21:03:00.007Z

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

2011-04-04T20:39:00.004Z

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.

The Creationist Brain Zap

2011-03-27T12:54:00.005Z

I first became aware of the conflict between evolution and creationism at the age of six, when I read about Early Man in a school story-book. The book was about a day in the life of different people around the world. It was probably written by Enid Blyton and was as scientific as you'd expect. I literally didn't know Early Man from Adam. I asked my mother if Adam and Eve had had pointed ears, hairy pelts, and had lived up a tree. This was not a welcome question to raise in a Lewis manse. Adam's ears may or may not have been pointed but mine certainly burned. My mother had some sharp words with the teacher, and went on to score out and write indignantly over any references to evolution she came across in the numerous children's books of knowledge which our parents - and all due credit to them - gave us over the years. As we grew older we were also presented with a steady supply of anti-evolution tracts and books, culminating in a fine copy of what you might call the bible of modern creationism, Morris and Whitcomb's The Genesis Flood. I read this in my early teens and found it persuasive.

In case anyone doesn't know ... The Genesis Flood argues that the entire universe was created a few thousand years ago, and that a couple of thousand years after its creation, the Earth was devasted by a global flood resulting from the collapse of the vapour canopy that had hitherto kept the early Earth pleasantly warm and humid. There have been some disagreements since about where the water came from, and where it went, but in any case the upshot was that this global aqueous catastrophe completely resurfaced the globe and produced almost the entire geological column and fossil record. The appearance of a succession of forms of life is an artefact of their original location ('ecological zonation') and 'hydrodynamic sorting', i.e. their differing capacities to sink or swim. Just why the ecologically and hydrodynamically almost identical ichthyosaurs and dolphins are never found in the same strata is never quite explained.

(There are other difficulties with this hypothesis.)

Fate or Providence or the course of nature took an ironic revenge on my parents for filling my head with this sort of nonsense, because having been primed to be suspicious of mainstream science my brain was an open goal for pseudoscience. Flying saucers and Erich von Daniken and Velikovsky other such rubbish went straight to the back of the net. One consequence was that I started thinking, just to try and make sense of it all, and by the time I went to university I was a convinced atheist. I still thought that the anti-evolution tracts had made some telling points. This misconception didn't survive a reading of the first chapter of the first-year biology textbook, Keeton's Biological Science. As often happens it was an entirely trivial point that pricked the bubble:

'Why,' Keeton asked, 'would the Creator have given pigs, which walk on only two toes per foot, two other toes that dangle uselessly well above the ground?'
Creationists can argue about the human appendix and the whale's hind legs and male nipples till the cows come home, but the pig's superfluous trotters walked all over that, at least for me.

So I studied biology and then zoology and I read everything about evolution I could find. I read The Origin of Species, and I saw for myself how it had been misrepresented in the creationist tracts. One particularly prevalent practice of these was what later became known as quote-mining: taking a quote from an evolutionist out of context or mangling it, so that it seemed to be conceding a point against evolution. An example that jumped out at me was the passage from Darwin's sixth chapter, 'Difficulties of the theory', the one that goes: 'To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' I'd often seen this quoted, but nary a word from the three pages that follow, in which Darwin explains how the eye could indeed have been formed by natural selection. As you might imagine, I was indignant about how I had been deceived. I came to have a very short fuse on the subject of quote-mining.

Needless to say, all through my zoology studies the matter came up at home. I didn't raise it myself, but my parents did, repeatedly. They plied me with Young Earth Creationist material, and got very upset when I questioned it, however tactfully. Not that I was always tactful. I was sometimes grossly insensitive. But all but a very few of these fights were picked by my parents and not by me. I don't blame them for that. They were doing good as they saw it.

At other times, I've taken a light-hearted, irenic, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger attitude to all this. What a shame, I've said, that some fundamentalists can't seem to understand that there is no necessary conflict between Christian faith and the scientific fact of evolution! One of my tutors, a palaeontologist who was a devout Christian and later became an ordained Anglican vicar, could surely have set them straight on that!

But he couldn't have. They were perfectly well aware that there were Christians who weren't YEC. I don't know if they thought these people weren't really Christians, but at the very least they thought they were bad and inconsistent Christians, at least in that respect. I'll say again, I don't blame them for that.

The people I blame are the people who wound them up.

As time went on I thought very little about the whole creation-evolution controversy, and I only became interested again in the 1990s, when I started following talk.origins, a Usenet newsgroup where creationists (and other anti-evolutionists) have toe-to-toe knockdown arguments with supporters of mainstream science. Its numerous FAQs and other resources are now easily available at its website. What I learned there, from repeated example, is that the problems I noticed in the creationist tracts - the distortions, the fallacies, the faked anomalies, the quote-mining - are still absolutely characteristic of creationists, along with something that doesn't come across in (most of) the books but comes over loud and clear when creationists are arguing online in person: a quite insufferable arrogance, aggressiveness, and ignorance. There are a few creationists who acknowledge the weight of the evidence for evolution and don't distort it but still reject it. But they're the exceptions.

What quote-mining shows is that some people who produce creationist material are conscious liars. Behind these pseudo-science hacks are worse people yet. These are theologians who have the education to understand the conflict precisely. It's not one between 'science and the Bible'. It's a lot more stark than that. It's a conflict between a particular way of reading the Bible (what is loosely called 'literalism') and normal scientific method. There would be a certain integrity in acknowledging the conflict, admitting that there was no obvious resolution, and pointing out that we are not always given to comprehend the intent of the Ancient of Days. That at least would allow young people from these traditions to study biology and geology and astronomy without the constant arguments at home interrupting their thoughts like a buzz of static across their brains.

There's one further ironic revenge visited on all this. A frequent complaint against the New Atheists is that they're only arguing against fundamentalism, and ignoring the broader and more accommodating forms of religious belief. This isn't exactly true, but to the extent that it is, they've hit a sweet spot in the market. When I rejected fundamentalism I didn't turn to broader and more accommodating forms of religious belief. I didn't start wondering if maybe there was something to be said for Anglicanism. I just went straight over to atheism. If this is typical, and I think it is, then there must be many for whom the New Atheist books are like water in the desert. We need no condescension from those who have already found an oasis.

[Note: this includes part of my Leicester Secular Society Darwin Memorial Lecture that I left out below.]

Déjà Vu all over again

2011-03-23T09:52:00.003Z

A few years ago I read and gave an enthusiastic blurb for a small-press, POD-published book, something I don't often do. The book was Déjà Vu, by Ian Hocking. It was a cracking story, more technothriller than SF, using plausible-sounding physics to set up, as I recall, a time-travel paradox that powered a cleverly thought-through plot. It was at least as good as lot of more widely-published work in the same genre. I wasn't the only reviewer who thought the book, and the writer, deserved a lot better. Ian's efforts to become a properly published writer were serious, unavailing, and in the end heartbreaking. He had another life than being a writer, and reckoned it was time he got on with it.

Now he has decided to make Déjà Vu available on Kindle for a very low price. Give it a go. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised, and find yourself, as I did, looking forward to the sequel.

Libya

2011-03-21T16:14:00.003Z

The armed forces of the UK, US, France and several other countries are at this moment attacking the government and armed forces of Libya, in the immediate interest and at the behest of an armed rebellion led by people some of whom were until very recently members of the government and armed forces of Libya. At the same time, the states attacking the Libyan state and supporting the armed rebellion are fully supportive of the governments and armed forces of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen (today on the brink) in using armed force to put down unarmed protest demonstrations. There's no inconsistency in their actions (and their inactions). They have to maintain their interests in the region, which are threatened by the Arab revolutions.

People of the most diverse political views, which in the UK range from the leaderships of the major parties to the dregs of the far left, are joined in demanding support for the attack on humanitarian grounds. Many sincere supporters of the Arab revolutions also support the attack.

I think the well-intentioned among these are making a big mistake. The attackers themselves, however, probably aren't. This humanitarian intervention is likely to be as successful as those in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

The leadership of the Libyan rebels probably aren't making a mistake either. Having failed to take the country they refused even to test offers of mediation. At first they hung out banners opposing foreign intervention. Then they called for a no-fly zone. Now they celebrate the attack, their fighters dancing on the burned-out hulks of a dozen or so tanks and supply vehicles destroyed from the air. It seems safe to assume that taking power with the support of imperialism and its Arab client despots is what they intend to do. Now, I could be wrong about this, but I'm finding it hard to see this prospect as a win for the Arab revolutions.

For these reasons I think people in the attacking countries should oppose the attack.

Outcasts, BBC One

2011-03-15T19:33:00.004Z

Outcasts, now mercy-killed after its first series - eight episodes that felt like sixteen - collapsed across the finishing line, had a lot going for it. The CGI was competent. The South African landscape was unfamiliar enough to most viewers, and spectacular enough in its own right, to stand in for an alien Earth-like world. The sets had moments and angles of promise. The lead actors were in their different ways good-looking. Some of them had been successful in other roles.

All that was wrong with it was the script. Clunky dialogue, kitchen-sink drama instead of plot, every character with a back-story like a tin can tied to a cat's tail. Every time something interesting threatened to happen, the kitchen sink got heaved at it. The extras were never seen doing anything that made you feel you were looking at a living community. They either walked briskly from place to place or gathered in front of the public telescreens whenever something had to be announced. The lead actors' talents were squandered on sub-EastEnders scenes with more Scottish accents. This was the BBC doing science fiction without the science fiction. Its ratings collapse and near-universal panning will probably convince the BBC not to risk doing SF again for a very long time.

Good.

One day later, relief: the second series of The Event has begun on C4! Already I'm rooting for the leader of the 'evil' faction of the aliens. At least, I am when I'm not wondering why, when the aliens crashed and were captured back in the late 1940s, the US government didn't follow the SOP for First Contact that worked so well at Roswell:

Kill and dissect. It's the only way to be sure.

Online elsewhere

2011-03-15T08:48:00.003Z

My appreciation of John Scalzi's novel Old Man's War is online at tor.com, and my write-up of last month's LSE event on 'Science Fiction and International Orders', exploring (with lots of links) the use of SF/F by academics in the contentious field of International Relations, is now online at Salon Futura, along with a fine selection of reviews and interviews.

New poem on Human Genre Project

2011-03-14T10:26:00.003Z

The Human Genre Project has a new poem, SMAD4, by science writer Elaine Westwick.

Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation, John F. Welsh, Lexington Books, 2010

2011-03-11T16:05:00.007Z

It seems apt that Stirner's work has found its greatest appreciation among the self-taught. Academic works that give so much as a fair-minded exposition of Stirner can be counted on the fingers of one hand. This book, a welcome addition to their number, reviews them all - as well as the more numerous others that give Stirner anything but a fair exposition - in a few pages. Stirner's place in intellectual history has likewise often owed more to imagination and indignation than investigation. Welsh traces Stirner's influence by a method so blindingly obvious that it has hitherto escaped even sympathetic academics: rather than tease out possible influences of and parallels to Stirner in the work of thinkers, activists and artists with individualist or egoist views, he looks at the work of people who explicitly stated that they were influenced by Stirner.

The structure of the book is clear and straightforward, as is its style. Part One deals with Stirner himself. The first chapter outlines Stirner's life, his historical and intellectual context, and his critical reception: from his contemporary Young Hegelians and their breakaways Marx and Engels, through later Marxists, existentialists, anarchists, and academics. The next two chapters, 'Humanity - the new Supreme Being' and 'Ownness and Modernity', are a concentrated but lucid exposition of the major themes of The Ego and Its Own, firmly locating Stirner as a critical Hegelian, and carefully differentiating Stirner's concept of 'ownness' from 'freedom' in its many guises. These two chapters are the best guide available to Stirner's book, and significant original arguments in their own right.

The three chapters of Part Two discuss in turn three of Stirner's most influenced, and most influential, disciples: the individualist anarchist Benjamin R. Tucker, the egoist philosopher James L. Walker, and the feminist and 'archist' Dora Marsden. For anyone whose acquaintance with these has come primarily from the efforts (handsomely acknowledged by Welsh) of egoist websites such as this one and anarchist or individualist small presses and little magazines, these chapters shed a flood of new light. Tucker, Walker and Marsden were much closer to what might be called the mainstream of the intellectual avant-garde than their present relative marginality suggests: Tucker's Liberty carried the first discussions and translations of Nietzsche in the United States, Walker was a prominent journalist and editor as well as noted atheist and anarchist publicist, and Marsden's journals published early works of Pound, Joyce, West, Lawrence and Eliot. Again, intellectual and historical context, clear and accurate exposition, and original development of the arguments, are combined and smoothly presented.

Part Three's first chapter examines the evidence for Stirner's alleged influence on Nietzsche, and, in finding it wanting, presents a survey of Nietzsche's thought and its contrast with Stirner's on numerous points. The final chapter of the book, 'Dialectical Egoism: Elements of a Theoretical Framework', lays out the toolkit for applying Stirner's approach, as analytical intrument and intellectual weapon, in the struggles and debates of today. This chapter has the potential, and no doubt the aim, of making egoism and dialectics available and accessible to students, scholars and activists seeking an alternative to the collectivism, statism and irrationalism in which critical theory is so often shrouded and buried. Egoism, Welsh argues, can be prised from the hands of capitalism's partisans, and dialectics wrested from those of communism's. Given the truly shocking state of academic critical theory, some of whose authentic products are indistinguishable from their wickedest parodies, this aim is neither quixotic nor ignoble. The impulse to cut a dash, if nothing else, could incite many a young or old academic to cut a swathe with the dialectical egoist scalpel.

To sum up: any reader of this journal, and anyone who has ever tried to grapple with Stirner, will enjoy and benefit from this book. Scholars and students seeking a clear, honest, up-to-date introduction to Stirner need look no further. Individual-minded individuals outside the academy will also find this book of use: 'Society, the state, and humanity cannot master this devil: the un-man, the individual, the egoist.'

A few critical remarks:

First, and least: while the proof-reading and production are fine over-all, there are several sentences that baffle the reader until a dropped word is spotted.

In his first chapter, Welsh misses a key point in his discussion of Marx's critique of Stirner: the role of Stirner in the genesis of Marx's own distinctive viewpoint, historical materialism. As first argued by Nicholas Lobkowicz in his 1969 article 'Karl Marx and Max Stirner', subsequently expanded on by Chris Tame in his 'Stirner in Context', a 1984 commentary on Lobkowicz's article, and now entrenched by Gareth Stedman Jones in his scholarly introduction (2002) to the Penguin Classics edition of The Communist Manifesto, it was the challenge of Stirner that made Marx a Marxist. The challenge, as Stedman Jones puts it, was twofold. Not only did Stirner implicate Marx in the humanistic religiosity of Feurbach, he also dissipated the Left-Hegelian sense of crisis. One reading of Stirner, after all, could be that the egoism of bourgeois society, against which Marx as humanist had inveighed, is the genuine culmination of history, and already the best we can get!

Here, Welsh's commendable, closely argued - and of course textually defensible - reading of Stirner as a radical social and political critic leaves him little room for considering possible conservative or cynical implications of egoism. The same blindspot occurs in his survey of Dora Marsden, where he regrets, and seems almost surprised, that she failed to develop as an egoist philosopher and social critic after her brilliant formulation of 'archism'. The reason, surely, is that she had nowhere to take it! Once acknowledge that the world is pretty much what you'd expect it to be if everyone - or at least, everyone with their head screwed on - were already an egoist, and there's very little point in arguing for egoism. It's casting pearls before oysters.

Finally, and not so much a criticism as a pointer to further investigation: Welsh throughout uses 'humanism' in Stirner's sense of a doctrine like Feurbach's (and the pre-Stirner-impact Marx's) in which 'Man is the highest being for man'. Modern secular humanists are - in too many instances to ignore - closer to Stirner than to Feurbach in their rejection of this particular spook, and their work is as well worth the egoist's time as this book is the humanist's.

But these are very small points, and this is a very good book.

[This review appeared in i-Studies, Issue 1 and is posted here by kind permission of its editor, Svein Olav Nyberg.]

The Ego and His Ain

2011-03-10T10:46:00.001Z

I've written a review of a new book on Max Stirner, Max Stirner's Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation, by John F. Welsh (Lexington Books, 2010) for the first issue (pdf) of the online journal i-Studies. The issue leads with an article by the distinguished Hegelian scholar Lawrence Stepelevich, and concludes with a rethink of egoism (and a wry reflection of the impact of fatherhood on this position) by Svein Olav Nyberg, which he has conveniently posted on his new blog.

That's MacLeod with an 'M', I think you'll find

2011-03-09T20:22:00.005Z

On Saturday 12 March, 14:00 - 15:00, at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, I and Iain M. Banks will be talking about and possibly reading from our latest books, Iain's Surface Detail and my The Restoration Game, as part of Glasgow's literary festival Aye Write!.

A thoughtful review by Andy Sawyer of The Restoration Game is now up at Strange Horizons. And an enthusiastic review that I missed earlier appeared last September in the SWP's monthly journal Socialist Review.

One of the book's biggest strengths is its excellent characterisation of Lucy. Here we have a protagonist who is fully rounded, dealing not only with the enormity of the book's main plot but with the everyday pressures of work, friendships and relationships. All this is tied together in an enigmatic twist worthy of Philip K Dick.

The Restoration Game is highly recommended to fans of science fiction and political thrillers alike.

Lysenko's Tomb

2011-02-25T14:38:00.012Z

A few months ago Chris Williams, an OU history lecturer and political activist whom I've known for years online, asked me to give this year's Darwin Memorial Lecture to the Leicester Secular Society. I suggested the topic of 'Darwin, Dawkins, and the Left' because, a couple of years earlier, I'd put together a stash of notes and links for a blog post that I'd never quite got around to writing.

The event, at the Society's splendid Victorian red-brick Secular Hall on 13 February 2011, drew a large and lively audience, from that cross-section of radical England that you so often find in its socialist, secularist and peace movements. Their searching and informed questions often had me thinking fast on my feet, and have improved the talk I actually gave into the version that follows. It's a combination of the talk I didn't give with the post I didn't write. I've left for another post what I said about my creationist upbringing and how I got over it.

The first questioner, after my talk, pointed out that all the examples I'd given of people on the left misunderstanding or misrepresenting Dawkins came from what the questioner called 'the ultra-left', mainly the Socialist Workers Party. It's a fair cop. In my defence, I said that the SWP is the largest Marxist organization in Britain; that Alex Callinicos is a respected academic, public intellectual, and prolific author; and that Richard Seymour's blog Lenin's Tomb is (quite rightly) one of the most widely-read and influential far-left blogs.

I also pointed out that the tropes I was talking about are found well beyond the SWP's orbit. A couple of years ago, a reviewer in the Scottish Sunday Herald ( 12 July 2009), wrote:

And science is no more immune to opinion, fashion and political bias than any other endeavour of humankind. (Evidence of that, I would suggest, is Dawkins's 1976 The Selfish Gene, ushering in the Thatcherite era. The clue is in the title.)

So while my examples were mostly from the far left rather than the broad left, I don't think they're thereby irrelevant.

However, in honour of my main foil in this over-long ramble, I've changed the title of the post from the one I used for the talk.

From 1972 - 1976 I studied biology and then zoology at Glasgow University, and read popular works about evolution - Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression, Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape, Robert Ardrey's African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, Lionel Tiger's Men in Groups and I think Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox's The Imperial Animal. I soon found out that my teachers in biology and zoology didn't think much of these books, and that the message of most of these books was pretty conservative. They seemed to be saying, and quite often explicitly did say, that human nature was rooted in animal behaviour and was unchangeable. At the same time as I was learning about Darwin and evolution, I was learning about Marx and revolution. At that time, in the early and mid-1970s, there were very intense struggles going on in society, and an argument that was very much used by the conservative side in those struggles was precisely that the hopes of the left were futile and destructive because human behaviour was rooted in biology. This genetic determinism was quite prevalent and was linked to the argument that intelligence was genetically determined, and that the social inequalities between classes and races and sexes and nations were a straightforward consequence of differences in their genetic endowment. Workers and women and blacks and the Irish were just thick, and that was why they were what the left called oppressed, and that was that.

There were, of course, answers to these arguments from the left, some of them from distinguished psychologists and biologists, and I read them and listened to my lecturers who explained why the likes of Robert Ardrey weren't quite sound on evolution. This may help to explain but not excuse why, when I saw a copy of The Selfish Gene in the bookshop of Brunel University in 1976, I didn't read more than the title. I thought it was just more of the same.

Some time in the 1980s I read The Blind Watchmaker and was impressed enough to go and read the The Selfish Gene, and found that it was not at all what I'd thought.

The 'selfish' gene is, among other things, an explanation of how genes for 'unselfish' traits - traits that work against the individual organism's own reproductive fitness - can emerge and persist. It's because it doesn't matter to the gene's prevalence that its copy in one particular body is, let's say, eaten by a predator - as long as other copies of the same gene thereby get a better chance to be reproduced. To take a simple and familiar example, the 'gene for' the scut: the white underside of rabbits' tails. The white scut flashes like a warning light whenever a rabbit runs, and presumably makes the fleeing rabbit more visible to the fox. But it also makes copies of the same gene (or genes) in all the other rabbits more likely to get away.

The earlier 'group selectionists' explained this sort of thing - and there's lots of this sort of thing in biology - by arguing that behaviour or characteristics that benefited the group but not the individual were selected for because they helped the group survive. What the gene-selectionists showed mathematically was that this was unstable - that if selection took place at that level, genes that helped the individual to survive at the expense of the group (e.g. a rabbit without a white scut) would tend to spread through the population.

But over the years and right up to today, some people on the left still haven't read past the title. I remember some time in the early 1990s an article in Socialist Worker claimed that The Selfish Gene provided scientific cover for Thatcherism by saying that we were genetically programmed to be selfish.

A few years later, Alex Callinicos, a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party, took to task the materialist philospher Daniel Dennett for drawing on Dawkins's dangerous ideas. He wrote in the Summer 1996 issue of its journal, International Socialism

[Sociobiology's] ideological implications are made evident by the very title of one of sociobiology's founding texts, Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (1976).

But this doesn't mean that Callinicos hadn't read past the title. He goes on to say:

Dawkins declares, 'We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.'

So he'd read at least the first page of the preface. The impression of progress, however, is at once dashed:

Human beings must thus be seen as essentially the bearers of their genes, who use them as means to maximise their reproductive chances. The reactionary uses to which this idea can be put were made clear in Richard Hernstein's and Charles Murray's recent book The Bell Curve, which argues that black Americans' poverty can be explained by their biologically determined inferior intelligence as measured in IQ tests.

It should be emphasised that Dennett at no point shows any sign that he shares such repellent social views. [...] At the same time, however, the book is full of approving references to Dawkins' ideas and work [...]

See what he did there?

Reading this made my blood run cold.

In 2000, Julie Waterson, reviewing The Natural History of Rape wrote:

They want us to believe that theirs is a science book, using objective rules and laws. In fact it is a political book--similar to those used to justify capitalist greed (Dawkins' The Selfish Gene) and to condone racism (Murray's The Bell Curve).

A 2009 article and long comments thread on Lenin's Tomb, in which I participated, had a few highlights. In one comment, Seymour wrote:

Because Gould posits a much less reductionist model, much more pluralist in the way that selection works; and because he sees the struggle for survival as taking place at the level of the organism and not the 'selfish gene', he can argue that cooperation and mutual aid can be just as succesful pathways to reproduction as struggle and selfishness. Organs struggling against their environment can arguably do better by cooperation, depending on the organs in question and the environment in question. He doesn't have to explain altruism by reference to an altruism gene. For Dawkins, the sole unit of selection is the selfish gene, and the only route to reproductive success is selfish behaviour. The two views could not be more different. Dawkins offers a reductionist model that sees our morally laudable behaviour as a challenge or an affront to a natural order that is not just "non-moral" as Gould has it, but actually has immoral consequences by Dawkins' lights. Gould's conception allows for a great deal of flexibility, and Dawkins' doesn't.

I like the image of 'organs struggling against their environment'. I've had mornings like that. But seriously, this paragraph seems to get things entirely the wrong way round: if the unit of natural selection was the organism and not the gene, you would expect more selfish behaviour by individual organisms, not less!

In response to my hint that he might not have read the book, Richard responded:

It would be pathetic to rise to such baiting, and I considered it far better to just talk about the book in such a way that you might come away with the impression that perhaps you had pre-judged matters. So much for that. I certainly haven't read it 'cover to cover', but I've read enough of it to understand what it actually says.

I think that means 'No'.

The discussion sent me on a long and rather depressing trawl through other Marxist websites. In all fairness, some in the SWP have written reasonable and knowledgeable summaries of the debates in evolutionary theory. The most entertaining thing I found was a gem of an exchange on the website of one of the SWP's smaller competitors, where Clive Bradley trotted out all the usual pious objections, and Richard Dawkins quite unexpectedly responded, 'roasting [him] alive', as Bradley later acknowledged. It's well worth reading.

The more traditional Trotskyists Alan Woods and Ted Grant, in Reason in Revolt, their dialectical materialist guide to life, the universe, and everything, make heavy weather of Dawkins' metaphors:

According to Dawkins child adoption is against the instincts and interests of our "selfish genes." "In most cases we should probably regard adoption, however touching it may seem, as a misfiring of an in-built rule," says Dawkins. "This is because the generous female is doing her own genes no good by caring for the orphan. She is wasting time and energy which she could be investing in the lives of her own kin, particularly future children of her own. It is presumably a mistake which happens too seldom for natural selection to have ‘bothered’ to change the rule by making the maternal instinct more selective."

You'd never guess that Dawkins was writing about monkeys.

A likewise firm grasp of the wrong end of that very same stick was shown by Richard Seymour, in the thread I referenced earlier :

[Dawkins] tells you, for example, that natural selection favours lying, cheating, stealing children. He tells you that it favours a 'battle of the sexes'. He tells you that it favours competitive, selfish behaviour in such a way as to make, eg, the welfare state 'unnatural'. Now I am aware that he does not necessarily or wholly disapprove of the welfare state, and that he probably isn't a sexist or someone who looks unkindly upon children - but the point is that his inferences about human behaviour do have powerful ideological consequences even in the text's own terms.

Grant and Woods go on to raise the philosophical tone:

For Dawkins, human nature and motivation are to be understood by analysing human DNA. The same is true of James Watson (the discoverer, with Crick and Franklin, of the double helix) who said "What else is there but atoms?" They never allow the existence of either multiple levels of analysis or complex modes of determination. They ignore the essential relations between cells and the organism as a whole. This empirical method, which emerged with the scientific revolution at the birth of capitalism, was progressive in its day, but has now become a fetter on the advancement of science and the understanding of nature.

The fetter of the empirical method is certainly broken here.

And so on and on, right up to 2011, it goes:

I think it is well arguable that the bio-reductionism of Dawkins has always been inter-woven with a Thatcherite project of vicious, competitive individualism, egoistic bourgeois self-interest, and authoritarian national chauvinism, and now grounds an avowedly 'secularist' agenda which is a major vector for the revival of racism among middlebrow liberals who have already swallowed the neoliberal kool aid.

[...]

These people represent the basest elements, the ordure, of an imperialist culture whose degeneration is spiralling now that the crisis is eating away at even the perks and security of middle class employment. And there is further still to go. The adventures of the selfish gene have not ended at this nadir, I am sure.

To be fair, this outburst is in response to a remark by Dawkins in support of Pat Condell, an online comedian whose hostility to Islamism seems to have morphed into hostility to Muslims as such - but while Dawkins can well be criticised for that comment, it has no connection whatever with his advocacy of the gene-centred model of evolution.

What we see, over and over, is an apparent inability to grasp two simple points:

(i) that the selfish gene is not a gene for selfishness
(ii) that the gene-centred model of evolution is not about genetic determination or genetic determinism.

The perpetrators of this misapprehension also seem unaware that, as the radical anthropologist Chris Knight points out, the 'group selection' theory, which the 'selfish gene' theory displaced, was in fact the basis for the arguments advanced by some of the conservative popular biology works of the 1960s and 1970s - those of Ardrey, for example. These authors saw natural selection taking place at the level of societies, and argued that Western societies were losing out in the competition.

I suggest that part of the reason why geneticists and population-geneticists are not at all impressed by left-wing criticism - including criticism by left-wing scientists such as Gould, Rose, and Lewontin - is that several key figures in the development of these disciplines, notably J. B. S. Haldane and John Maynard Smith, were themselves on the left in 1940s and 1950s and had heard this kind of thing before. As Communists, Haldane and Maynard Smith had been severely burned by the Lysenko affair. In the Soviet Union at that time, mainstream genetics had been smeared as complicit in class privilege and racism. Lysenko wrote that all knowledge, including science, had a class basis. Not even Stalin fell for that. Looking over Lysenko's draft, Stalin scribbled in the margin: 'Ha-ha-ha! What about mathematics? And Darwinism?'

And it was indeed mathematics and Darwinism that buried Lysenkoism, as they also did for group selection.

The lesson, for a generation of left-wing scientists in Britain, was to regard dialectical materialism as irrelevant or dangerous to science. Decades later, the merest hint of it could still make their hackles rise. I well remember how one of them, the great entomologist and systematist R. A. Crowson, snapped 'That's irrelevant!' at me when I ventured a remark about speciation being an instance of 'quantity changing into quality'.

The lesson is unlikely to have been lost on the generation of geneticists and evolutionary theorists who were Haldane's and Maynard Smith's students. Nor was it lost on the 'mainstream' Communist parties. It may, however, have been lost on scientists from other disciplines (such as palaeontology, in the case of Gould ~~and Lewontin~~, or neurology, in the case of Rose) which were spared the trauma, and whose encounter with Marxism was (as far as I know) mediated by the Maoist-influenced New Left of the 1960s. Still more has it been lost, it seems, on Trotskyism, which of course was innocent of the debacle.

In conclusion, I put it that the only kind of 'genetic determination' that Dawkins sees as possibly relevant to human social orders is 'kin selection and selection in favour of reciprocal altruism', which may have had powerful effects in the small, closely-related social groups of humanity's pre-history. And (as Chris Knight has also pointed out) if kin selection creates a biological basis for any human trait, it's fraternity.

So, brothers and sisters, why worry about it?

Recent manifestations

2011-02-23T12:57:00.003Z

On Sunday 13th February I gave a talk at the Leicester Secular Society's historic Secular Hall, on the persistent inability of some on the left to grasp what The Selfish Gene is actually saying. A full write-up is in the works but for the moment you can read the gist over at the Genomics Forum's blog.

Last week's LSE event on Science Fiction and International Orders was live-blogged by Stephanie Carvin. I've done a full write-up, which should appear in the next issue of the online magazine Salon Futura.

Science Fiction and International Orders

2011-02-15T20:16:00.005Z

On Thursday 17th February (i.e. this Thursday) I'm taking part in a free but ticketed event at the LSE, with Paul McAuley and Jon Courtenay Grimwood. It's part of the LSE Literary Festival, Wednesday 16 - Saturday 19 February 2011, which is on the theme of 'Crossing Borders'.

All welcome, but remember to get a ticket.

The battle of Tahrir Square means we can all be human again

2011-02-08T14:48:00.003Z

For the past thirty years humanity has existed only as an animal species. The appropriate science for its study has been zoology. Great advances have in fact been made in that field, notably through the application of genomics. But humanity as a rational and political animal died in 1979, and went to hell. There it did what the damned do: tormented others and itself. The instrument of torment was identity. As some philosopher said, identity politics is zoological. If we don't see our partial struggles as part of a general project of human emancipation, we turn on each other and fight over crumbs.

In Tahrir Square last week thousands of people stood up to a counter-revolutionary mob and fought it back, yard by yard over a long day and night, with sticks and stones. In those few hours they proved in practice that the human being's conscious will can change history. They brought the human subject and human emancipation back into politics. Whatever the immediate outcome in Egypt, this consciousness will not go away. We can all go back to being human. That doesn't mean we will all love each other. It means we can fight each other for good reasons.

As someone said on Twitter: 'Yesterday we were all Tunisians. Today we are all Egyptians. Tomorrow we will all be free.'

And that's your grand narrative, all you post-modernists, rising up and coming right back in your face!

Space Rockets

2011-02-04T08:45:00.003Z

Going to space with rockets: path dependent locked-in fluke or inevitable result of technological synergy?

We report - you decide.

(Thanks to Jack Crow in comment to post below for pointing these out.)

Poetry competition results

2011-02-03T20:41:00.003Z

As a great poet said, 'Now is the hour of the furnaces, and only light should be seen'. But life, and poetry, and even poetry competitions, go on even when the world is shaking. So ... belatedly, here's an account, with links to the winners and their work, of the event at the Scottish Poetry Library last Saturday. The quality as well as volume of entries - from around the world - was high, and the competition attracted published as well as beginning poets. Kelley Swain, who has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Forum and took part in our Social Session on poetry, has given the competition and the winning entries a generous and detailed write-up in New Scientist's online Culture Lab.

One of the judges, Kona MacPhee, who spoke after Steve Sturdy had introduced the event and the work of the Forum, was very enthusiastic about the importance of science fiction, recounting how she had read all the SF stories of H.G. Wells in childhood, before going on to talk about the importance of poetry as a means of developing an emotional understanding of the consequences and implications of the sometimes arcane new life sciences.

All in all, a very successful and heartening event, and a worthwhile project, of which all involved and especially Pippa can be proud.

This is not 1979 ... or 1989

2011-02-03T13:04:00.003Z

Like many others I've been following the Egyptian Revolution in real time, flipping back and forth from Twitter (#Jan25 #Egypt #Tahrir are the hashtags to watch, and journalist Mona Eltahawy's tweets and retweets, along with the frontline reports (and amazing photos - and now live images!) of socialist journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy, who also blogs here, are good ones to follow) to the Al Jazeera live coverage.

Just two comments for the moment. In yesterday's Guardian, Jonathan Freedland writes on Israeli official reactions to the revolution:

They recall that the Tehran crowds which won western hearts 31 years ago also looked secular and modern – only to be rapidly displaced by a dictatorship of the ayatollahs.

The Tehran crowds of 1979 did not look secular and modern - the streets were a sea of black chadors - and almost the only western hearts they won were those of people on the left who were assured by their Iranian comrades - godless and feminist to a man and woman - that what looked like a movement to put the ayatollahs in power was really something quite different underneath. This was true to an extent. But:

In the period leading up to the February insurrection, the left as an independent tendency within the mass movement did not exist. It simply merged with the Khomeini dominated movement, tail ending the reactionary leadership.

Juan Cole gives a very clear analysis of why nothing like that is happening in Egypt today, or is at all likely to.

So, not another 1979. 1989? Yes, in the sense that the revolution reverberating across North Africa and the Middle East is a geopolitical earthquake - with the difference that the regimes under threat are more repressive, and more far strategic for the Western powers than the East European regimes were for the USSR. And yesterday's and today's terrible events are a grim reminder that these dictatorships are, for a multitude of reasons, far tougher to crack than the bureaucratic socialist shells that collapsed under the weight of the crowds in 1989.

Everything in your genome, it's all in the chromosome

2011-01-31T20:39:00.001Z

From New Scientist:

Poetry links for Burns Night

2011-01-25T16:30:00.005Z

The winners of the Genomics Forum's poetry competition, launched last year by Pippa Goldschmidt, will be annnounced - and will be giving readings of their work - on Saturday afternoon at a free event, 2- 4 pm at the Scottish Poetry Library. All welcome.

In other genomics poetry news: three new poems, all by Ruth Sabath Rosenthal, have been added today to The Human Genre Project.

Sin Bio: writing a democratic dystopia

2011-01-24T13:28:00.005Z

Last Thursday I finished the first draft of Sin Bio, the novel I've been writing since late last year. I haven't felt so relieved at finishing a novel since the first draft of The Star Fraction - possibly because this is the first novel I've written since then without having written a fairly detailed outline in advance. All those wise old novelists who assured me they wrote like that, making it up as they went along, a few hundred words a day, can go take a running jump. I have no intention of going through this ever again.

On the other hand, it has worked. The book's more interesting than what I'd have devised if I'd planned it, and a lot more interesting than my vague imagining of how it was going to go. I never expected that barbarian to walk across a hallway and through the wall. I'm sure my then editor didn't either, when we brainstormed my next book last year. 'All we want you to do, Ken,' he explained, 'is write the next Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four or Fahrenheit 451.' Oh fine, I said. Why didn't I think of that? I had all kinds of ideas, none of which he liked, until I said: 'What if genetic engineering became so common that not having it was like not having vaccinations?' As soon as he said 'Yes!' I thought oh no what have I done?

And then I thought and scribbled and talked with my agent and came up with an outline for a novel about just that, with vast geopolitical conspiracies involving selective viral weaponry, and was told that this wasn't what they wanted at all. Then my agent suggested I read Children of Men, and focus on the woman and the child. So I read that book and didn't like it, but it gave me a sense of what mainstream authors writing SF can get away with.

The book I've ended up writing is not at all like any of the books I've mentioned, and not very like anything I've written before. No date is given. The technological advances in synthetic biology are perhaps faster than the developments shown in other areas. There's no big political change in it. No new ideology, no new system. There have been geopolitical shifts. If the society shown is a dystopia, it's a democratic dystopia. It's what we have, a decade or three down the line.

At the moment it seems like the best thing I've ever written. I'm enjoying the feeling while it lasts. By the time I've been through the revision, the copy-edit, and the proofs, it'll seem the worst thing I've ever read, let alone written. But for the moment, I'm happy with it. The rest is up to the readers, some time in the not too distant future.

A lesson from the classics

2011-01-10T21:21:00.008Z

Hector was first to speak. "I will-no longer fly you, son of Peleus," said he, "as I have been doing hitherto. Three times have I fled round the mighty city of Priam, without daring to withstand you, but now, let me either slay or be slain, for I am in the mind to face you. Let us, then, give pledges to one another by our gods, who are the fittest witnesses and guardians of all covenants; let it be agreed between us that if Jove vouchsafes me the longer stay and I take your life, I am not to treat your dead body in any unseemly fashion, but when I have stripped you of your armour, I am to give up your body to the Achaeans. And do you likewise."

Achilles glared at him and answered, "Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall and glut grim Mars with his life's blood." The Illiad

[Added for clarification: What a shit!]

Never make nice.

From the Old Space Age

2011-01-05T10:00:00.006Z

The latest issue of Redstone Science Fiction has, among other delights, a reprint of my 2008-Hugo-shortlisted story Who's Afraid of Wolf 359?. First published in the anthology The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan (Eos Books, Harvester, 2006) the story is set in the same universe as my novel Learning the World. In that universe, the common notion of prehistory is of a time when people lived in caves, on the Moon.

But let's not knock the people of the Old Space Age! Take a look at this striking image of the solar transit of the International Space Station during yesterday's partial eclipse, and marvel.

Jim Cannon's socialist hope

2011-01-02T19:40:00.010Z

Speaking of optimism, here's the peroration of a speech that James P. Cannon, an American socialist, made in 1953.

All will be artists. All will be workers and students, builders and creators. All will be free and equal. Human solidarity will encircle the globe and conquer it and subordinate it to the uses of man.

That, my friends, is not an idle speculation. That is the realistic perspective of our great movement. We ourselves are not privileged to live in the socialist society of the future, which Jack London, in his far-reaching aspiration, called the Golden Future. It is our destiny, here and now, to live in the time of the decay and death agony of capitalism. It is our task to wade through the blood and filth of this outmoded, dying system. Our mission is to clear it away. That is our struggle, our law of life.

We cannot be citizens of the socialist future, except by anticipation. But it is precisely this anticipation, this vision of the future, that fits us for our role as soldiers of the revolution, soldiers of the liberation war of humanity. And that, I think, is the highest privilege today, the occupation most worthy of a civilised man. No matter whether we personally see the dawn of socialism or not, no matter what our personal fate may be, the cause for which we fight has social evolution on its side and is therefore invincible. It will conquer and bring all mankind a new day.

It is enough for us, I think, if we do our part to hasten on the day. That’s what we’re here for. That’s all the incentive we need. And the confidence that we are right and that our cause will prevail, is all the reward we need. That’s what the socialist poet, William Morris, had in mind, when he called us to

Join in the only battle
wherein no man can fail
for whoso fadeth and dieth
yet his deeds shall still prevail.

Cannon's deeds have prevailed all right. You may never have heard of him, but the world we live in would be noticeably different if Cannon had never lived, or had made different choices. Ignazio Silone once said that the final conflict would be between the communists and the ex-communists. One less-than-final but still significant conflict today, that over the left's response to war, is between those who work and think along the lines that Cannon laid down and those - the inheritors, whether they know it or not, of Shachtman on the one hand and of Stalinism on the other - who don't. Without Cannon, there wouldn't be an antiwar movement. There would be a 'peace' movement, begging the warmakers to see sense. There would be a 'Decent left', cheering the warmakers on. And that - give or take a few fringe intransigents - would be that.

How did Cannon acquire the confidence that the cause for which he fought had 'social evolution' on its side? As a youth he walked into a meeting to hear a lecture on 'Marx and Darwin'. That lecture, and further study, convinced him 'theoretically - and that is the firmest conviction there is' that capitalism is inseparable from crises and wars, that the great majority of working people would sooner or later be compelled to move into action against these crises and wars, and that they would establish as capitalism's successor system one of global co-operation for abundance, peace, and freedom. 'The victory of Socialist America is already written in the stars.'

Nothing that has happened since his death in 1974 would have surprised him if he'd lived to see it, or disillusioned him. He had no illusions. Cannon's theoretical conviction allowed him to face unflinchingly the terrible realities of the 20th Century: World War, the rise of Stalinism, the Depression, the Yezhovschina, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the atomic bombings, the Stalinist labour camps, the Cold War and the colonial wars. Unlike some, he faced and fought them all while they happened, in real time. He never gave an inch.

We're all so much more sophisticated now.

2011 - Year of Hope

2011-01-01T10:18:00.003Z

It's all true, you know: Scottish writers do sometimes meet in a pub, where over a few pints we share our plans for world domination. We don't call ourselves the mafia for nothing, you know.

So I'm explaining the novel I'm writing and Ian Rankin says:

'Tell me Ken, is anyone writing a hopeful novel about the future?'

'That's my next,' I tell him.

It seems to be a trend. Charlie has a hopeful novel in the works, Alastair Reynolds has a whole series outlined, and I've heard the same question from some actual scientists.

One of the side-effects of writing a dystopian novel is that you start to look for the bright side, like that phone app that shows you what stars you're looking at and when you turn it towards the ground you see the sun on the other side of the Earth.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Two odd visual effects

2010-12-10T12:24:00.004Z

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.

Notes towards a class analysis of the economic conjuncture

2010-12-08T13:04:00.004Z

Contains strong language. (Via.)

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

2010-12-07T18:12:00.001Z

... 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.

Mark Bukumunhe interviews me at Novacon 40

2010-12-05T18:15:00.003Z

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.

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

2010-11-30T19:45:00.014Z

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.

Scotland at standstill as strange white substance falls from sky

2010-11-29T13:48:00.005Z

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.'

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

2010-11-28T14:41:00.006Z

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.

What if the equations are the fire?

2010-11-21T15:07:00.004Z

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.

New on Human Genre Project

2010-11-10T16:20:00.003Z

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.

Sense of wonder

2010-11-06T14:05:00.003Z

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.

The uncanny valley just became a gravity well

2010-11-06T12:14:00.003Z

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.

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

2010-11-04T20:02:00.008Z

'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.

The One O'Clock Gun Anthology

2010-11-03T19:06:00.004Z

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.

Science fiction is the first human literature

2010-10-22T19:28:00.010Z

[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.

Cockermouth Cafe Sci

2010-10-11T21:16:00.003Z

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.

Pyr to publish The Restoration Game in the US next year

2010-10-09T10:42:00.007Z

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.

Poetry Competition

2010-09-28T10:08:00.004Z

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.')

That iffy skiffy science ...

2010-09-27T19:50:00.003Z

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!

Parallel Worlds

2010-09-27T13:45:00.004Z

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.

Has Karen Armstrong ever read Feurbach?

2010-09-13T20:35:00.009Z

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.

The man who stared at dolphins

2010-09-07T11:24:00.004Z

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.

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

2010-09-04T10:34:00.003Z

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:

Queen Victoria's Terraformers

2010-09-02T07:26:00.004Z

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".
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Filling a much-needed gap

2010-08-30T09:02:00.006Z

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.