Posted 2:05 pm by Ken

Not the Master Race

A few days ago I forwarded a promotional tweet about
Matthew Collins' newly revised and reissued memoir Hate: My Life in the British Far Right.

Thanks to the wonders of online marketing, on Friday a free copy of the book landed on my doormat. I finished reading it on Saturday. That's the kind of book it is: hard to put down, very funny, and eye-opening. I've always hated the fash, you understand, but I've sometimes had a dark suspicion that they were a sort of Black Mass satanic inversion of the far left. Happily, I couldn't have been more sadly mistaken. If you've never fully appreciated the significance of German porn ('videos of Animal Farm, and I don't mean the film of George Orwell's book') in the cash-flow and sex-life of British fascism, this book will set you right.

Collins joined the remnants of the National Front as a teenager in the 1980s, at which time the Nazis were in a sorry state, shattered and reduced to a shadow of their late-70s glory by Tories unfairly stealing their votes and Socialists unfairly beating them on the streets. When Collins became sickened and disillusioned he changed sides, became a mole for the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, and helped to wreck the Front from within.

How the squabbling shower of losers, tossers, creeps, thugs, and drunks that make up the British fascist milieu repaired the damage and rebuilt is outside the main story of this book, but not outside its concern, and the lessons Collins draws are challenging. And his deadpan comic timing is flawless:

The C18 crew [the BNP's defence squad] consisted of all the well-known Nazi football hooligans from London, dressed to the nines in expensive gear, snorting drugs off the tables and drinking bottled beers. This was madness. I followed Nicky into the toilet where he was using his Switch card to cut up some more coke.

A cracking read and highly recommended.

Labels: fascism, reviews

Posted 6:44 am by Ken

A few reviews of The Night Sessions

The US edition of The Night Sessions is getting some thoughtful reviews online: from A Progressive on the Prairie, The King of Elfland's Second Cousin, Shiny Book Review, and Lex Communis. That last explores the book's religious angle from the interestingly different perspective of 'an unrepentant neo-Conservative, Catholic' viewpoint, and is strikingly generous. The author has been good enough to post his review on Amazon, so if you want to give it a thumbs-up, you know what to do.

Labels: reviews, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 8:27 pm by Ken

Reviews round-up

Intrusion continues to get good reviews, from newspapers at interestingly different quarters of the political compass.

Here's the Daily Mail:

Dramatising a novel of ideas is the opposite of easy but Ken MacLeod manages it at an apparent stroll. He also conjures up a scarily plausible and cleverly detailed vision of mid-21st-century life - the weather (damp and really cold), computers (with wraparound specs and virtual keyboards), health Nazism (the illicit backyard cafes, where people eat bacon butties and smoke), and the looming brave new world offered by bio-engineering. Excellent.

Well to the Mail's left, a review of this and other books in the weekly Socialist Worker says:

Left wing science fiction author Ken MacLeod brings us a dark vision of a dystopian future in a novel that some have likened to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This tale of totalitarianism revolves around “the fix”—a pill that change your genetic make-up to fit into a world of forced conformity.

It’s a world where New Labour-style “freedom” is forced down your throat, while you live a life surrounded by CCTV and surveillance drones.

Expect MacLeod’s characteristic imagination, wit and venom in the latest novel from the author of The Execution Channel and The Night Sessions.

David Langford, in a round-up of recent SF/F in that fine old Tory daily The Telegraph, writes:

Big Nanny State is watching you. In Ken MacLeod’s near-future Intrusion (Orbit, £18.99), surveillance drones blanket London, all the databases are linked, and routine police torture is followed by trauma counselling. When the pregnant heroine refuses the pill that should correct her unborn child’s genes, she finds such crimethink is no longer tolerated… Thoughtful, plausible and scary.

In a similar round-up for the only English-language socialist daily paper, my comrade and friend Mat Coward writes in the Morning Star:

In Intrusion (Orbit, £18,99) modern SF's leading Cassandra Ken MacLeod turns his fire on nannyism, that moralistic false turn which has contributed so much in the last 20 years to isolating the left from its natural supporters.

In a near-future Britain where women can't buy alcohol without proving they're not pregnant and second-hand books are no longer sold in case they carry traces of fourth-hand tobacco smoke, a Londoner named Hope, expecting her second child, decides that she won't take The Fix, a single pill designed to eradicate genetic "defects" in foetuses.

Under a benevolent, neo-democratic regime, The Fix is, of course, voluntary - until you try to refuse it.

MacLeod certainly delights in raising questions which creatively discomfort his fellow socialists.

But he shuns the cynicism and defeatism which mars most satirical writing - not to mention the defiant unreadability of many of his famous contemporaries.

At (very) different times in my chequered political past, I've sold Socialist Worker and the Morning Star, and I still read both regularly (and buy them when I get the chance) but I'm not entirely sure that I still count as a 'fellow socialist' - as I explained when I was interviewed a couple of years ago by the then up-and-coming and now world-famous radical journalist Laurie Penny for, yes, the Morning Star. I am sure, however, that these two left-wing newspapers have caught something about the book that's been missed by likewise generous reviewers who see it as a 'socialist dystopia'.

Labels: libertarian, Marxism, reviews, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 8:15 am by Ken

Dejah View

(Source.)

'Take to your paraloons!'

This bizarre speech-bubble, and a panel showing John Carter, Dejah Thoris and maybe someone else dropping from the sky hanging from balloons attached to their parachute harnesses as their stricken flyer spirals groundward, are almost my only memories of my first encounter with Barsoom. (You can see what's very likely the preceding page here.) I seem to remember also the couple gazing fondly at a large egg, from which a Carter-Thoris offspring is soon to hatch. John Carter was the first married hero I'd ever seen in a comic. That wasn't the only shock on its pages, peopled as they were by hideous entities that seemed to me almost demonic.

Years later, in my early teens, I met them again in print. This time it was my mother who made the same mistake, and expelled my borrowed Burroughs paperbacks from the manse. It's probably as well she judged the books by their covers: she'd have been far more upset if she'd looked at the pages. Just as well, also, that she never noticed that they shared an author with the Tarzan books, which she regarded as innocent enough, more or less on a par with Biggles.

Colour, adventure, and an aura of sexuality and scepticism - all these cunning priests and false gods - were what stuck in my mind. That and cliff-hanger endings, which - given the random nature of my access to the stories - left me feeling cheated. I more or less forgot Burroughs, though I smiled at the allusions I found in other, ostensibly more sober, tales set on Mars. Every respected SF writer, it seems, has to pay back that early debt. Blish's genius kid Dolph Haertel, stranded by a glitch in his home-built space-drive, notes of one of the moons that it was not 'the low-hanging, looming Deimos' of Burroughs' Mars.

So, though never a great ERB fan, I recalled the tales with enough affection that I was thrilled to see the first clip from a trailer of the John Carter movie on some film discussion programme a year or so ago. I have to see this, I said. Reviews on release were so mixed that I was reluctant to drag anyone along but my daughter, the other SF fan in my family but I still felt I had to see it for myself, and my daughter - the other SF fan in the family - was keen to see it too. [Correction instigated by said daughter - see comments.] We saw it at a mid-day screening last Wednesday. Apart from three other people, one of whom left early, we had the cinema to ourselves.

We enjoyed it. Not a dull minute. The film has flaws all right - there are plenty of daft minutes - but it's one I'd happily watch again. (For a review that strikes me as reasonably close to my own experience of the film's strengths and weaknesses, go here.)



(Source.)

Labels: amazing things, reviews, skiffy

Posted 11:07 am by Ken

Another Practical Handbook

The other day I picked up in the library a nifty little management and self-help paperback called The Art of Always Being Right, by Arthur Schopenhauer. I read it in half an hour, with yelps of joy and pain. In the fine tradition of Machiavelli, Edward Luttwak and Darrel Huff, this book enlightens the just in the guise of instructing the wicked. (Or, just maybe, the other way round.)

You can read all about it and read the whole thing free online in several places, including a graphic version by someone fully aware of all internet traditions. (Via.)

Remember to use this power only for good.

Labels: amazing things, reviews

Posted 9:56 am by Ken

He was a god, Memmius, a god indeed!

I've just read The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, by Stephen Greenblatt: the new book (referred to below) about the chance discovery in 1417 of the last surviving copy of De Rerum Natura, a long exposition by the Roman poet Lucretius of the philosophy of the ancient Greek materialist, Epicurus.

The finder was Poggio Bracciolini, an indefatigable book-hunter, a fervent reader of Greek and Roman literature, and former secretary to several popes. His most recent pontifical employer sat not in the Vatican but in a dungeon: one of three rival pretenders to the See of Peter, the deposed John XXIII had been arrested and charged with simony, sodomy, rape, incest, torture and murder. Sixteen more serious charges against him had been suppressed for fear of public scandal.

In that era the ideas of Epicurus had survived only as a slander: that he advocated the most luxurious sensual indulgence. With the recovery, copying, and eventual printing of Lucretius, this lie could no longer be repeated, though it survives in the language. Epicurus did indeed urge that pleasure was the only good. His point was that to enjoy life we need very little: food, water, shelter, good company. With that we can be satisfied. Only the desire for more than we need is insatiable. The one luxury he allowed himself was cheese.

One idea of his was mocked for much longer: that the fundamental particles of nature every so often and quite unpredictably swerve ever so slightly in their course through the void, and that this is the basis of the free will we all know by experience. The laughter has died since the discovery of quantum mechanics.

Just such an unpredictable swerve, Greenblatt suggests, deflected the course of history as Bracciolini reached for that neglected codex. The ideas expounded by Lucretius - and lucidly and enthusiastically summarised in Greenblatt's central chapter, 'The Way Things Are' - became the basis for the whole modern understanding of the world. The mantra he makes of Epicurus' teaching - 'atoms and the void and nothing else, atoms and the void and nothing else, atoms and the void and nothing else' - has liberated our bodies as well as our souls.

Greenblatt traces the ancient origins and modern influence of this sane and sensible philosophy as it passed through often underground channels, to well up in Montaigne, in Shakespeare, in Jefferson, and in Bruno who was burned in Rome.

Poggio Bracciolini remained a faithful son of the church. He lived to a ripe old age and fathered twenty children, six of them by his wife.

Labels: atheism, reviews

Posted 12:20 pm by Ken

Intrusion: three reviews

Reviews of Intrusion in the past few days from:

Gwyneth Jones in Saturday's Guardian, Jill Murphy at The Bookbag, and Michael Flett on GEEKChocolate.

Labels: reviews, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 12:37 pm by Ken

As we are to the beasts that perish

Crooked Timber, the collective blog of some impressively clever people, has once again rotated its objective lens to focus on science fiction (as it's done several times before), this time to discuss 'libertarian paternalism' aka Nudge and related topics in the light of my novel Intrusion and Charles Stross's Rule 34.

It's an interesting take, because the discussion is largely about the ideas arising from and possibly going into the books rather than the stories themselves, and in my case the opening post focused precisely on a passage that's central to the book's implied argument while giving away nothing of the plot.

Labels: reviews, skiffy, writing

Posted 11:58 am by Ken

Like some watcher of the skies

It seems to be in the nature of things that people discover Lucretius by sheer accident. Take this typical account:

'Started reading Lucretius, 'On the Nature of Things'. I'd got the book years ago but got bogged down somewhere around the refutation of Heraclitus. This time my interest and the power of the writing carry me over the drier patches without difficulty ...

Finished Lucretius. After it there is something dishonourable about being anything other than a materialist.'

Or this:

In his early teens he had read with delight the poem of Lucretius, in a tatty old paperback published by Sphere Books in 1969 with a Max Ernst picture on the cover. He'd found it in the attic of his parents's house [...] On the inside cover the pencilled words were just legible:

Here rolls
The large verse of Lucretius, who raised
His index-finger and did strike the face
Of fleeting Time, leaving a scar of thought
The rain of ages shall not wash away.

[...] It was an obscure thrill imparted by the lines that impelled him to turn over the pages of the book, and then to read it. He found a great deal in those pages that left imprints on his brain [...]

Actually, I've cheated: the first quote is from my own appallingly Molish diary from 1977, the second is from Intrusion, and I could as easily add a third, a circumstantially fictitious but emotionally accurate rendering of my own response:

For the first time in my life, I had heard good news. I drank that black gospel to the lees.

But this one (coincidentally referring to the very same edition) is genuine:

I had very little pocket money, but the bookstore would routinely sell its unwanted titles for ridiculously small sums. They were jumbled together in bins through which I would rummage until something caught my eye. On one of my forays, I was struck by an extremely odd paperback cover, a detail from a painting by the Surrealist Max Ernst. Under a crescent moon, high above the earth, two pairs of legs—the bodies were missing—were engaged in what appeared to be an act of celestial coition. The book, a prose translation of Lucretius’ two-thousand-year-old poem “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”), was marked down to ten cents, and I bought it as much for the cover as for the classical account of the material universe.

Ancient physics is not a particularly promising subject for vacation reading, but sometime over the summer I idly picked up the book. The Roman poet begins his work (in Martin Ferguson Smith’s careful rendering) with an ardent hymn to Venus [...] Startled by the intensity, I continued, past a prayer for peace, a tribute to the wisdom of the philosopher Epicurus, a resolute condemnation of superstitious fears, and into a lengthy exposition of philosophical first principles. I found the book thrilling.

This was the genesis of Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, an acclaimed new book on the consequences of the accidental rediscovery of the only surviving copy of Lucretius in medieval Italy.

As an accidental consequence of reading about that book, I stumbled upon a recent translation of Lucretius that I'd never heard of: a 2007 Penguin Classics edition, translated by the distinguished poet A. E. Stallings into rhyming fourteeners - a project that she herself says 'might seem crazy in modern times'. Naturally I bought and read it straight away.

What can I say? It works, and it's a delight.

There's a lot to be said for good prose translations - the lucid, much-loved and recently-revised Penguin Classic by Ronald Latham, the aforementioned careful rendering (also recently-revised) by Martin Ferguson Smith - and modern verse translations such as Rolfe Humphries' The Way Things Are or the dogged, plodding but sometimes soaring regular metre of Palmer Bovie's long out-of-print, poorly-published but well-received 1974 paperback.

But Stallings' quaint relentless drumbeat is in a class of its own, and is the only version anyone is ever likely to memorise and recite lines from. Her handling of the one line everybody knows, the line that Voltaire said would last as long as the world, is a touchstone:

So potent was Religion in persuading to do wrong.

The rhyme-scheme and metre are the same as those Chapman used for his Homer. Some day, perhaps centuries hence, another poet will write 'On First Looking Into Stallings' Lucretius'.

Labels: amazing things, atheism, reviews, writing

Posted 3:34 pm by Ken

Strong starts for Intrusion (UK) and The Night Sessions (US)

While waiting for the enLIGHTen lights to go on yesterday evening, I saw a tweet from @SpecHorizons, aka James Long, editorial assistant at Orbit:

'Intrusion by @amendlocke is being reprinted, having only been officially released today! #result'

#result, indeed. Later that evening the book's sales ranking was in the top thousand on Amazon UK and top fifty for SF/F.

And today SFX put online a very good (and perceptive) review:

As a portrait of benign tyranny, Intrusion is chillingly effective (and morbidly entertaining), not least because so many of this future state’s dystopian elements are rooted in inarguable Good Things. It takes a seriously determined – and seriously cold-blooded – libertarian ideologue to argue in favour of, say, parents’ right to condemn their children to suffer and die of preventable diseases. Where to draw the line between private life and public good is not a debate unique to our time, or to dystopian fiction, but the technology of MacLeod’s world enables him to present the issues more starkly. Here, women are not just subject to stern government health warnings – and social disapproval – about how they use their bodies during pregnancy; they are now “encouraged” to wear sensor rings that allow their local health centre to monitor every molecule they encounter. This is a society being slowly smothered by the systems and safeguards it demanded at the ballot box, and the hobby-horses of its favourite newspapers.

The Night Sessions is to be published in the US in April by Pyr, and it's already had two good reviews: in Publishers Weekly and RT Book Reviews (that one's subscription only, but my editor at Pyr, Lou Anders, has sent me a pull quote from it and it's enthusiastic).

Labels: reviews, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 3:40 pm by Ken

Fresh Paint

The post below reminds me that I've promised to review Tim Maughan's collection Paintwork, each of whose three stories takes the idea of city environments overlayed with locally-experienced virtual reality - augmented reality - a step or two into the future. They've already been widely and enthusiastically reviewed, and rather than rehash the storylines I'll just flat out recommend them - at a couple of quid for the ebook, it's not much of a risk to check out, and well worth it - and remark on what I think makes them distinctive, which is this.

The cyberpunk vision of the future has been around for a quarter of a century - more than long enough to become default. You can handwave it, you can buy one off the jpeg. And like the shiny and trekky and trippy futures that preceded it, it's become in itself an overlay, a mirrorshade between us and the emergent future in the present that cyberpunk once forced our attention on.

Tim Maughan is, in these stories, doing with now what the original cyberpunks did with then. I hope he does a lot more of it.

Labels: reviews, skiffy, writing

Posted 7:28 am by Ken

Another good review of The Restoration Game

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

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

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

Labels: reviews, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 3:21 pm by Ken

Cult books

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Labels: amazing things, reviews, writing

Posted 8:39 pm by Ken

The witch-child that books built: Jo Walton's Among Others

The only fairies I ever saw were quite conventional. They had cheeky faces, pointy ears, small conical caps, and they played leapfrog on the ceiling. I was eight at the time, and unwell, and I had a high temperature. I knew I was seeing something that wasn't there. The fairies didn't frighten me. They didn't seem real.

The contorted faces that emerged from the wood-grain of the wardrobe door, and the great multicoloured irregular shapes that in the dark drifted through the room like paramecia under a microscope - all of which put in an appearance every bloody night - they seemed real. To me, at that age and a little older, they were real. I thought the drifting shapes, in particular, were a completely objective phenomenon. I remember getting very excited when we were told in school about germs. I thought the things I saw every night were a special kind of germs that were big enough to see.

The fairies in Jo Walton's Among Others (Tor, 2010) are like what the faces and the shapes would have been if they'd been real. From their descriptions in the book, they might be instances of paraedolia. But in this story we know they aren't. They haunt, mainly, industrial ruins. At one point, the fifteen-year-old heroine speculates that they are a sentient manifestation of the interconnectedness of the world, which is just the sort of thing this sort of heroine would think. Among Others is a fantasy about science fiction. It's a story about being fifteen in 1979 and growing up through, among other things, reading science fiction (and talking to fairies). It captures exactly the feeling of growing up in post-war, and then post-industrial, Britain, amid the ruins of giants' work: We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one. She had me at that sentence. I fell into the book and didn't come out for two days, and I missed it when I'd finished. Mori, the narrator and heroine, uses magic to find her way to science fiction fandom. This use of magic turns out to have been a mistake, but you can see the temptation.

The way that Mori uses science fiction is a kind of magic in itself. In the words of Francis Spufford's The Child that Books Built, a real-life memoir of a male counterpart of Mori:

You can see through the differences and irregularities of cases to the unchanging principle beneath, the bare grid of the idea they have in common, and the exercise of this new power is, of course, pleasurable. It makes the world a giant step more graspable - more yours.

There are costs for that grasp. In Walton's book, they are paid. But as anyone who has grown up among others will tell you, it's that or the loss of self, which is the precise threat that Mori has to finally face. At that point the price is worth it. And then you grow up, or don't.

Among Others is about someone who will grow up, by someone who did; a sentient manifestation of the interconnectedness of the world.

Labels: reviews, skiffy, writing

Posted 9:52 am by Ken

Déjà Vu all over again

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.

Labels: reviews, skiffy, writing

Posted 4:05 pm by Ken

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

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.]

Labels: atheism, Marxism, politics, reviews

Posted 10:46 am by Ken

The Ego and His Ain

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.

Labels: libertarian, reviews, self-promotion, writing

Posted 7:45 pm by Ken

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labels: reviews, skiffy, writing

Posted 8:02 pm by Ken

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted 7:06 pm by Ken

The One O'Clock Gun Anthology

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

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

Labels: local, reviews, writing