Posted 11:29 am by Ken

Never knowingly understated

It's not my place to review a book in which I have an essay, but it is my place to plug it. Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence, just out from Word Power, is a book worth reading. Finely produced -- the type-setter is acknowledged among the contributors, as well she should be -- the book is an intriguing snapshot of what some Scottish writers think about the issue of Scotland:

We are deluged by facile arguments and factoids designed to 'manage' the Scottish question, or to rig the terrain on which it is contested. Before we get used to the parameters of a bogus debate, there must be room for more honest and nuanced thinking about what 'independence' means in and for Scottish culture. This book sets the question of independence within the more radical horizons which inform the work of 27 writers and activists based in Scotland. Standing adjacent to the official debate, it explores questions tactfully shirked or sub-ducted within the media narrative of the Yes/No campaigns, and opens a space in which the most difficult, most exciting prospects of statehood can be freely stated.

Its declared intention, then, is to raise the level of the independence debate. Its immediate effect, predictably enough, has been to lower it further, with a somewhat uncharitable and highly selective reading of Alasdair Gray's contribution being met by a prickly response from Kevin Williamson and Mike Small. [Update: more  here.] But that's only to be expected, and in the longer term the book bids fair to meet its publishers' hopes and vindicate its editor's efforts, undertaken 'for the sake of curiosity and in the interests of posterity'.
 

The current independence debate is -- beyond its widely deplored and even more widely indulged tetchiness, pettiness, and point-scoring -- a bit artificial and accidental. There's been no recent surge of sentiment for independence. Scotland is having an independence referendum in 2014 because the SNP won a quite unexpected majority of seats in the 2011 election to the Scottish Parliament, and was committed to calling a referendum if it had the power to do so.

More than likely, the SNP never expected to have to deliver on this so soon: the electoral system was set up more or less deliberately to prevent any one party being able to govern on its own, and in any coalition negotiations the referendum plank would have been the first and easiest to break. As it is, they're stuck with a massive distraction from the job that made most of their supporters in the 2011 election vote for them in the first place: being a fairly popular and competent governing party in the devolved parliament.

But you play the hand you're dealt. To have the future of the state a topic at all is something. Unstated is an attempt to seize the opportunity for a serious conversation about what kind of society we want. It's not in itself that conversation: each of the contributors wrote without knowing what the others were saying, or indeed who they were. No claim is made that the 27 authors represent anyone but themselves.

That said, it seems to me a fair enough sample of Scottish literary life. Of the 27, I counted 15 who would give a definite Yes to independence. Only two of the others -- Jenni Calder and myself -- give a definite No. The rest I've marked as ambiguous, or answering a different question. (The splendidly cross-purposed contributions of Douglas Dunn, Tom Leonard and Don Paterson are in themselves worth the price of the book.)

On this reckoning, a majority of writers here would vote for independence, and most if not all of these would hold out for a more radical polity and settlement than that offered by the SNP. (As would, I think, most of those ambivalent or against.) This distribution of opinions is pretty much the exact inverse of where the wider public stands at the moment. Whether this indicates that the writers sampled are ahead of the curve or just out of step remains to be seen.

Posted 8:52 pm by Ken

'in the English-speaking countries the word "poetry" would disperse a crowd quicker than a fire-hose.'

Orwell must have been wrong about that, or things have changed. The crowd for the launch of Where Rockets Burn Through filled the venue and stayed there, and everyone had a good time. Skiffy-themed cup-cakes on the table and an emergency bag of breathable air and space-ration sweets on every seat were part of the package.

Chris Scott has a fine photo collection here. Thanks to Napier University's social media team, you can see and hear me declaiming two poems here.

There's still time to get a copy to all your friends for Christmas, at a seasonal discount of 20% off.

Posted 6:46 am by Ken

Yet another event

Most of my recent blog posts have been about upcoming events or articles published elsewhere. I hope to redress this fairly soon. Meanwhile, here's another.

The Scottish Book Trust's imminent Book Week Scotland includes a Pop Up Festival on December 1st at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, featuring among much else me and Iain Banks, in conversation with Stuart Kelly.

An hour of fascinating conversation featuring Banks’ dazzling new Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata, and Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion, a clever, frightening and dystopian vision of the future that has drawn comparison with Orwell’s 1984. Chaired by Stuart Kelly.

This event is part of Scottish Book Trust’s day of celebrations at The Mitchell Library on Saturday 1st December.

Even if you've already seen the well-known Banks and MacLeod double act - usually involving incomprehensibly inconsistent recollections of every significant event in our closely linked literary lives and long personal friendship - you'll see something new as we are publicly dissected by Stuart Kelly, the best-read man in Scotland and a dab hand with the scalpel.

Posted 11:50 am by Ken

Where Rockets Burn Through

For the second time in forty years, I'm a properly published poet, and in very distinguished company at that. Anthologies of science fiction poetry are almost as infrequent: this is the first I've seen since Frontier of Going and Holding Your Eight Hands came out in the Seventies. Edited by scholar and poet Russell Jones, introduced by Alasdair Gray, and inspired by (and featuring) the science fiction poetry of the late great Scottish Makar Edwin Morgan, Where Rockets Burn Through should rise higher and travel farther than its predecessors.

Free launch events: Edinburgh, Thursday 29 Nov and London, Thursday 6 December.

The Edinburgh event will feature readings by several local writers, including me. You have been warned.

Thursday 29 November, 6.00pm (Update - not 6.30, as I had before!)
Blackwell’s 53-59 South Bridge Edinburgh
FREE

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

Posted 1:03 pm by Ken

The Soul of Man after Socialism

I have another article up at the new online magazine Aeon, this time elaborating on some points about socialism and (post)humanism that I've made earlier.

Labels: amazing things, evolution, Marxism

Posted 8:56 pm by Ken

Cell Culture - Examining how science and literature interact

I've been remiss in not proclaiming earlier that I'm taking part in an event this Saturday, 14.00 to 15.45, at the Scottish Storytelling Centre on the High Street:

How accurately does modern literature portray the life sciences? In what way is the use of science within fiction evolving to create new genres such as “lab-lit”? Is there more in common, than is often imagined, between the way in which both writers and scientists work?

These are some of the fascinating topics that are up for discussion in an afternoon of fact and fiction examining how fiction portrays life sciences and genetics. The event is being produced by the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, in conjunction with the Scottish Storytelling Centre, on Saturday 3 November 2012.

Cell Culture will feature participants including: Dr Jennifer Rohn, cell biologist, editor of Lablit.com and author of Experimental Heart and The Honest Look; Ken MacLeod, celebrated science fiction author; and Pippa Goldschmidt, short story writer and former writer-in-residence at the Genomics Forum.

The authors will read from their work before engaging in a public discussion which will be chaired Professor Stuart Monro, Scientific Director of Dynamic Earth.

Tickets £5 - booking details here.

Finally, speaking of events, a wee reminder that Iain Banks and I are manifesting on Friday evening at the Linlithgow Book Festival.

Labels: bookfestival, coming attractions, genomics, local, public engagement, self-promotion

Posted 2:10 pm by Ken

Yet another classic!

The left-libertarian Center for a Stateless Society has republished yet another of my blasts from the past, this time a sympathetic but dissenting rant I wrote for the perennially fascinating (to me, anyway) Socialist Party of Great Britain on the occasion of its centenary in 2004.

Trainspotters of the political fringe may be amused to note, in that same centenary issue, a stirring call to smash cash, written in 1968 by David Ramsay Steele, one of whose later writings convinced me (eventually) that you can't. He went on to state the case more clearly, comprehensively, and readably than anyone before or since in a very interesting book.

Posted 11:14 am by Ken

Two links

The left-wing market anarchists at Center for a Stateless Society have reprinted (with my permission and the publisher's) my Introduction to the American edition of The Star Fraction, as part of their ongoing series of left-libertarian classics. I hardly think it's anything of the kind, but who am I to argue? If it works to subvert the dominant paradigm, fine by me. (I'm not saying which dominant paradigm.)

The Herald magazine on Saturday published an interview with me, which is I think the first time I've ever featured in a lifestyle supplement. Thanks to Mike Calder of Transreal for the use of his shop for the photograph (in the print version only) of me holding a soft toy dinosaur and grinning wanly.

Labels: local, self-promotion

Posted 4:31 pm by Ken

The Awakeness

Last week I had a short piece on two types of odd but unmystical experiences published at the new and interesting magazine Aeon. One of these is a peculiar, spontaneous iteration of self-awareness where it feels surprising to be me. In the article I asked if anyone else had it.

The response: lots of comments saying 'Oh, I have that too!'

Since writing it, I came across two things that seem relevant to the odd experience.

One is that I remembered a passage I'd read years ago - it may have been an essay in the now legendary anthology The Mind's I - in which the writer imagined abstracting from every personal feature of one's consciousness, and pointed out that what remained would be what is common to all conscious beings. What struck me is that if one could step back into that consciousness-as-such, one would have something like the experience I described.

Another was reading Chris Beckett's Dark Eden. One of the characters, Jeff, is an odd little tyke with the habit of saying, every so often and apropos of nothing: 'We're here. We really are here.' Later in the book we get inside his head, and find that he (unlike everyone around him) sees 'the same Awakeness' in the flat, blank eyes of the alien animals as people do in each other and remember in Earth animals. This is more or less what Schopenhauer said in opposition to Descartes and Spinoza: that animals may not think or reason, but they share the same awareness as we do, just by being aware.

I don't know where that line of thought is going, but if you're interested, have a look at my article, and especially the comments. And give Aeon a browse too - there's a lot of interesting stuff there that you won't find anywhere else.

Posted 9:08 am by Ken

More Manifestations

I'll be speaking (very briefly) at the Edinburgh City of Literature Salon this evening, along with Emily Dodd. We'll be talking about our residencies - mine at Napier, hers at Leith Library.

Speaking of speaking, you can hear me here being interviewed about The Night Sessions by Daniel Nexon, who blogs at The Duck of Minerva.

On Sunday 21 October, I'll be on a panel, Banning the Brave New World? The ethics of science at the annual Battle of Ideas festival of public debate, which this year is at the Barbican.

And finally ... Iain Banks and I are doing our well-known double act at the Linlithgow Book Festival. In the Masonic Halls, which is a first for me and probably Iain too. Eight quid gets you in (no funny handshake required).

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

Posted 7:56 pm by Ken

Pointers

A nice review of The Night Sessions; another, longer, by Paul McAuley; me on my UK publisher's blog, on other stuff I do.

Labels: self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 1:06 pm by Ken

Mapping the Post-human

For a few days in the first week of September I was in the Breton port city of Brest (which although medieval is an architectural riot of modernity, nearly every building except its impregnable chateau having been levelled in 1944) at an academic colloquium on Mapping Humanity and the Post-human to which I'd been invited by its organiser, the erudite and vivacious Hélène Machinal. Its programme was wide-ranging, and mostly in French. Although I couldn't follow everything that was said, I think I got the gist of most, and was kindly helped by a student who volunteered to sit beside me and pass notes.

I found it strange to be listening in to serious academic discussion of ideas that originated on the fringes of science fiction, and to hear 'Kurzweil', 'Vinge' and 'extropians' pop up from a flow of French discourse like yellow plastic ducks on the Seine. About half the discussion was on the post-human in mainstream literature and philosophy, but popular culture, movies, and SF were just as minutely and seriously anatomised.

My own presentation touched on my earliest encounter with extropianism and (that cheap laugh out of the way) argued that Darwin had made post-humanism possible: first, by establishing that humanity was a species with predecessors and (by implication) possible successors, and (therefore) that the human mind was the outcome of a material process; and secondly, by shifting the notion of 'species' from an essence to a population, with no intrinsic limit of variation. Once 'the human' ceases to be an essence, it loses its self-evident status as a standard of value. Watson and Crick followed up in 1953 by demonstrating the material basis of heredity, and hence the possibility of consciously changing it.

Two developments that were new in the 1980s and 1990s made post-humanism a project rather than a prophecy. The first was that thanks to Moore's Law and molecular biology, it became possible for the first time for people to imagine that they themselves might live into the post-human era. The second was that socialism, the global project whereby the International was to unite the human race, was over, and with it the counter-project of liberal humanism. Humanity is no longer an imagined community. If it's ever to become so again, something like the socialist project will have to be revived, or replaced by a different project with less hubris but no less ambition.

Otherwise the robots will rise up and eat our brains, if we haven't beaten them to it by bashing each other's heads in first.

Labels: amazing things, evolution, skiffy, writing

Posted 9:03 am by Ken

Intrusion longlisted for Wellcome Trust Book Prize

Here. A strong list, of five novels and nine non-fiction books, and very good company for my book to be in. Needless to say, I'm well chuffed.

Labels: genomics, public engagement, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 12:08 pm by Ken

'The Surface of Last Scattering' is to become a film!

My short story 'The Surface of Last Scattering', published last year in TRSF (a well-received original anthology commissioned by Technology Review) is being made into a short film. Needless to say, I'm over the moon about this. Scattered is the graduation project of MetFilm School students Joshua Bregman (writer-director) and Victoria Naumova (producer), and they've pulled together an impressive team of students and professionals to make the film and act in it. I'm seriously in awe of, and deeply grateful to, the kind of talent that's throwing itself into realising my story on screen.

If you'd like to be a movie mogul - and let's face it, who wouldn't? - go to their fundraising site at IndieGoGo, contribute, and claim whatever amazing perk (which can include, as well as tangible mementoes and desirable treats, your name on the credits) matches your contribution.

Labels: amazing things, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 8:28 am by Ken

Dark Eden

Monday evening's 'Scary Fururistic Fictions' chaired by Stuart Kelly and featuring Chris Beckett and me, was one of the last events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. It went well, with Stuart steering our discussion in interesting directions, and plenty of good questions coming from the floor. I met Chris for the first time an hour or two before, in the Authors' Yurt (the festival's spacious, imaginative and civilized version of a Green Room) and liked him a lot. We'd received copies of each other's books a fortnight or so earlier, and Chris had already responded to reading mine with a thoughtful and appreciative review. By Monday I was about half-way through my copy of his book Dark Eden (which he kindly signed) but that was already enough for me to be enthusiastic about it and to comment on it in the discussion.

I finished reading it a couple of days ago. The main reason it took me about a week to read is that I kept stopping to think. It's one of those books like The Left Hand of Darkness that gets you so convinced by and immersed in its world that you come out of it looking at the real world in a new way. By imagining realistically a planet without a sun, and its ecosystem that runs on geothermal energy, Beckett gives us picture after vivid picture of alien beauty that highlights the different wonder of Earth.

As its title suggests, Dark Eden takes an SF trope so tired nobody uses it any more: what if an isolated man and woman on an alien planet were to become the Adam and Eve of a new world?

Well, for a start, their descendants would have lots of genetic defects ...

The rest of the outcome is likewise logical, and ruthless. The echoes of the Old Testament are there, and deliberate, but the tale also recapitulates the more recent origin myths told by Freud and Engels: the small society we start with is a primeval, promiscuous matriarchal horde, into which the actions of the main character - and reactions to them - begin to introduce patriarchy, and with it the family, private property and the state.

Myth and its meanings are themes of the story, and often darkly funny: one of the legends of the mismatched founding couple re-enacted by their descendants unto the third and fourth generation is called The Big Row. Regular readers of hard SF may feel that the back-story's Earth and its nascent starfaring but troubled society are too crudely sketched - until the late, chilling moment where we glimpse them as they were, and remember through whose eyes we've seen them hitherto.

All that's just the background. The story itself is gripping, full of character, incident and adventure.

Now I find myself in an awkward situation. Like I said, Chris has reviewed my book, and we got on well when we met. If I were to give Dark Eden a rave review, it would look like the sort of mutual authorial back-scratching that Private Eye annually skewers with damning quotes from 'Book of the Year' features. No one would take it seriously.

Fortunately, I don't need to do that, because Dark Eden already has many rave reviews, from an impressively wide range of critics and readers, in the genre and out. Read them, then read the book.

Posted 10:27 am by Ken

Edinburgh International Book Festival notes

Next Monday (27 August, 8:30pm - 9:30pm) I'm doing a Book Festival event, Scary Futuristic Fictions, at Peppers Theatre with Chris Beckett. (Tickets £10.00, £8.00 conc.) I've received (courtesy of the Book Festival) a copy of Chris's latest book, the widely praised Dark Eden, and I can't wait to read it.

Chris is replacing G. Willow Wilson, an author I was greatly looking forward to meeting and who regretfully had to cancel. Her new novel, Alif the Unseen, looks intriguing - a supernatural post-cyberpunk thriller from the storm centre of the Arab revolution. I hope Willow can be a guest at the festival (and/or a British science fiction convention - she has a deep background in comics fandom, comics writing, and political commentary) in the future. Meanwhile, best wishes to her from me and Chris.

In other news, the Genomics Forum again has a team covering the festival for Genotype. Because of work I couldn't commit to being on the reporting team myself, but has that stopped me blogging events for Genotype? No! My latest contribution is on last Saturday's appearance by Jennifer Rohn and Neal Stephenson, and contains enough controversial remarks to incite (I hope) a few comments - if so, over on Genotype, please, not here.

The third and last of Forum's own Book Festival events, The Scientist in Fiction: Creative or Crazed Genius? is on tomorrow Wednesday) at 7 pm.

Labels: bookfestival, coming attractions, genomics, local, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 12:54 pm by Ken

I have a new job!

I'm delighted to say that my appointment as Writer in Residence at Edinburgh Napier University has just been officially announced. The university's innovative MA in Creative Writing course, open to full-time and part-time students, is both practical and challenging, with a strong genre component. Over the past few years, I've met and been greatly impressed by its lecturers, course leaders and students, and I very much look forward to working with them.

The 2010-2011 Writer in Residence, Robert Shearman, has some interesting and slightly scary things to say about what the job involves. For more, equally enlightening and entertaining information about the course and its objectives, take a look through the blog - and expect to see some contributions there from me in the coming months.

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

Posted 8:32 pm by Ken

When the Force really is with you

It's not every day you get to shake hands with someone whose name will be remembered on the starships. Today I did, unexpectedly. Participants in the Edinburgh International Book Festival can choose up to ten free tickets. One of mine was for Frank Close on his new book The Infinity Puzzle, about the search for the Higgs Boson. I sat down in the packed-out Scottish Power Theatre tent, and saw on the screen that the event was to be chaired by Peter Higgs.

Chaired! By Peter Higgs!



In reality, of course, nothing of the sort took place. The session was introduced by the Festival Director, Nick Barley, who made it very clear how amazing this was. Frank Close outlined the physics, conducted a free-wheeling interview with Professor Higgs, then caught and passed on questions from the audience.

While this was going on I tried to figure out just why the tent was so packed and I was so excited. Like everyone in else in the entire world (obviously) I'd spent the morning of July 4th watching the live feed from the Cern press conference and tweeting madly about it. It was the best Big Science white-knuckle ride until the Curiosity landing last week. But in reality, what I know about physics could be written in biro on the back of my hand, and probably was at some point because I passed the first year physics exam at Glasgow University, albeit on the resit.

I stopped believing physics lectures when they got to electricity. That bit about holes moving where electrons could be but aren't? It might as well have been the poetry of Ezra Pound for all the sense I could make of it. Quantum mechanics? Relativity? I know the Standard Model works and I don't doubt for a moment that it's true to a trillion decimal places and explains, as Close said, 'seven percent of everything' (the rest being dark matter and all that) but there I walk by GPS and not by sight.

And, judging by the questions from the floor, I'm far from alone in this. But we were all thrilled to be there and I think I know why. We were in the presence of a man who has deservedly become the icon of understanding this stuff, and who advanced an idea about something so fundamental to the fabric of reality that we have to recreate conditions just after the Big Bang to test it. And just seeing him, right there in the flesh, gives us a sense of connection to that fundamental force, the Higgs field.

The signing tent was mobbed. All copies of The Infinity Puzzle were gone in seconds, or maybe picoseconds. I picked up a copy of Close's earlier paperback, Neutrino, and joined the queue. I sort of babbled when I asked Professor Higgs to add his signature to the author's.

On top of everything else, the man's a gent.

Labels: amazing things, bookfestival

Posted 6:39 am by Ken

Landings and crashes

Curiosity landed successfully this morning. In perspective:




Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

Labels: amazing things

Posted 3:08 pm by Ken

Fantastic grow the evening gowns. Agents of the fisc pursue

(Source)
Jo Walton recently wrote about how the future, and particularly the future we can imagine ourselves or our children living into, has darkened or is avoided in current SF. Along the way she linked to an earlier piece, on the dystopian future Earths, over-populated and over-regulated, that backdropped so many of Robert A. Heinlein's novels for young readers. She points out that we don't usually see these futures as dystopias, wonders why not, and asks:

No individual one of these would be particularly noticeable, especially as they’re just background, but sitting here adding them up doesn’t make a pretty picture. What’s with all these dystopias? How is it that we don’t see them that way? Is it really that the message is all about “Earth sucks, better get into space fast”? And if so, is that really a sensible message to be giving young people? Did Heinlein really mean it? And did we really buy into it?

Well, I bought into it. It wasn't just Heinlein, and it wasn't just juveniles (as SF for young readers was called before YA, a category that has a whole 'nother passel of problems, as Farah Mendlesohn will tell you). A hefty proportion of the SF I read in my teens had dystopia or disaster as default for the fairly near future, say the first decade or two of the 21st century. It gave me the impression that the world I was going to grow up in was doomed to something like The Fall of Rome.

A bad influence on the young, I'm sure you'll agree, and no preparation for the challenges of real life in a world that is making fitful, unevenly distributed, but nevertheless significant progress.

Today in the Sunday Herald there's an opinion piece by Ian MacWhirter about the ongoing financial crisis, and a column by Trevor Royle, the paper's diplomatic editor, on the ongoing confrontation of the US and Israel with Iran.

MacWhirter suggests that if a Eurozone state (Spain, to pluck an example from the air) defaults or otherwise goes bust, UK (and other) banks might be so exposed that the only way to keep them functioning would be outright nationalization of the financial system, 'this time for keeps'.

Royle's article assumes without evidence that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon - but never mind that, the point is that he discusses the prospect of an attack on Iran by the US or Israel within the next year or so. Russia and China, he says in passing, would not stand idly by. We've heard all this before, of course, and I've sometimes been too quick to take such talk seriously.

What strikes me, however, is how strange normality has become. I don't expect to see, next Sunday, a single letter telling the paper's editors that two of their respected writers have lost the plot. The crisis has become the spectacle. We've all got used to a situation where we don't know, from day to day, if the world we know will be here in the morning. We could wake up and find the ATM doesn't work, and be living by lunch-time in a West gone redder than China. Or we could turn on the weather forecast to find ourselves looking in disbelief at fallout patterns from wrecked nuclear reactors.

There's no question that either of these (or both) would be a bit of a downer. Twitter would be in meltdown, I'll tell you that for nothing, all OMG #banks or Holy Shit #Iran #Russia. What not enough people appreciate, however, is the suffering these possibilities are causing right now. How many, reflecting on how war and crisis have become always-imminent, spare a moment's thought for science fiction writers?

It's all very well for those of us writing all that talking squids in outer space rubbish. What if you're trying to write realistic, socially relevant, near-future SF? I'm working on a novel whose back-story starts, oh, a few years from now, and one of the key points in that back-story is a moment where, as an emergency measure to deal pragmatically with economic collapse, the financial systems of the West get nationalised almost overnight. I came up with that bold idea a year ago. Now I have to consider it possible that something like it might actually happen before I've finished the first draft.

If I could write a novel that centred on that problem, the problem of the radical uncertainty of the near future, I'd be getting somewhere.

Labels: skiffy, writing

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 9:06 pm by Ken

The Black Train

The annual Semana Negra in Gijón, Asturias is a literary festival like no other. For one thing, it has a crowded and raucous funfair attached, complete with Ferris wheel, scary or sedate rides, and air thick with the smells of hot sugar and – this being Spain – abundant, freshly grilled meat. For another, its focus is on genres that some might not regard as literary as all: mainly crime fiction, or 'black novels' as they're called in Spain, with an added peppery dash of comics, westerns, horror, fantasy and science fiction. And finally, it's directly and proudly political.



Just how proudly and directly, I found out a couple of weeks ago when we rode from Madrid to Gijón on el Tren Negro - the Black Train. Hired to transport dozens of writers and journalists to the festival, the Black Train is part of Semana Negra's quarter–century of tradition. It has to defer to the time-tabled trains, so progress is full of unscheduled stops and starts. Our one scheduled stop was in Mieres, a coal-mining town in the mountains of Asturias, where we were due to be greeted by the mayor and a delegation of striking miners and taken on procession through the town for a late-afternoon two-hour lunch.

Thousands of miners in the mountains of northern Spain are on strike, against a projected slashing of the subsidies that keep the pits going. The strike is bitter and militant. Passing through one nearly deserted town and village after another, you can see why. It's also popular.

At La Robla in León, the province just south of Asturias, we found ourselves held up for an hour. Journalists piled out on the platform, mobiles to their ears. León miners had blocked the track up ahead, quite unaware that their comrades in the next province – and in a different union – were waiting for us.



This misunderstanding sorted, we arrived late at Mieres, where Paco Ignacio Taibo II, legendary crime writer and festival director, led a group of writers in solidarity T-shirts out to a tumultuous welcome from the mayor and a dozen likewise T-shirted miners. Songs were sung, to the accompaniment of a bagpiper and a drummer in Asturian costume, who then led writers, mayor and miners through the quiet town. After the mayor had rallied us to a brief sit-down in the main street, we arrived at a courtyard of laden tables. We might have done the lunch justice in two hours. We had twenty minutes and made the most of them. Then it was back on the train and down from the hills to the coast, and Gijón, where a brass band at the station played the Internationale as we climbed on the bus.



Apart from that - well, like I said, it was a literary festival like no other!

Many thanks to Ian Watson, Cristina Macía, Javi, and the whole magnificent team.

Labels: amazing things, revolution, self-promotion, writing

Posted 8:50 pm by Ken

The revolution will be audible

What with one thing and another I'd clean forgotten to mention that all thirteen of my novels are now available on Kindle, and that the first four of these (the Fall Revolution quartet) are also available as unabridged, professionally read audio downloads, at Amazon and at Audible - as is my novella, The Highhway Men.

Naturally, I'd be very interested in hearing (so to speak) what hearers think of the audiobooks. I suspect I'd find them hard to listen to myself, because at some level I already have the voices of the characters - and indeed the narrative voice, which is not necessarily my own even in third-person narration - in my head.

Labels: self-promotion, skiffy

Posted 3:07 pm by Ken

Naming the prey

The other night Carol and I were half-watching an episode of David Attenborough's Living Planet after dinner. Dinner is what it was all about. The starter (vegetarian) was a phytoplankton bloom, followed by an explosion of krill. Carol nodded at the screenful of scrabbling crustacea and said: 'It'll be difficult to think of names for all of them.' We laughed as the difficulty multiplied up the food-chain. Shoals of fish arrived to eat the krill, closely followed by a shark that ate the fish, then something really big turned up, but it turned out the whale was after the krill too, so we didn't have to name the shark.

Giving names to prey animals is a joke we've had for a few years, ever since watching a nightly week-long BBC real-time nature series about lions. All the lions were given names by the breathless presenter, possibly having already been named by the game wardens. The grazing animals that the lions hunted were simply an anonymous herd. After a few nights we got fed up with this blatant carnivorist bias from a supposedly impartial state broadcaster and started naming the antelopes.

'Will poor Doris and her little calf Freddie get away, or will their throats be torn out by ravenous lions? Find out in tomorrow evening's thrilling episode of "Rushing Around the Serengeti in Jeeps"!'

I'll never get over the end of another nature programme, set in the Arctic. The closing shot of Mummy Polar Bear (whose care for her charming, tumbling cubs we'd followed for an hour) swimming towards an ice-floe on which a seal was just visible as a black squiggle, was accompanied by the heart-rending cry from beside me: 'Look out, Sammy!'

OK, this is all a domestic in-joke and sentimental nonsense, but it would have taken a harder heart than mine to watch unmoved a later sequence in the Attenborough episode. A female whale and her newborn calf were swimming up the West Coast of the US, heading for a herring spawning or some such annual multi-layered feeding frenzy off Alaska. The rest of her pod, unencumbered by young, were hundreds of miles ahead. Out of the blue a pack of orcas turned up, looking somehow sinister in their shiny black and white SS uniforms. For six hours they harried the cow and calf, until they drove the young whale to such exhaustion that it began to drown. As it foundered, the pack moved in for the kill. You might think that after all that effort, they'd at least eat all they could of the unfortunate beast. But no. They bit off its lower jaw and part of a flipper, and left the rest for the hagfish that crowd around every dead whale on the sea-floor, and then for the bacteria, which excrete nutrients for the phytoplankton, which ...

So it goes, but what are we to make of it?

Nothing. This is just nature, and it isn't cruel. It isn't even indifferent. It's just mindless machinery thrashing about. There is no 'I' behind any non-human animal eye. Subjectivity is inseparable from language. Although emerging from animal sensation, animal emotion and animal signalling, conscious reflection and self-awareness are unique to human beings. We can name the prey, but they don't name themselves.

I very much doubt that this is the deeper meaning of the account in Genesis 2:19 of how Adam named the animals, 'and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.' (Even restricting the exercise to birds and beasts, as the King James suggests, it must have been a long day. 'Hmm, I think I'll call that one Conopophaga lineata ...') If, however, that passage had been taken as such by fundamentalists we might have been spared some of the excesses of Young Earth Creationism.



Here's how it works. One of the stumbling-blocks for YECs is the notion that suffering and death existed before the Fall. If animals suffered and died for tens of millions of years before Adam saw apple, well ... This leads YECs into all sorts of absurdities about prelapsarian vegetarian carnivores, such as the well-known case of the tyrannosaur's teeth being designed for cracking coconuts rather than ripping flesh. But if non-human animals don't have consciousness then there's no non-human suffering, and their deaths are just part of the economy of nature, not 'an evil'. The implications are above my pay grade but no doubt theologians can take it from there.

Fundamentalists are unlikely to use this conclusion from the Marxist-Leninist theory of consciousness to get themselves off the YEC hook, but I offer it nevertheless, in a spirit of charity.

Labels: atheism, creationism, evolution, Marxism, squibs

Posted 9:39 pm by Ken

The Night Sessions hits the US atheist market

Pyr, the energetic and immensely respected publisher of the US editions of my novels The Night Sessions and The Restoration Game, is the science fiction and fantasy imprint of the even more widely respected humanist and rationalist publisher Prometheus Books. That thought always leaves me with a wicked wee smile, because I knew Prometheus Books decades before they knew me.

I first came across some of their output in the National Secular Society's old bookshop on Holloway Road, and man, it was like discovering that you had a whole unknown branch of your family who'd made it big in America. And they'd been there for generations. Robert Ingersoll! A Civil War hero, in his day the most popular lecturer in America, and they had him in print. Thomas Paine! A Founding Father, one of British rationalism's own legendary figures, and they had him in print. Along with current writers who were already on my read-everything-they-write list: Martin Gardner! Isaac Asimov!

And lots more. They're not in any way narrow or sectarian in their rationalism. They even publish books by Calvin. (And Hobbes.)

Books such as Arthur Strahler's sledgehammering geological labour of love Science and Earth History: the Evolution/Creation Controversy, and Paul Kurtz's wise, pragmatic Forbidden Fruit: the Ethics of Secularism were, looking back, essential reading in preparation for writing my own first novel, The Star Fraction. More recently, Randell Helms' Gospel Fictions and Victor J. Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis were somewhere in the background of The Night Sessions.

So I'm very, very proud that Prometheus is running a full-page ad in a forthcoming issue of the atheist magazine Secular World, showing off some of their featured books, and that The Night Sessions is included, in a box of its own at the foot.

Labels: atheism, self-promotion, skiffy

Posted 11:33 am by Ken

Charity walk

Carol (aka Mrs Early) is taking part in today's Walk for Scotland to raise money for Erskine, the charity for (often disabled) veterans. Feel free to donate here.

Labels: local

Posted 11:29 am by Ken

Red Plenty debated

A lively discussion of Francis Spufford's novel Red Plenty (about which I've enthused before) on the academic blog Crooked Timber has just about wrapped. Participants have looked at the book from many angles. One of the most intriguing contributions was by Cosma Shalizi, on the mathematical feasibility of the linear programming advocated by the book's central character as a solution to the problem of central planning. (Shalizi responds to responses here.)

My take, amended from one of my own comments:

In the 1970s I thought that central planning combined with democratic control along the lines argued for by (e.g.) Ernest Mandel was possible and desirable. Towards the end of the decade I stumbled upon the economic calculation argument, as briefly stated by David Ramsay Steele in a readable pamphlet. I didn’t understand it fully but I kept worrying at the problem it posed. In the 1980s I read Geoffrey Hodgson’s The Democratic Economy, and Alec Nove’s The Economics of Feasible Socialism, which made some socialist sense of the same argument.

Recently I’ve been interested in the more radical market socialism proposed by David Schweickart. The only serious socialist arguments against market socialism are those of Paul Cockshott et al for a democratic, cybernetically planned economy – which I don’t have the mathematics to follow in detail, but which I keep dragging to the attention of anyone who does.

Meanwhile, in my own neck of the woods, the Scottish Socialist Party offers a 12-point plan for a ‘Scottish socialist republic’, one of whose 12 points is:

‘Supermarket prices will be frozen.’

Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

Labels: amazing things, Marxism, politics, writing

Posted 6:52 am by Ken

Stem cell comic hits the spot, say scientists

European stem cell research consortium OptiStem yesterday launched Hope Beyond Hype, a short educational comic that tells the story of stem cells from discovery to therapy. The comic, now available online and as attractive hard-copy

'starts with the true life story of two badly burned boys being treated with stem cell generated skin grafts in 1983. We then follow the successes and setbacks of a group of researchers working together to use stem cells to cure blindness, whilst being introduced to knotty issues that are part of the process, including stem cell regulation and the controversial ethical issues surrounding the subject. Whilst some of the story lines sound like science fiction they are in fact all true, despite the fact the script was written by the well-known Scottish Science Fiction writer, Ken Macleod. Comic book artist Edward Ross illustrated the script with his clear, friendly and attractive artwork, whilst stem cell researchers from OptiStem provided the real-life examples of their research and experiences.'

The comic was produced by a team led by Cathy Southworth, Optistem and EuroSyStem's Public Engagement, Outreach and Communications Manager, who works at the MRC Centre for Regenerative Medicine. She came up with the idea, recruited the team, showed us around the marvellous building in which the Centre is housed, introduced us to her colleagues, and arranged the immense privilege of an hour for us all with stem cell pioneer Professor Michele De Luca.



Cathy and I consulted graphic-novel guru David Bishop at Napier, who explained how comics scripts are written and suggested books to read. I went off and read them, then wrote the script. Comics artist Edward Ross and his colleague, Glasgow University PhD student Jamie Hall, did the design and artwork. Meanwhile Edward and Jamie were just finishing a rather longer comic on malaria, and Edward and his wife were expecting a happy event (now happily eventuated, as you can see from the pram handle in the picture below), but they took it all in their stride. The script (and some panels - none of us will forget the blastocyst picture) went through several iterations, as we and some of Cathy's colleagues tore successive drafts to shreds.

For all that, we finished on time and in budget, and it was a proud moment when we all got the finished article in our hands.

Labels: coming attractions, public engagement, writing

Posted 10:20 am by Ken

Moon over Gotham

It's now a fortnight since I went to America for a panel at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, and high time I wrote about it. PEN American Center looked after me very well, and paid for my flights, accommodation and transport.

Early on Friday afternoon I was met at Newark NJ airport by a driver from Diva
Limo, who whisked me to the hotel, the Jolly Madison Towers on 38th and Madison
(near Grand Central). The hotel was splendid and the room was good - nothing
fancy, but plenty of room and everything ship-shape. So I had a shower and then
walked down 3rd Avenue to the main Festival hotel, the Standard in Cooper
Square. I was wearing my black boots (as they're the nearest I have to smart
shoes) and I got a blister that hurt for the rest of my stay - by Monday it was
quite painful, though it started to go as soon as I got home and changed back into
trainers.

Anyway, I enjoyed the walk, which took about forty minutes. The Standard is just across from the old Cooper Union building and next door to the new one, which looks like an aluminium Culture Ship.



Just off the reception at the Standard is a quiet parlour called the Library, with books around the walls and lots of sofas and soft chairs. This room was being used as the PEN hospitality suite. It opens onto a plaza with tables and more seats. I introduced myself to a young lady sitting with a laptop beside by a stack of Festival programmes. Her name was Emma Connolly and she welcomed me on behalf of PEN. I drank some water and ate a pastry from the table and I was just replying to an email from Julian Sanchez when he walked in. He's 33 and thin and talks as enthusiastically as Charlie Stross. He was wearing jeans, a striped jacket, and shirt with a bow tie: the very image of a Cato Institute free-market libertarian.

Talking and smoking as I hirpled beside him, Julian took me out for a drink via a lecture he wanted to hear at a nearby university, where a conference was going on on Anonymity and Identity in the Digital Age. This turned out to be actually relevant to both the panel topic and my thinking about my next book: there was an intriguing discussion of how anonymous can data really be - if, say, patients' medical records are used for epidemiological (etc) purposes, the more relevant facts a given record includes the less effectively it's anonymized. Julian put the point in a self-acknowledged geeky way: '"Sarah Connor"', he said, 'is not a unique identifier - but that doesn't help Sarah Connor.'

What really struck me from the discussion was how confident everyone was that legislators were open to rational persuasion, and that between good programming practice (with a bit of revision I could design the SQL or Excel query myself) and well-formulated regulation that particular problem could be solved.

We had drinks in a dim but posh tavern and I impressed Julian with my e-cig if not my now jet-lagged conversation. Then we went back to the hotel and into its fine bar (which is opposite the main doors, glass-walled and accessible from the street) to join Julian's girl-friend Kashmir (who is a reporter for Forbes and is nice) and some of their friends. Julian, Kashmir and I had dinner in a Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant in the East Village for something ridiculous like $20 each including tip. By this time it was about ten and I left them at the hotel and walked back to mine. I hit the sack and got a good night's sleep, followed by a good continental breakfast. I went for a stroll around the vicinity, which turned out to be the Fashion District (mostly closed for Saturday), then back to the hotel in time to be picked up by another Diva Limo car at noon.

The line-up for the panel, in the new Cooper Union, was: Larry Siems introducing, Julian chairing, Catherine Crump from the ACLU, me, and Russian writer Ludmilla Ulitskaya and Romanian writer Gabriella Adameșteanu (who turned up with three or four friendly people from the Romanian Cultural Institute).

Ludmilla and Gabriella had interpreters on stage, which made made the discussion a bit less free-flowing than usual (and bit odd for me because of the whispering at either side). But it seemed to go well, and everyone I spoke to afterwards said that it had. It was covered in the New York Times, though Julian felt (and I agree) that the report cast an unfounded aspersion on him.

Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden were there and took me, Julian, and Kashmir out for a late lunch at a Ukrainian diner. At one point Julian was talking about an alarmist article he'd read about the countermeasures teenagers take against electronic tracking by their parents, and Patrick remarked: 'We're raising kids to behave like characters in spy novels!'

Patrick invited me to drop by Tor any time between 12 and 3 on Monday. After Patrick and Teresa headed home, I left Julian and Kashmir on the way to the hotel and set off for St Mark's Bookshop, which I was sure was in St Mark's Place. It wasn't, but I had an interesting walk finding out. The bookshop itself was just as I remembered it from my previous visit back in the late 90s, full of academic left (cultural studies etc) and general books in so many bookcases that it's hard not to brush against a sharp corner. (This happened to my son Michael that time, making a tiny scratch on the casing of a new sports watch he'd saved for for months and had just bought at Nike. I still have a pang about that.)

In a back corner are two revolving racks of left-wing journals. One contains the respectable left (In These Times, Dollars and Sense, ISJ) and the other the far left and ultra-left: Spartacist, Maoist, and three left-communist journals which are as mutually hostile and politically indistinguishable as they were when I first encountered them in Compendium in Camden in 1976 and whose format, layout and fonts, as well as their contents, are exactly the same as they were then. I gave all these a cursory browse and a determined miss and bought a copy of Strunk's The Elements of Style, for about $4.

Looking for something to do before the party at 10, I found a poetry event in the ground floor of the Standard, and very good it was too, with a lively young black MC and several poets. One was pregnant - 'She's eating for two, and she's reading for two!' the MC said. There was a real feeling of a buzz of new poetry and experiment. Also, free wine, cocktails and cookies.

I made the most of left-over wine and cookies while hanging around the plaza until the party. It was in the 21st-floor penthouse, which had a huge suite (including a bedroom) and an all-round balcony, which had as you can imagine (you'll have to, because my camera was recharging) the most amazing views of Manhattan at night.

'This is Ayn Rand's New York!' I said to Emma Connolly, the nice young woman who'd greeted me. 'All it needs is a naked man on a cliff,' she replied, impressing me with her knowledge of The Fountainhead.

Later I got into a conversation with Leily Kleinbard, who as well as working for PEN works with Larry Seims and others on Reckoning With Torture, a project to develop a film that they hope will go viral. I agreed whole-heartedly with the aim, but in articulating my own fury and frustration on the issue I'm afraid I bent her ear a bit (though she assured me later I hadn't).

Around midnight I saw that Oana Radu, one of the women I'd spoken with earlier from the Romanian cultural centre, had her coat on and went over to say goodnight. It turned out her hotel was near mine so we shared a taxi which dropped her off.

The following morning I strolled down Madison Avenue to Washington Square and then into Greenwich Village, took a phone call from the editor of a computer magazine that's publishing a short story I've just written, and then walked over to Cooper Union to listen to a panel on Occupy with the editors of the Occupy! Gazette.



After this I mooched about for a bit, had an over-priced but welcome bagel, walked around a few blocks of the East village, and just before five joined the block-long queue for Salman Rushdie's Arthur Miller Lecture. This was in the main auditorium of the old Cooper Union, a most impressive hall which was packed with mostly young people. Rushdie's talk, as you can see from the video, was brief, witty and interesting, and followed by a Q & A session with Gary Shteyngart, the American son of Russian dissidents.

I bought a $20 Metro pass (spending exactly $10 too much, as I thought at this time that I'd have to make my own way to the airport) and took the line up to Grand Central, went back to the hotel and showered and changed. Back down for 8.30.

The party was in the top of the Clock Tower of the old Cooper Union: one bare room, with an opening to a balcony, and the workings of the clock itself on show inside. The party started slowly but soon got busy. Early on I joined others outside to see the moon rising, huge and orange, just one night after full.

It felt strange being in the same room as Salman Rushdie, and I hung around the edge of a semi-circle around him on the balcony while he held forth on the short film 'Powers of Ten', which he said showed the non-existence of God. I chatted to a few people, including Beth Weinstein, who'd arranged everything for me and who I met for the first time there. She told me that a car would pick me up for the airport.

I took the subway back after the party finished at 11.

Monday morning I got breakfast, showered, packed, checked out and left my luggage and took the subway to the nearest station to the Flatiron. When I turned up at noon Patrick asked me to come back in an hour. I wandered on, around a small branch of Barnes & Noble, and back. Patrick took me and Steve Gould out to lunch, which was good, then recommended I should check out Union Square, which he said was the real heart of New York. I walked down and found a busy organic market and an Occupy stall and a generally lively scene.



Subway back to hotel, car to airport, home! - and jet-lag for a fortnight.

Labels: amazing things, libertarian, writing

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 10:10 am by Ken

Putting the Science in Fiction

Last Wednesday's day-long workshop Putting the Science in Fiction was a big success, drawing about a hundred participants of whom many were new faces to jaded old hands like me. It was so cool it even had a hashtag, #SciFicManc. A press release got picked up by The Guardian, where, in a further demonstration of the event's cool cutting-edginess, it got the predictably depressing and idiotic stream of comments that no worthwhile idea or initiative should fail to attract.

At lunch-time I found a handful of people from the disciplines of media studies and science studies in a huddle, aghast at the naivety of the ideas the rest of us had about science and fiction. As mere practitioners of one or the other (or both) we were treating each in their different ways as quite unproblematic representations of reality, and the problem as matching them up. I saw their point, but it was somewhat blunted by an earlier coffee-break conversation I'd had with a science studies guy who assured me that all scientific knowledge was confirmed by social processes, not by further experiment (or words to that effect). When I protested that a lot of scientific discoveries had become established fact, literally solidly proven by (e.g.) the very floor we stood on, he assured me that that sort of thing (what goes into making trains, planes, and automobiles, etc) was 'engineering knowledge' and not science at all. Nevertheless I tossed a plea for some attention to critical media and science studies into the afternoon's discussion, where it sank without a ripple.

My own preferred model (sketched out in late-night conversations with Iain Banks, long ago) for how scientists and SF writers should interact with movies and television is the approval-stamp from the American Humane Society that you see in the credits. A little line saying 'No elementary scientific truth or serious science-fictional speculation was harmed, distorted, or mangled beyond all recognition in the making of this motion picture' would not be much, but it would be a start.

Labels: skiffy, writing

Posted 9:49 am by Ken

'It's life Jimmy, but not as we know it'

The National Library of Scotland has an exhibition, running until the end of June, of science fiction in Scotland. The exhibition is compact but comprehensive, with proportionate weight given to SF work in genre and mainstream modes, to comics, TV and films, and with unabashed exhibits of garish covers and artwork alongside fragile manuscripts and antiquarian rarities. SF is treated with the kind of respect and attention to detail that you might expect from someone who has a real love and knowledge of the genre - which turns out to be the case, as curator John Birch (above) explains.

In related videos you can see (so far) me, Charlie Stross and Gary Gibson give our various takes on being SF writers. Eventually these videos and others will be on the NLS site, but for now, enjoy on YouTube and, if you happen to be in Edinburgh in the next couple of months, drop in on the exhibition.

Labels: local, self-promotion, skiffy, writing

Posted 6:18 am by Ken

Upcoming manifestation in New York

I'm delighted and honoured to have been invited to be on a panel on 'Life in the Panopticon' on Saturday May 5th at the Cooper Union in NYC, as part of the upcoming PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature.

Tiny surveillance drones that hover and stare. An Internet where every keystroke is recorded. The automated government inspection of hundreds of millions of e-mails for suspicious characteristics. The technological advancements spurred by the computing revolution have improved our lives, but have also diminished our privacy and enhanced the government’s power to monitor us. Writers and directors who have grappled with technology’s mixed blessings join civil liberties advocates to discuss ways of preserving our freedom in an era in which we all dwell in Bentham’s Panopticon—a prison that allows our wardens to observe us at all times without being seen themselves.

Labels: coming attractions, libertarian, self-promotion

Posted 7:25 am by Ken

Alt.Fiction

A belated thank-you and appreciation for Alt.Fiction, where I was a Guest of Honour last weekend. This annual festival of fantastic literature is a bit like an SF/F convention, but sponsored and run by one of the capillaries of local/regional government that channel Arts Council funding. One can imagine lots of ways in which this could go wrong, all of which Alt.Fiction triumphantly doesn't. It's an enjoyable, well-organised and worthwhile event. I met old friends and acquaintances and made new ones - some faces were familiar from SF conventions, but most weren't, and I got a strong impression of new writers and readers sprouting like these green things that sprout at this time of year.

One person I met was Ian Sales, who sold me a copy of an anthology he's edited, Rocket Science, and his own stand-alone novella Adrift on the Sea of Rains (which he talks about here. I read the latter on the train back and it's very good indeed, as are the stories I've read so far in the anthology, including 'Going, Boldly' by the Edinburgh SF gang's very own Helen Jackson.

Big thanks to the organisers, especially Catherine Rogers and Adele Wearing, who looks back on the weekend here and links to others' impressions of the festival here.

Labels: 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 11:40 am by Ken

Impending Manifestations

I have a number of public events coming up, starting tomorrow!

Friday 13 April, 5.30 pm: Human 2.0, a panel on transhumanism/posthumanism with bioethicist Andy Miah, SF writer Justina Robson and sociologist Professor Steve Fuller at the National Museum of Scotland, as part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

What does it means to be human, past, present and future? As we re-engineer the human body, and even the human genome – through technology, drugs and genetic manipulations – how do we define and value our humanity? What are the social, political and cultural challenges inherent in our enhanced future? As part of our Future Human mini festival, sociologist and author Professor Steve Fuller, and sci-fi writers Ken MacLeod and Justina Robson, join ethicist Andy Miah to mull over these compelling questions. Are we facing a re(evolution) of the species?

The following morning, I expect to bounce out of bed, shower, get dressed, pack, grab some toast and rush to the station to travel to Leicester, to arrive mid-afternoon for:

Saturday 14 to Sunday 15 April: I'm one of the Guests of Honour heading up a guest list that most SF/F cons would kill for 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.

And that's not all! Later this month, I have another two events one night apart:

Genetic Fictions: Genes and Genre, Tue 24 Apr 2012, 18.30 - 20.00, at the Conference Centre, British Library, London, Price: £7.50 / £5 concessions.

Join leading Social Scientists from the ESRC Genomics Network, including Dr Joan Haran (Cesagen, Cardiff University) author of the forthcoming book 'Genetic Fictions: Genes, Gender and Genre', along with award-winning playwright Peter Arnott and Science Fiction author Ken MacLeod as they consider how genes and genetics are represented in literature and theatre. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion. The evening will be chaired by Jude England, Head of Social Sciences at the British Library. [Further details here.]

Another day, another sci/lit event:

Wednesday 25th April 9:30am to 5pm in Zochonis TH A (B5), University of Manchester: a day-long workshop 'Putting the Science in Fiction' Interfaculty Symposium on Science and Entertainment.

Many people look suspiciously at science in fictional media and may ask themselves: Why don't the creators of fiction ever talk to real scientists? In fact, those who write novels, craft television scripts, create movies, and produce stage plays do speak with scientists on a regular basis. This workshop explores how science provides challenges and opportunities for the creators of fiction. By bringing together leading entertainment professionals, novelists, arts scholars, and scientists the workshop will forge new relationships between the scientific community and the arts/entertainment community. One goal of the workshop is to begin discussions about creating a "Science and Entertainment" collaboration programme in the UK equivalent to the Science and Entertainment Exchange run by the National Academy of Sciences in the US.

This event is free but spaces are limited - you can see how to book a place by clicking on the link.

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