Posted 2:50 pm by Ken

What I've been doing

I wrote up two book proposals for my agent to send to my editor: one for a long book, the other for three loosely linked shorter books. With that out of the way, I turned to a project which Iain Banks left me to complete. It involves poetry, and you will hear more about it in due course. While carrying it out I came across a few lines from one of my own longer efforts:

I saw you strong and free, like the future.
You saw
what Althusser saw: the structures
replicate across time like molecules in a cheap graphic.

The 'you' addressed here is long gone from my life, and flourishing in her own, but the lines reminded me that I'd never actually read Althusser. So I went and read my old black Penguin University Book paperback of Althusser's For Marx, which turned out to make sense if you take it slowly. This in turn made me take a lot more seriously the critical literary theory that is an essential part of the Napier MA Creative Writing course. (I already knew that learning the theory worked wonders in terms of making students much better and more confident writers, but I'd idly assumed it was a sort of side-effect of lots of hard thinking.) An early consequence of this was a story I wrote this month for Jonathan Strahan's forthcoming anthology Reach for Infinity. I'm delighted to say that '"The Entire Immense Superstructure": An Installation' has been accepted, so yay!

My editor got back to say my publishers were interested in -- in fact, really excited about -- the least developed of my book ideas, so yay! again but of course that means I have to develop it into something solid by the time the Christmas trees go in the brown bins, so no rest for the wicked.

Have a good 2014, everyone.

Posted 5:33 pm by Ken

Colin Wilson

That fine online magazine Aeon has today published my article on Colin Wilson, who died earlier this month and for whom I retained a sort of sceptical admiration long after my teenage enthusiasm waned. Reactions to his death suggest that that early enthusiasm and continuing admiration was more widely shared than I'd thought. If you'd like to comment on the piece, please do so there.

Posted 3:42 pm by Ken

Mair Manifestin

I have something of a rush of public events in the next few weeks, after which I intend to keep my diary clear (more or less) and focus on writing the next book.

On Wednesday evening I'll be at Edinburgh City Chambers, speaking at a free public seminar organised by the Edinburgh Active Citizenship Group, on the topic of 'A Year to Go to the Big Vote'. Needless to say, I'll be arguing for a No vote. My sparring partner will be pro-independence blogger Kate Higgins. The event runs from 7 - 9 pm, doors (and Word Power bookstall) open 6.30, admission free.

At the end of next week (Sun 29 September), I'll be at Shoreditch Town Hall, taking part in FutureFest, a festival of ideas and discussion about the future, organised by education/innovation charity Nesta; specifically, I'll be speaking in the Sci-Fi Writers' Parliament, in which SF writers including Pat Cadigan, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross will propose radical legislation for future polities.

The following weekend, on Saturday 5 October, I have a session at the Wigtown Book Festival, talking with Stuart Kelly about my own work and that of Iain Banks.

At 8.30 pm on Wednesday 9 October I'm in a formal debate as part of the Durham Book Festival, on the challenging question 'Is great science great science fiction? Do we create scientific facts or do scientists simply discover what’s already there?' with Professor Tom McLeish (molecular physicist), Professor Patricia Waugh (English studies), and Dr Andrew Crumey (novelist and former physicist).

After all that, the panel on Technology and sutainablity: Kill or Cure? on Saturday 19 October at Battle of Ideas should be an absolute walk in the park, I don't think. But I'm looking forward to it.

Posted 9:21 am by Ken

Aboard the GCU Well, You Did Ask For a Concrete Example

Last Wednesday I was at Brunel University for The State of the Culture, a one-day symposium on the Culture books of Iain M. Banks. The campus has changed a lot since I was a postgraduate student there in the late 1970s. New buildings have been added, and others have been retro-fitted. The concrete Brutalist structures that form the hard core of the place are still there, with the famous Lecture Centre a listed building, albeit now garlanded with flowerbeds on its fire-escape and grass and trees on the plaza in front of it. Tower D, where I did research in biomechanics and where I recently housed an entirely imaginary sociology of science department, looks just the same as I remember it, at least from the outside. The most obvious change in the campus is that the male-female ratio is no longer 4:1.

My visit was as a guest of Fairies and Flying Saucers, the university's research cluster on fantasy and science fiction, and they looked after me well: Joseph Norman was at the bus stop to welcome me, and he showed me to the comfortable accommodation of the Lancaster Lodge and then met me in the bar for a pint or two before he and others took me out for a curry.


The conference was held in the Antonin Artaud building, and it ran smoothly, with breaks and refreshments at just the right times. My opening talk was billed as the keynote, which it certainly wasn't: despite much preparatory thinking and note-typing, when it came to delivering it I fell between the two wobbly stools of rambling anecdote about the man (and boy) and amateur analysis of the work. However, the audience listened sympathetically and laughed occasionally, and the questions that followed were well asked. SF critic Paul Kincaid was kind about my talk, and gave the whole conference such a good write-up that I really can't better it. (A full report is projected for Foundation issue 116, a special issue on Iain.) Two new books, The Transgressive Iain Banks: Essays on a Writer Beyond Borders and Gothic Dimensions were passed around, and their editor and author respectively each gave well-received and stimulating talks. It's exciting and indeed moving to see so much scholarly interest in Iain's work, coming at it from so many different academic angles.

Joe kept things on schedule, and after the conference finished on time, I had an hour for a reading -- from the opening of Descent -- and a Q&A, all professionally and unobtrusively photographed. Then about twenty of us headed through a light rain to dinner and subsequent pints and conversation at the fine local pub The Malt Shovel, whose very existence I had managed to miss in all my years at Brunel.

Posted 9:59 am by Ken

Descent cover

The cover of my latest novel, Descent (Orbit, forthcoming, March 2014) has now been launched:

Posted 2:13 pm by Ken

Use of Calculators

[I've been asked by one or two left publications for a piece about Iain's politics. I've told them I was going to write a blog post on the subject, which they were welcome to use. Here it is. (Update: the Morning Star and the IS Network have reprinted it.) If anyone else wants to use it, please ask.]

When Iain Banks and I were students back in the early 1970s, I was one of the first readers of Use of Weapons. I seem to recall reading the first draft in weekly instalments as the pages flew from the typewriter, and discussing the unfolding content almost as often. Iain explained that the Culture was his idea of utopia, in which advanced technology, inexhaustible resources and friendly artificial intelligence made possible a society in which nobody had to work and there was no need for money or a separate state apparatus. At the time I was reading with some excitement a slim paperback edited by David McLellan and titled Marx's Grundrisse, a collection of extracts from Marx's notebooks, in which he allowed himself some bolder speculations than he ever saw into print. I explained to Iain that the Culture was very similar to Marx's conception of communism: a stateless and classless society based on automation and abundance.

Iain was interested and I think persuaded. But, I went on, the Culture on his telling didn't seem to have come about through class struggle, revolution, and the rest. How, then, could it have come about, given that Iain was as sceptical as I was about the likelihood of such a society being handed down by benevolent rulers from above? By way of answer, Iain pointed to his pocket calculator. He said that on his last vacation job, on a construction site, one of the full-time workers had borrowed it and worked his way through a stack of wage slips, to discover that he and his mates weren't getting all the pay they were due. The site workers had taken the result to the management, who duly if perhaps reluctantly shelled out the back pay that was owed. That, Iain said, was how he'd envisaged the Culture coming about. Conflicts of interest between classes and other groups there would be, but the sheer availability of information and computing power would arm the majority with facts and arguments that would enable them to prove, as well as enforce, their claims. The consequent advance in consciousness would allow the opportunities offered by automation and abundance to be grasped, first in imagination then in reality, and make opposition to their realisation irrational, futile, and weak.

This projection of a democratic, deliberative, and peaceful transition to a co-operative commonwealth wasn't as far removed from Marx's own later views as I thought at the time. I saw Marx through Lenin, Lenin through Trotsky, and -- for that matter --Trotsky through the Trotskyists, and each successive prism lost something of the one before, let alone the original image. Iain respected them all as thinkers, but remained sceptical of any attempt to emulate their practice. He was quite willing to stick his neck out when necessary: he came down to London in 1977 to join the mobilization against the fascist National Front's attempt to march through Lewisham, took his place in a small squad of comrades none of whom he knew but me, and thoroughly enjoyed the fight that ensued. On a later visit he joined me when it was my turn to guard our group's bookshop and offices, which had recently been targeted in an amateurish arson attempt by the fascists. As Iain and I checked the locks on the building's back door, two policemen loomed behind us and tapped our shoulders. It took us some minutes to convince the coppers that we really were there to protect rather than attack the shop. Iain ribbed me about it afterwards:

'I bet that's the first time you've ever had to say, "Honestly, officer, I really am a left-wing extremist ..."'

However friendly he was to the radical left, Iain had little interest in relating the long-range possibility of utopia to radical politics in the here and now. As he saw it, what mattered was to keep the utopian possibility open by continuing technological progress, especially space development, and in the meantime to support whatever policies and politics in the real world were rational and humane. For Iain that meant voting Labour. After the party mutated into New Labour he switched his practical vote to the Scottish National Party and his protest vote to the Scottish Socialists and (I think) the Greens. Even before then, in the early to mid 1990s, he'd come around to the view that Scotland would never be safe from the ravages of Tory governments it hadn't voted for unless it separated from England. This support for independence didn't come from nationalism but from reformism, and from a life-long, heart-felt hatred for the Conservative and Unionist Party.

In Iain's view, popular access to information was decisive to any hope of progress, and control of information was central to the power of the ruling class. One of his few intellectual heroes was Noam Chomsky, who has for decades argued and documented this over and over. Iain made a point of being well-informed himself, and seemed to have read the Guardian from cover to cover every day. The most radical writings -- Chomsky's apart -- that he ever enthused about to me were those of John Kenneth Galbraith, George Monbiot and Will Hutton. Iain valued the far left mainly as a source of information that even the Guardian was likely to gloss over. He followed my own adventures and misadventures in Marxism with a sort of sympathetic scepticism, always keen to read whatever rag I was flogging at any given time, and to listen to my explanations of why which paper I was selling sometimes changed over the years. It was my later explorations of libertarian thought that most sorely tried his patience. I could never persuade him that libertarianism was anything but a shill for corporate interests: a common misconception, and one that many libertarians have worked hard to confirm.

In his view, the left's most stupid and repeated mistake was to accept that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend,' which he saw as at the bottom of most of the left's disasters. He had no illusions in existing socialism, and no hopes for the better in its collapse. He opposed every war the British state waged in his lifetime, with the one exception of NATO's war over Kosovo, which he argued for before it happened and never repudiated. Fortunately, this wasn't the first step on a slippery slope. He was even more vehemently opposed than I was to the attack on Iraq -- I tried to at least see a certain logic to it from the imperialist point of view, whereas he saw it as utter folly and madness from the moment it was mooted, an adventure that would sow destruction, multiply terrorism, and do incalculable harm to the interests and security of the UK and US.

He blamed Blair absolutely for the Iraq war, and never forgave or forgot the crime. Anger over what was going on in the Middle East impelled him to his two best-known political gestures: cutting up his passport and sending it to 10 Downing Street, and refusing to have his own books published in Israel. The former action was mocked, the latter attacked. Iain took not a blind bit of notice.

In summary, Iain's political views were, by and large, what you'd expect from an Old Labour supporter and Guardian reader with an informed interest in the analyses of the radical left. What was perhaps more unusual than his views was the consistency and tenacity with which he held them, and his confidence that they must in the long run prevail if civilization was to survive. He saw quite clearly that events weren't going the way he would have liked them to, but never saw any reason to revise his reckoning that neoliberalism just didn't add up.

Posted 1:05 pm by Ken

The State of the Culture

Faeries and Flying Saucers, a fantasy and science fiction research cluster based at Brunel University, in association with the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing, presents a day of presentations and discussion on the 'Culture' series by Iain M. Banks (1954 - 2013).

Posted 1:41 pm by Ken

Celebrating the work of Iain [M.] Banks

From Edinburgh City of Literature comes a short season of events 'celebrating the work of author Iain [M] Banks' this summer, culminating with an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. They include a screening of The Crow Road at the Filmhouse, and an exhibition of SF poetry at the Scottish Poetry Library. I'm taking part in the (already sold-out) Book Festival event, along with Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. I'm also taking part in Illicit Ink's This Side of Paradise, an evening of utopian readings next Sunday at the Bongo Club:

Brought to you by the folk who like to conduct gruesome fictional experiments on stage and play in the dark, This Side of Paradise will be a heaven on earth. Compèring the night is science fiction visionary Andrew J. Wilson. Bringing the paradise to life with original stories and instruments of science are writers Ken MacLeod, Ariadne Cass-Maran, Erin McElhinney, Halsted Bernard, Hal Duncan and Tom Moore.

Posted 9:14 am by Ken

Iain M. Banks (1954 - 2013)

[Image: Kate Copeland, The Skinny]

Iain Banks died last Sunday. I have lost my oldest friend. I was asked to speak about him for radio and TV, and I have. I was asked to write about his SF, and I did. I've tried to write something more personal, and I've failed.

Here are a few lines I wrote some years ago, for an introduction to a German edition of Consider Phlebas. It outlines an outlook implied in the Culture books.

To live a human life is to die. Immortality is for gods. Humans can become gods, but to do so is to cease to be human, and that too is a kind of death. In accepting mortality the humans have the chance, their only chance, to make their lives complete, sufficient, shaped; and to get out of the game while they're ahead.

This is what gives the book, with all its violence, its fundamental gaiety. Life may be a game of damage, but it is a game to be played with grace, every day new under the sun.

Iain did that.

Posted 2:58 pm by Ken

Impending Manifestations

I have two public events coming up, this month and next.

First, there's the Futura Sci-Fi Convention, a one-day event on Saturday 15 June in Wolverhampton's innovative arts centre the Light House. My fellow guests of honour are Adam Roberts and Ian R. MacLeod, so I feel honoured indeed, and I'm very much looking forward to it. The day and evening event has all the usual features of an SF convention: panels, GoH readings, kaffeeklatches, signing sessions, book stalls, a real ale bar etc, without the hassle of hotels and all for a modest £25 (or £100 for a group of five). Details and bookings here.

 

My second upcoming public event is in July. Napier MA Creative Writing student Anni Telford has made canny use of her contacts to set up a series of workshops for writers featuring three-quarters of the Napier MA Creative Writing course team. Stuart Kelly talks about writing creative non-fiction next Friday (7 June). I'll be talking about writing SF and fantasy on Friday 5 July. David Bishop will teach the dark arts of writing graphic novels on Tuesday 23 July. Full details and bookings here and the same with a downloadable flyer from the group putting on the workshops, the Booktown Writers.

Labels: coming attractions, local, skiffy, writing

Posted 2:19 pm by Ken

Napier Creative Writing Open Doors Event

The MA Creative Writing course at Edinburgh Napier University is holding a free (but ticketed) Open Doors event tomorrow evening (Tuesday 28th May).
  
Here's the schedule for Open Doors 2013:


• 5.30 Arrive for tea and coffee
• 6.00 Introduction to MA Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier
• 6.20 Taster session: writing for graphic fiction with David Bishop
• 7.00 Taster session: experimental writing with Sam Kelly
• 7.45 Q & A with staff and current students
• 8.15 Drinks
• 8.30 Reading by Ken MacLeod, writer-in-residence
• 9.00 Close


Full details and a link to booking here.

Posted 1:28 pm by Ken

Rockets for Edwin Morgan

Next Thursday, 25 April at 6.30 pm. the Scottish Poetry Library hosts live readings from the highly successful SF poetry anthology Where Rockets Burn Through, edited by Russell Jones.

This event will also include a short movie by Dan Warren based on Edwin Morgan's SF poem, ‘In Sobieski's Shield’. The event will feature the following poets:

Ron Butlin
Pippa Goldschmidt
Andy Jackson
Kelley Swain
Claire Askew
Ian McLachlan

Details and bookings here.

Posted 12:10 pm by Ken

The Writing Front

Yesterday I completed a first draft of my new novel, provisonally titled Descent. The feel and tone of Descent is about as unskiffy as I could make it. My pitch to myself for Intrusion was 'genomics Aga Saga'. The equivalent marching song for Descent was 'near-future bloke-lit'.

Bloke-lit's the kind of book Nick Hornby and Tony Parsons do so well: a first-person, confessional tale of an ordinary guy who behaves with typical male insensitivity and self-absorption until at least one exasperated woman-in-his-life knocks him about the head with some home truths. In Descent the narrator's excuse for being such a dick is that in his teens he got knocked on the head by a flying saucer. Also, he suspects the revolution may have happened while he was studying for his final high school exams. When his girlfriend tells him he and she may be from different human species, relationships become strained. We've all been there.

There's no doubt more to be done with it but the feeling of a weight off my shoulders is dizzying. I intend to make very sure my next novel is outlined in far more detail before I start writing -- but then, I always say that.

So, on to stuff I've been neglecting for the past few weeks:

First, as many of you know, Intrusion has been shortlistedfor the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I am of course delighted. This year's shortlist has caused some controversy, which has raised the award's mainstream profile. The book's latest enthusiastic review is in the LA Review of Books (which seems to have a rather Clutean policy of not worrying about spoilers, so be warned).

Second, Intrusion  didn't win the BSFA Award for best novel -- Adam Roberts' Jack Glass did, for which belated congratulations.

Third, my novella The Human Front is now out in a new US edition from PM Press, with supplementary material, and very good it looks too. If you want a signed (and personalised, if you like) copy of this nifty paperback, you can order/reserve one at Edinburgh's great SF bookshop Transreal. An ebook version is available here.

Posted 3:57 pm by Ken

Stem Cell Stories - creative non-fiction competition

We all have stem cells in us -- but do you have a stem cell story in you?

A non-fiction story, that is; or a poem; or four to six pages of graphic non-fiction? If so, and if you're not a professionally published writer, this exciting competion sponsored by EuroStemCell could be your big chance.

We're looking for imaginative science writing, fresh and original, accurate and relevant, on the theme of stem cells and regenerative medicine, and accessible to a non-specialist audience.

Fame (your work published worldwide online) and fortune (300 euros first prize, 50 euros each for two runners-up) await. That's got to be worth a few hours of anybody's time. So take a look, read the criteria and the terms and conditions carefully, and give it a go.

Posted 11:19 am by Ken

Against a Dark Background

As the world now knows, Iain Banks has cancer and the prognosis is not good. Yesterday he made the grim news public with characteristic courage and wit, having done the same privately some weeks ago. He and I have been very close friends for about forty years. Nobody could have a better friend.

Iain has given me enormous support and encouragement over these four decades. He read and critiqued early drafts of my first novel, and gave it a great boost with a generous cover quote. In recent years we've taken to talking over rather than reading each other's works in progress. For me at least that has been an irreplaceable part of the process of writing. Reading his books is a delight in itself, and a permanent inspiration to try harder. His work has had the same effect on SF as a whole: an open invitation to raise the game and an example of how to do it.

Iain, it has suddenly and terribly become clear, is one of those authors who is not only popular but loved, and whose work has become a part of how many of his readers think and feel about the world. The outpouring of tributes has been almost unbearably moving.

A website has been set up for family and fans to leave messages and check on his progress. Go there, now.

Posted 5:52 am by Ken

You Can See the Comet

... if you live in the northern hemisphere, anyway. I saw it from my doorstep last night, through the glare of nearby street lamps, using 8x40 binoculars and this map from @VirtualAstro. (Click to enlarge; follow @VirtualAstro or your local equivalent outside the UK for #PanSTARRS updates.)

Posted 10:20 am by Ken

A better distillation

Update: A much more comprehensive account, with splendidly evocative pics,  of the symposium I wrote about below is here.

Posted 9:04 am by Ken

The Evaporation of Things, distilled

Social science has a permanent problem of identifying its objects of study. The relationships, interactions, institutions, organizations and other aspects of society may have all sorts of things connected with them that we can see and touch, such as houses and police stations and pound coins and wedding rings, but the relationships themselves they aren't stuff you can spot on CCTV. Identifying new or hitherto unnoticed goings-on between people or in their minds or in how they relate to the world around them is always going to be tricky and contestable. Is such-and-such a one-off, a will-o-the-wisp, or is it, as the fashion columnists would say, a thing? (This usage of 'a thing' has definitely become a thing.)
Artists, at least the kind of artists who cause outrage and bafflement when their work is exhibited in the Tate, have a similar problem. You want your work to glom onto something significant and say something about it that makes sense to yourself if to no one else, and you're allowed to do that with any material at all within the law and health and safety regulations: bits of tin, wire, plaster of Paris, marble, bronze, paint, canvas, neon tubes, dust bunnies, pickled shark... If you're very clever and /or lucky, you might hit on exactly the right expression for some feeling or situation or condition that no one has quite put their finger on before. Fame, fortune, and an angry editorial in the Daily Mail await.

So there they are, social scientists and artists, looking about, antennae quivering, alert for the new. Might they sometimes help each other lock onto the same scent?

Last week I attended a symposium at Inspace, the arts venue of Edinburgh University's Informatics Department. The space is functionally divided between an auditorium and a gallery, and is so modern it aches -- literally enough after a while, as the audience sits on thin cushions scattered along steps. The event, initiated by the Genomics Forum, brought together social scientists, natural scientists, and artists. I was there to blog the event's first day; Pat Kane, currently a visiting fellow at the Forum, would cover the second. The question the symposium asks, I suppose, is: 'Is the question "Where is the thing?" becoming a thing?' Its hashtag is #eot13. Its rubric:

The symposium Evaporation of Things is intended to explore the increasingly digital interface to biological ‘things’. From the phylogenetic analysis of plants, to the data representation of the human genome project, studying the subject on a screen has replaced the study of the material artefact. For the general public, astronomy remains a question of looking at the stars in the night sky, whereas for astronomers the use of optical telescopes is a thing of the past – so the question emerges “where is the thing?”

The natural sciences have been prolific in practising not only this evaporation of things but also in reassembling innovative living entities, such as genetically modified organisms, and new creative possibilities are emerging with the advent of the enhancement of the human body with cybertechnologies. This fluidity of the living things is potentiated by interdisciplinary engagements, and entities which are in one minute the subjects of sciences become in the next the raw materials for arts.

Forum Director Steve Yearley welcomed us to the event. Then one of the organisers, Maria Grade Godinho, introduced the session. She explained how she'd trained and worked as a biologist. Encountering genes with patents had brought home to her that what she did in the lab was part of a wider social world, which she wanted to investigate further. Here, she wanted to explore the possibility that the relationship between objects and data wasn't one between matter and mind, but between two different states of matter -- hence the metaphor of evaporation.

Maria's co-organiser Chris Speed of the College of Art kicked off with a clip of the Challenger disaster, with its familiar voice-over of a man reading from the space shuttle's instruments and continuing to relay numbers for several seconds after the rest of America had watched the craft explode live on television. That shocked moment of delayed realisation when someone tapped the announcer's shoulder and pointed to the TV screen was, Chris said, what this symposium was about. He gave other examples: the debris of the later space shuttle crash, Columbia, tagged, connected by strips of tape, and spread across across a floor as a physical database; the flash crash of May 6 2010, as two duelling algorithms dumped stocks in a death spiral only interrupted by physically pulling the plugs; and one of his students' art projects, which consisted of a thick stack of A4, a printout of reports from her iPhone for one day.

The presentations that followed were intriguing, varied, and of high quality. Mike Phillips took us from the melting Wicked Witch to the unease-inducing ambiguities of how scientific imaging converts numbers to visuals. Synthetic biologist Vincent Danos took us ever deeper into the molecular structure of starch and the phenomenology of mathematical modelling. Laura Beloff charmed and delighted with her sci-art projects, starting with a portable 'space station for fruit flies'. Sociologist Gill Haddow walked us through how 'human' became in some contexts legally defined in terms of percentages of DNA.


After and over drinks in the early evening, the exhibiting artists displayed and discussed their work. I wouldn't presume to judge or compare -- take a look for yourself -- but for me by far the most memorable and disturbing of their artefacts was Ai Hasegawa's short film of a woman giving birth to a salmon, which she later eats. Sushi will never be the same.

So was the symposium a success? Did the artists, scientists, and sociologists combine their particular points of view to outline, somewhere in the room, an elephant we'd have otherwise missed? I think they did. The evaporation of things is a thing.  

Posted 3:14 pm by Ken

Only the truth is revolutionary

I'm inordinately proud to have an article with the above title in the current issue (#35) of Perspectives, the quarterly journal of Democratic Left Scotland. The article is about Thomas Kuhn's influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). I think I've given a clear and fair summary of Kuhn's argument, and a brief account of the objections to it, some of which I share. Kuhn concludes that we can't say one paradigm is closer to the truth than another. Given that (e.g.) our space probes don't crash into crystal spheres, this strikes me as mistaken.

Perspectives is an interesting and readable magazine of political and cultural discussion. In particular, it's one of the few places on the left where you can find a civilised and informed conversation about what's going on in Scotland in the run-up to the independence referendum. It has a fine pessimism of the intelligence, if perhaps a little less optimism of the will than I would like. To say that you don't agree with everything in it would be to miss and to make its point. Many of its back issues are available online. At £8 a year for a sub (£10 Europe, £12 rest of world), it's a steal.

Posted 9:03 pm by Ken

Re:Search

Some thoughts too inchoate to make a science fiction story from yet ...

This time next week I'll be attending and later blogging about the first afternoon of a symposium on The Evaporation of Things, which discusses the cultural and intellectual consequences of the digitisation and virtualisation of physical, and particularly of biological, objects. A couple of weeks ago, in a BBC programme on Google's attempt to digitise all written knowledge, someone was quoted as saying: 'Google isn't building a library - it's building an AI!' And today I read a much-tweeted piece on how Google Glass plus some existing/easily foreseeable applications and algorithms such as face recognition and voice recognition and speech-to-text transcription will make everything we say and do within sight of the damn things recordable and indexable and searchable forever.

The physical world is on its way to becoming as searchable as a database. As real-time surveillance from satellites and drones and sensors increases asymptotically to ubiquity, the knowledge won't even have to be recorded first. We'll be able to, as it were, google Earth.

Almost all recorded knowledge from the earliest bone-scratchings to your latest Tweet via the Library of Congress are all going to be in a single searchable virtual space.

Add to this that there is an uncountable number of deductions that could be made from what we already know, but that we haven't made -- or perhaps can't make in our heads, because they are of the type that Charles Dodgson identified long ago as 'pork chop problems', and which now look entirely soluble using modern symbolic logic and lots of computer power.

What seems to follow from this is that a large and growing part of the science of the future will be not finding new results but making new discoveries by connecting hitherto isolated drops in the ocean of facts we already know. The key skill will be formulating algorithms. Research becomes Re:Search.

Have I just discovered data mining, or is there something more here that we aren't thinking about yet?   

Posted 10:49 am by Ken

Intrusion out in paperback

My 2012 novel Intrusion is now available in paperback. As you can see from my friend George Berger's photo of a display in the Uppsala English Bookshop, copies are already out in the wild and have made it as far as Sweden.

I'm delighted, and honoured, that the book is on the Best Novel shortlist for the British Science Fiction Association's BSFA Awards:  

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Corvus)
Empty Space: a Haunting by M. John Harrison (Gollancz)
Intrusion by Ken Macleod (Orbit)
Jack Glass by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)  
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)

In such company, it's an honour just to be nominated.

The novel is also on the Locus 2012 Recommended Reading List.

I'll finish with a quote from David Hebblethwaite's recent review:

[I]t is in MacLeod’s portrait of his future society that the novel shines most brightly. Several times, we see how the authorities cross-reference online traces and other seemingly-unremarkable points of data, and infer that someone might be a security risk – and the first they know of it is when the police come for them. This mirrors the novel’s sense that isolated bits of rhetoric have cohered invisibly to form the framework of government ideology; which can also be a net to trap the unwary, as Hope and other characters discover. The ending of Intrusion is also built on the idea of isolated details coming together unexpectedly, which is a satisfying touch.

Perhaps what’s most chilling about Intrusion is its quietness. As terrible as the society and events of MacLeod’s novel can be, its prose treats them largely as banal, which is quite fitting for the insidious way they’ve come about. Intrusion is likewise a book that creeps up on you – and stays there, just out of sight, waiting.

Posted 8:18 am by Ken

Another train-wreck

The biggest left-of-Labour organization in Britain, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), is in crisis over its leadership's handling of a rape allegation raised by a party member against a member of the Central Committee. A redacted transcript of a disaffected delegate's secret recording of the relevant session of the party's recent conference was leaked, and published online, with care taken to protect the identity of the complainant. Its substantial accuracy is not disputed. It leaves the SWP's credibility on the most sensitive questions of women's oppression severely compromised.

The panel that investigated the complaint and exonerated the accused was made up of five women and two men, most of whom had worked closely with the accused and all of whom had known him for years. As is painfully clear from the transcript, they all took their duty to be impartial with the utmost seriousness, despite its manifest impossibility. Why they nevertheless went ahead with the investigation is difficult to explain, at least in terms that make sense to anyone on the outside.

The debacle has now gone mainstream. It turns out that earlier outrage over how the case was being handled lies behind the formation of two declared opposition factions in the run-up to the conference. We learn that China Mieville, the well-known writer and a long-term party member, is aghast. The high-profile SWP blogger and author Richard Seymour is in open revolt. These and others have saved their own honour. Whether they can save that of their party remains to be seen.

The SWP has made plenty of enemies over the years, some of them on the left. I'm not among them, despite my often stated disagreement with much that the party thinks and does. All the more vehemently, then, should I say that this latest development leaves me sick. It was through the SWP's precursor that I made my first acquaintance with Marxism. The organisation's journal from the 60s and 70s shows an engagement with the real world that was, shall we say, not always obvious in some other parts of the left particularly at the time. I soon found my way, for better or worse, to a different tradition (and then another again). When the latter collapsed around me, and the world continued to burn, I joined the SWP for a couple of years in the early 90s. I made my disagreement with some of the party's most cherished verities clear before, during, and after my membership, and these disagreements have only deepened since. Never once did I face anything but argument. Others have had less happy experiences with the SWP. Its internal life and its way of relating to broader movements have left all too many people with lasting grudges. Maybe I was just lucky. Twenty years later, I still know, like, and respect people I met back then. I hope some of them are fighting against the disaster their party's leadership has brought down on their heads. Unless that fight succeeds, the party is done for.

Posted 8:05 pm by Ken

Above us only sky

Humanism is more terrifying than most humanists, I think, are willing to admit.

'Humanism,' wrote H. J. Blackham, 'proceeds from an assumption that man is on his own and this life is all and an assumption of responsibility for one's own life and for the life of mankind - an appraisal and an undertaking, two personal decisions. Less than this is never humanism.'

Coming from the first director of the British Humanist Association, and author of Humanism, the Pelican Original (1968) from which the above is taken, this seems authoritative enough. Challenging enough, too, when you think about its implications - which, of course, Blackham spent the rest of his fine book doing.

One that he missed is hidden in the phrase 'the life of mankind'. When we read that today, of course, we immediately politically correct it to 'the life of humanity', but we probably have much the same vague mental image as Blackham may have had in 1968, something like a blur of National Geographic pages flicking past, maybe the UN flag, the Earth from space, babies in Africa, suits in Manhattan, lab coats and microscopes ...

Whatever it is, it's wrong. Because 'the life of humanity' surely includes future humanity, and future humanity is much, much bigger than we think. Even if we never go out into space on any large scale, and merely send out machines to beam us solar energy, ward off asteroid impacts, and explore, and the human population stabilises at ten billion or so (or whatever anyone, Greens apart, considers a stable population) we're still talking about vast numbers of human lives over the next thousand years, or ten thousand, or hundred thousand, or million years ... and why stop there? Some species have survived almost unchanged for tens of millions of years. There's no reason in principle why we shouldn't be among them -  or, if we aren't, having some cultural continuity with our successors. Nor is there any reason, in principle, for our civilization to collapse.

Taking responsibility for that is a big, scary deal. We're living in the very early days of human civilization. And that's just the start. If we relax the constraint of most of us staying on Earth, to imagine the future of humanity we have to go out on a clear night and look up.

Now try taking your proportionate particle of responsibility for that.

Posted 3:26 pm by Ken

Looking forward, looking back, and looking up

Intrusion has made four end-of-year best-SF lists: in the Telegraph, the Guardian, i09 and SciFiNow. The paperback is to be published in March.

Among the many satisfactions of Ken MacLeod’s fiction is his confidence in literature as a tool of political engagement. Intrusion (Orbit, £18.99) is a vision of life in a near-future Britain where nanny-state supervision has edged into soft-totalitarian surveillance and control. The plot revolves around an expectant mother seeking an exemption from the genetic “fix”, a single pill that guarantees a healthy foetus, but things get rapidly less cheerful from there in this steely, brilliant piece of work. Also due out in March is a new US edition of my Sidewise Award-winning novella The Human Front, from the enterprising radical publisher PM Press. Like other volumes in the excellent Outspoken Authors series, this edition comes with additional goodies: an interview with me by Terry Bisson and a couple of of my short essays, one of them written specially for this book.

Looking back ... The Human Front features flying saucers and revolution, as does the Engines of Light trilogy. Looking farther back, so did the very first SF novel I set out to write, in my mid-teens. The working title of that premature, immature and now mercifully lost effort was 'The End of Heaven'. I tried to inveigle Iain Banks and another friend into co-writing it. They (wisely) declined. Despite extensive background research, drawing on sources that ranged from Chariots of the Gods to Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, the draft never amounted to more than a few closely-spaced pencilled pages. Some of it became part of the mulch from which my real first novel grew. It was in quixotic recognition of this that I inflicted on The Star Fraction the abandoned work's banal opening line: 'It was hot on the roof.'


The novel I'm working on, provisionally titled Descent, features a UFO encounter, albeit one that (even as a teenager, when it happens to him) the protagonist doesn't attribute to aliens. It also features a revolution, albeit one so peaceful and legal that most people don't notice it as such at the time. Unlike my previous stories, Descent takes on board the UFO experience as it exists in the real world, rather than elaborating an ironic rationalization of the UFO mythos. Part of its inspiration was a review in Fortean Times of Mark Pilkington's well-received Mirage Men, a book which I've since read and found very useful indeed. Pilkington shows that the story of a government cover-up of the truth about UFOs - the standard X-files trope - is itself a government creation, and is quite deliberately kept going by various governments and intelligence agencies. 

You might think from all this that I'm fascinated by UFOs. I'm not. Pilkington's book was - with Neil Nixon's Pocket Essentials on UFOs - the second UFO book I've read in years. As a teenager I read everything on the subject I could find, and by taking everything at face value and trying to make it all fit together, learned that it was a mirage and a mare's nest. (The only SF book to do full justice to this aspect of the phenomenon is Ian Watson's Miracle Vistors, which captures exactly the escalating sense of unreality that takes over any attempt to make sense of it all.) I lost interest in the topic, but kept a vague suspicion that something beyond our present knowledge was behind it all. In my thirties I came across the standard sceptical treatments (starting with Ian Ridpath's classic article and found that there wasn't. Even now, I find myself surprised to learn how much some elements of the standard story - the MIB, for instance - were simply made up.

So like almost all SF writers - as taxi drivers everywhere discover to their astonishment - I'm a rock-ribbed sceptic about flying saucers and little green men. But I still write about them - in fact, off-hand I can't think of any other current SF writer (apart from those writing for film and television and franchises) who has written so much. Maybe Descent will at last get flying saucers and the coming revolution out of my system, but I make no promises.

Posted 4:48 pm by Ken

Happy New Year!

For the first time in far too many years we went to Edinburgh's Hogmanay Street Party, and had a great time. And for the first time in even longer, I'm having a New Year's Day without a hangover. (To avoid any unnecessary alarm, I hasten to add that I'm not ill and no, I didn't follow sensible drinking guidelines.) So, in another break with tradition I'll skip my usual reflections on the old year and hopeful or gloomy speculations on the new, and just wish everybody a happy and prosperous 2013.