The Early Days of a Better Nation

Tuesday, September 17, 2013



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.
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Monday, September 16, 2013



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.


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