tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41429652024-03-19T12:58:41.843+00:00The Early Days of a Better Nation<p><strong>Ken MacLeod's comments.</strong><br />
The title comes from two quotes:
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<em>“Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.”</em>—Alasdair Gray.
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<em>“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”</em>—Graydon Saunders
</p>Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.comBlogger862125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-66519671545223728942023-11-03T22:06:00.001+00:002023-11-06T12:52:55.946+00:00Chengdu Worldcon: Meet the Future<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhohI8XzYD65UdY8xZ24eiwluUiwWXgKcHZRrDUe2hXxFiVIt_29ry1xC3N-silsBSi0neigK3TB_43OXuwAcPahdOYCIeaNwAx0rNZcwAyoxyVqppJTHrjfoYNXobSlI3v0FPzPX7qR2tuDWrLVMaCfam7wlGMuqRyDkoAvcfaZZiOEDw8GdI_/s1215/IMG_20231020_170037.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="911" data-original-width="1215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhohI8XzYD65UdY8xZ24eiwluUiwWXgKcHZRrDUe2hXxFiVIt_29ry1xC3N-silsBSi0neigK3TB_43OXuwAcPahdOYCIeaNwAx0rNZcwAyoxyVqppJTHrjfoYNXobSlI3v0FPzPX7qR2tuDWrLVMaCfam7wlGMuqRyDkoAvcfaZZiOEDw8GdI_/s400/IMG_20231020_170037.jpg"/></a></div><br><br>This historic Worldcon has already been very well covered by others, e.g. <a href="https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/chengdu-worldcon-4-the-people-you-meet-along-the-way/">Nicholas Whyte</a> and <a href="https://jeremyszal.substack.com/p/the-world-in-worldcon-a-chengdu-report">Jeremy Szal</a>. For lots of coverage of events, guests and so on, see <a href="https://www.facebook.com/chengduworldcon/">the con’s Facebook page</a>.
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But I’ve been back over a week, and here’s my overdue account.
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Last month I spent far too few days in China, at the <a href="https://en.chengduworldcon.com/">Chengdu Worldcon</a>, to which I was invited as an international guest. My travel, and accommodation for me and my wife, were covered by the Committee of the 2023 Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention, for which much thanks.
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We had a wonderful time. The convention was a smashing success and easily the biggest, and most publicly celebrated, Worldcon ever.
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We arrived at Chengdu airport in the early evening of Wednesday 18 October and quickly met volunteers at a stall near the exit, from which were immediately hurried to a minibus that took us to the Sheraton Pidu. Along the way we saw advertisements for the Chengdu Worldcon lining the highways, and the robot panda mascot at numerous intersections. We met the volunteer who was looking after us, Zoe, who was unfailingly sweet and helpful throughout. Our luggage was whisked inside and we were back on a bus for a short drive to the venue.
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This was the elegant and futuristic newly built Chengdu Science and Science Fiction Museum, across a lake in the park from the hotel. We took our seats just in time for the start of the opening ceremony.
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This combined a traditional Worldcon opening ceremony...
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...with a spectacular show, including song and dance, giant video projections, and culminated in a drone display outside the huge semi-circular window of astronomical and sci-fi images whose high point was an outline rendering of a spinning black hole (which unfortunately I didn’t catch, so you’ll have to make do with Saturn).
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The other ceremonies – the Galaxy Awards, the opening of the Chengdu International Science Fiction convention, the Hugo Awards, the Hugo after-party, and the closing ceremony – were likewise spectacular: a primary school choir sang in one of these, an entire symphony orchestra took the stage in another, and so on.
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They were MC’d by professional television presenters.
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The venue was as impressive inside as outside.
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I took part in a couple of panels, one on Science Fiction and Future Science and one on cyberpunk, and was interviewed on video by an Italian documentary company and on voice recording for the Huawei news website. For two mornings I put in an hour or two at the Glasgow Worldcon stand. Never in my life have I been asked for so many autographs, or to pose with so many people for photographs. Nicholas Whyte, also at the stall, had the same experience, and others did too. Hardly any of the people whose notebooks and souvenirs we signed, or who stood beside us to have their photo taken, could have known who we were: that were overseas visitors with something to do with science fiction was enough. Among the few who did know us were some students from the Fishing Fortress College of Science Fiction in Chongqing.
Our enthusiastic reception was nothing to that of Cixin Liu, author of the <i>Three-Body</i> trilogy and the story filmed as <i>The Wandering Earth</i>. His signing queue was like those I’ve seen for Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Science fiction in China is taken very seriously and sincerely by its fans.
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Thousands upon thousands of people passed through the venue, including many primary-school classes there for the day. Lots of young people, and lots of families. They weren’t just there for the toys and for the impressive tech exhibition hall.
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The bookstall just across from the Glasgow Worldcon stall had a fast-moving queue of book-laden customers all the time. Many panels were standing room only, with people crowding the doorway leaning in and recording on their phones.
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There were hundreds of volunteers, some minding the international guests, others helping visitors to the venue, acting as guides in exhibitions, or adding some elegance to the ceremonies.
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Some even worked on security (the hotel and the venue had almost airport-level security throughout the convention). Most seemed to be from language schools, and eager to practice their English.
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Our good friend Fan Zhang, who <a href= https://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2019/11/blue-sky-over-china.html>looked after us so well in Beijing in 2019</a>, now has an important post at the Fishing Fortress college of Science Fiction. He took us out to dinner with two of his staff, and had some interesting proposals for next year, which I’m seriously considering.
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We had one side trip organised by the convention for guests: a visit to Chengdu’s famous panda research centre, truly unforgettable.
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Alongside the hotel was an exhibition of ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’, traditional arts and crafts: Shu embroidery not just displayed but demonstrated, traditional music and singing, silver filigree, a tea ceremony, cut-paper pictures, and melted-sugar drawings made before our eyes and handed to us on a stick to eat. It all made for an interesting and uplifting hour.
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On our final day, Monday 23 October, Carol and I went on our own to the Wuhou Shrine, a historic site and major tourist destination set in a great park which opens to some old streets, now lined with gift shops and street food stalls.
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And on Tuesday we began the long journey home. We had met old friends and made new ones, and it was a pang to leave.
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We owe thanks to many people – the organisers and volunteers, especially Zoe, and a special thanks to the indefatigable Sara Chen.
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Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-46097224059678951852023-04-20T10:57:00.002+00:002023-04-27T15:13:50.678+00:00Cosmia Festival
On Saturday I’ll be at the <a href="https://www.cosmiafestival.co.uk/cosmia-festival-2023">Cosmia Festival</a> in Huddersfield. I have a talk about my recent and current books (4:45pm to 5:45pm), and from 7pm to 8:15pm I'll be talking about Iain M. Banks along with his (and my) friend and musical collaborator, Gary Lloyd.
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£10 for the day, with a great range of authors, plus workshops and exhibitions: details and bookings <a href="https://www.cosmiafestival.co.uk/cosmia-festival-2023">here</a>.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-22152606057438163102023-04-14T13:58:00.000+00:002023-04-14T13:58:06.862+00:00Moniack in a Month – Writing Science Fiction
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-yvXP2gPUJIotxc1IEpWSwLJbH-zJdp4pTjw2Se_wneAPpLy_lRTBtIJDVIpwg-Iuxb7mbTCq_gL0UsINeEAMEPCkV9BhdES44hyEN2YrPdukr4NB3NFlaUhyphenhyphenIfQqDOS3YJlt/s1600/March+2015+-+June+2015+025.JPG" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-yvXP2gPUJIotxc1IEpWSwLJbH-zJdp4pTjw2Se_wneAPpLy_lRTBtIJDVIpwg-Iuxb7mbTCq_gL0UsINeEAMEPCkV9BhdES44hyEN2YrPdukr4NB3NFlaUhyphenhyphenIfQqDOS3YJlt/s320/March+2015+-+June+2015+025.JPG"/></a></div><a href="https://www.moniackmhor.org.uk/">Moniack Mhor</a> is Scotland’s creative writing centre, located in a spectacular landscape in Inverness-shire. I’ve taught there <a href= "https://www.moniackmhor.org.uk/courses/science-fiction-michael-cobley-ken-macleod/">before</a>, with Mike Cobley, and it was <a href="http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2015/12/looking-back.html">great</a>. But a residential week or long weekend isn’t for everyone, which is why Moniack Mhor offers ‘Moniack in a Month’: courses held over Zoom, with one evening workshop a week for four weeks, plus one-to-one tutorial sessions and guest events.
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I’m delighted to say that bookings are now available for an online course on writing science fiction which I’ll be teaching this September. Details are <a href="https://www.moniackmhor.org.uk/courses/2365-online-moniack-in-a-month-writing-science-fiction-with-ken-macleod/">here</a>. The wonderful <a href="http://justinarobson.co.uk/">Justina Robson</a> has kindly agreed to be our Guest Reader.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-15691442499540955172023-03-27T16:30:00.002+00:002023-04-03T14:53:57.687+00:00Lightspeed trilogy publication news: UK and USLast week saw the UK publication of my new novel, Book Two of the Lightspeed trilogy, BEYOND THE REACH OF EARTH, available <a href=https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0356514803?ref_=cm_sw_r_tw_ud_dp_D769EPA99QDRPZ6AX4H9>here</a> from Amazon UK.
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A day later came the US publication of the first book, BEYOND THE HALLOWED SKY, by Pyr Books and available via <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Beyond-the-Hallowed-Sky/Ken-MacLeod/9781645060642">Simon and Schuster, with links to Amazon and other online bookshops</a>.
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This book has had kind words from North American authors:<blockquote><i>Ken Macleod does things nobody else does and this is a terrific read.</i>
– Jo Walton, multi-award-winning author of <strong>Among Others</strong> and <strong>What Makes This Book So Great</strong><br><br>
<i>Sure, some writers knock it out of the park but with <strong>Beyond the Hallowed Sky</strong>, Ken MacLeod knocks it right out of the solar system! Too often, space opera throws science out the airlock, but MacLeod has given us a believable faster-than-light adventure that will have you racing through the pages at superluminal speed.</i>
– Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of <strong>The Oppenheimer Alternative</strong>
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<i>An exceptional blend of international politics, hard science, and first contact.</i>
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- Michael Mammay, author of the <strong>Planetside</strong> series.</blockquote>
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Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-72416401282850707602023-01-22T14:10:00.000+00:002023-01-22T14:10:45.215+00:00Interview
I haven’t been blogging much, and I hope to do more this year. There are one or two exciting publication announcements in the pipeline. In the meantime, here’s a recent interview with the incredibly productive Moid of <a href=https://www.youtube.com/@MediaDeathCult>Media Death Cult</a>, in which I talk about books I’ve read and books I’ve written, from my office which (New Year resolution!) needs some tidying.<br><br>
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Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-52461029224098896002022-04-27T15:33:00.000+00:002022-04-27T15:33:38.076+00:00Address to the Edinburgh Science Festival Church Service 2022The <a href="https://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/festival">Edinburgh Science Festival</a> closes with a church service in the historic St Giles' Cathedral. It includes a ten-minute non-religious, non-political address. This year I was honoured to be asked to give it. As you can see, the service is as splendid as the setting. My talk starts at 33:28. The text follows below.<br><br>
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The theme of this year’s Science Festival is Revolution. This is an apt topic here in St Giles, which after all is the very spot where the revolution, in the then Three Kingdoms, began: a revolution that created modern Britain. But whether Jennie Geddes is real or legendary, I hope no chairs are hurled at the pulpit today. So, steering well clear of religion or politics, I’d like to talk about how we talk about politics, and when and why people started talking about revolution. Interestingly enough, it was at about the same time that our revolution happened, in the seventeenth century.
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In the same century, and perhaps by no coincidence, there was a scientific revolution. The mechanics of Galileo and Newton was the subversive science of its day, challenging the metaphysical doctrines of ancient tradition as shatteringly as the artillery it helped to aim battered down the walls of lordly castles. And it left its mark on our language of politics.
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When you look at the language and vocabulary that we use to describe political events, you find a surprising number of words from seventeenth-century physics and astronomy. Revolution in that context meant a complete turning of a wheel, or the circuit of a planet in its orbit – the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, as Copernicus titled his revolutionary thesis. And revolution, as a metaphor in politics, originally meant something very similar – a return to the starting point.
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At the time it must indeed have seemed like that. You get rid of a King, you fight a civil war and end up with a Protector, and then the Protector dies and before you know it you have a King again. And everything seems to be back in the same place as it was before: after the Interregnum, the Restoration. Looking back, people in later centuries could see more clearly that it was not: that some things had changed irreversibly, and the revolution, you might say, kept rolling on.
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We still talk of <i>masses</i>, which may or may not be in <i>motion</i>. We speak of political and social <i>movements</i>, which may or may not have certain <i>dynamics</i>. We evaluate the <i>balance of forces</i>. If we’re politics professors or journalists, we may ponder the electoral <i>cycle</i>. We may look at a social or political <i>system</i> – and that word too, system, originates in astronomy – and ask whether the system is <i>stable</i> or <i>unstable</i>, or whether or not it is in <i>equilibrium</i>. We may investigate the system’s <i>mechanics</i>. We may despair at the system’s <i>inertia</i>, and hope, perhaps in vain, for some <i>impulse</i> or even <i>momentum</i> to change it. And can the change we seek or fear be <i>accelerated</i>, or <i>retarded</i>? Should we worry about possible <i>retrograde</i> developments? Will our <i>action</i> in the end produce a <i>reaction</i>?
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It’s Newtonian mechanics all the way down! Well – perhaps not quite. There are some other sciences that we draw on for political metaphor: the idea of a political <i>upheaval</i> surely comes from geology, as does a political <i>earthquake</i>, when the <i>tectonic plates</i> of politics shift. (I wonder how many years of the Edinburgh Science Festival, and how much toil of primary and secondary school teachers, and how many school visits to Dynamic Earth it took before plate tectonics became a political metaphor that everyone could understand!)
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Our most troubling political language comes from biology, and evolutionary biology in particular. The metaphors of competition, of natural selection, of struggles for existence have been applied and misapplied with dire consequences. This pains me greatly, not least because I trained as a zoologist. Now, I’ve read Darwin, and for my sins I’ve even read Herbert Spencer, and I can honestly say that in these matters they are both much maligned. There is no basis in their work, let alone in modern biology, for any kind of racial politics. But when the founding text of a discipline is titled <i>On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life</i> it’s all too easy to see how misunderstandings could arise.
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Is there a biological science that might offer us a more fruitful language for politics? I think there is: ecology. It’s already provided us with two familiar terms in politics: sustainability, and diversity. Ecology examines all forms of life in interaction with their physical environment and with each other, and identifies and measures the flows of energy and material among them. And humanity, of course, is now a somewhat important form of life, and affects these flows on a planetary scale, not always entirely for the good of itself, let alone the rest.
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Ecology, I think, is as subversive a science in our time as Newton’s mechanical philosophy was in his. Why? It delivers warnings about what our interactions with the rest of nature are doing to us and to the planet, certainly. But it does more. It suggests a science of ourselves that starts with our relationship with the rest of nature, and with each other. Like it or not, we all need food, drink, and shelter, and like it or not we can only get them from the rest of nature and in and through relationships with other people. Human beings can’t sustain themselves individually, like the sea-birds outside my window, or co-operate instinctively, like the ants in my back yard. We’re social and productive by necessity but not by instinct, so we must rely on thought and speech. To make our living together, we have to speak and think, imagine and create, question and discover. An ecologically inspired science of humanity could start from these facts, and trace the flows of material and energy through human society and back to the earth and air and water around us. It could ask what people think they’re doing, and investigate what they’re actually doing. It might dig up all kinds of inconvenient truths about where stuff comes from, where it goes, and how it gets there -- and who gets it, and who gives. And if these connections became widely known and understood, people might want to change a lot of what goes on.
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Perhaps we need a better metaphor for change than revolution. One that has always stuck in my mind is ecological succession. On land left bare by ice or fire or landslide or flood, different populations of plants, animals and fungi settle in well-defined stages, each incomplete and unstable in itself, each more complex and diverse in its components and their interactions, until finally there arises what is called the climax community, a combination of species that is self-sustaining and self-reproducing: a mature forest, for example. The more complex and various the community, the more stable and resilient it is. Is such complexity and diversity, then, that we should expect and work towards in our human community? What would a climax community of humanity look like? Are we there yet? I’ll leave these questions open. I’m not here to preach.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-11776400234367325942022-03-08T11:21:00.000+00:002022-03-08T11:21:20.660+00:00BEYOND THE HALLOWED SKY is a Kindle Daily Deal today<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjKhr4JoBgHyakMYw2kicQ9e_GOl5GdlJwghWPeoLnd86O5V9KT2U8xDwP0lKianG1zr-PGUVaRjBFU-MKTijJwm7WoUttOtKvvnGC6L2LeLzWQQWPXOdOo40NcJGwaBl8DL3tlP5wTiwFUuNwE7kgzoceBb1AmepGFV_oZ6AEctHzuN4IkaQ=s2759" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="1468" data-original-width="2759" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjKhr4JoBgHyakMYw2kicQ9e_GOl5GdlJwghWPeoLnd86O5V9KT2U8xDwP0lKianG1zr-PGUVaRjBFU-MKTijJwm7WoUttOtKvvnGC6L2LeLzWQQWPXOdOo40NcJGwaBl8DL3tlP5wTiwFUuNwE7kgzoceBb1AmepGFV_oZ6AEctHzuN4IkaQ=s400"/></a></div>
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Get it <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Hallowed-Sky-Lightspeed-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B08M5DRDB9/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QQI32GLR473P&keywords=beyond+the+hallowed+sky&qid=1646737435&s=digital-text&sprefix=Beyond+the+hallowed%2Cdigital-text%2C602&sr=1-1">here</a> today!Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-18308717978310739902021-12-12T15:01:00.000+00:002021-12-12T15:01:16.382+00:00BEYOND THE HALLOWED SKYWhat with one thing and another I’ve neglected to mention here that my new novel, <a href="https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/ken-macleod-5/beyond-the-hallowed-sky/9780356514789/"><i>Beyond the Hallowed Sky</i></a>, has been published. It has been well received so far, with good reviews in <a href="https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/book-review-beyond-the-hallowed-sky-by-ken-macleod-3478899"><i>The Scotsman</i>/<i>Scotland on Sunday</i></a> and <i>SFX</i>. The book launch at the Cymera mini-festival, in the form of an onstage conversation with Professor Ruth Aylett, went well. You can read the first chapter of the book <a href="https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/beyond-the-hallowed-sky/">here</a>.
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It’s the first volume of the Lightspeed Trilogy, and the second volume is well underway.
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Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-48009252914221986852021-12-03T16:44:00.003+00:002021-12-03T16:44:49.002+00:00What does fiction tell us about our hopes and fears for technology?
I'm delighted to say I'm on an online panel at the Digital Ethics Summit 2021, with Tabitha Goldstaub, Professor Sarah Dillon, and Ted Chiang.<br><br> 4.30pm – 5.05pm GMT, 8 December 2021.<br><br> Register for free <a href="https://www.techuk.org/digital-ethics-summit-2021/agenda-2021.html">here</a>.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFvo8rpMoGKh-rhxhZFo2gQSMocOtk4HXrF4k1-qGtnJ7TVbIio14CB6d8jEI_6SoMPaPZflyRVJyHELuTtD4CIuvHJDAN_gogx9zf8uXHL-BAxExBK5d5WABp2kVul54rH_fm/s1200/ken_macleod_final.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFvo8rpMoGKh-rhxhZFo2gQSMocOtk4HXrF4k1-qGtnJ7TVbIio14CB6d8jEI_6SoMPaPZflyRVJyHELuTtD4CIuvHJDAN_gogx9zf8uXHL-BAxExBK5d5WABp2kVul54rH_fm/s320/ken_macleod_final.jpg"/></a></div>Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-11165051971726392982021-11-22T13:50:00.001+00:002021-11-22T13:50:10.149+00:00Book launch for BEYOND THE HALLOWED SKYDetails <a href="https://www.cymerafestival.co.uk/">here</a>.<br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5yR68oUCCO04PLM9XHPG9CAAoYauqbrsS2464CHIvnkeT0X7w5OOF-41y10J-y986B6wlpjjbvMIDv_cUXqd3VDhTEghO0A6K9dAZyZr8KW3qPPYbHyCRuOafBFXRpSDML5I2/s0/FEy2Il_XwAA-Ouj.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="383" data-original-width="680" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5yR68oUCCO04PLM9XHPG9CAAoYauqbrsS2464CHIvnkeT0X7w5OOF-41y10J-y986B6wlpjjbvMIDv_cUXqd3VDhTEghO0A6K9dAZyZr8KW3qPPYbHyCRuOafBFXRpSDML5I2/s0/FEy2Il_XwAA-Ouj.jpg"/></a></div>Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-36824867777113489002021-08-21T19:32:00.001+00:002021-08-21T19:35:38.736+00:00‘Nineteen Eighty-Nine’I’m very happy to say that I have a short story, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Nine’, in the first issue (Autumn 2021) of the new online science fiction, fantasy and horror magazine ParSec, edited by Ian Whates, now available <a href="https://www.pspublishing.co.uk/parsec-79-c.asp">here from PS Publishing </a>.
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The story has been long in the making. Sometime in the early 1990s I had an idea for a story called ‘Nineteen Eighty-Nine’, in which events like those of 1989 in our world happen in the world of George Orwell’s <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i>. I wrote it and sent it to <i>Interzone</i>, and they sent me a kind rejection note suggesting that I try a local fanzine. I sent it to the local fanzine <i>New Dawn Fades</i>, and they rejected it. The editor softened the blow by encouraging me to write something else for them. They later accepted, I think, a review and a poem. But for the moment, I was done with short stories. After that, there was nothing for it but to write a novel.
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That’s the story I’ve told now and again, usually with the punch-line that the best thing about the story was the title, because it tells you exactly what the story is about.
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Now I’m going to have to retire that anecdote.
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Earlier this year, shortly after I had read that Orwell’s fiction was now out of copyright, Ian Whates emailed me to ask for a story for a new venture he was planning. I pitched ‘Nineteen Eighty-Nine’. Ian was keen, so I looked at my old story (or what I could find of it), decided it was beyond help, and wrote an entirely new story. I’m fairly sure it’s an improvement on my first attempt.
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One inspiration for the new version was the article ‘If there is Hope’ by Tony Keen, in <a href="https://efanzines.com/JourneyPlanet/JourneyPlanet03.pdf">Journey Planet #3</a> (pdf). Another was the article <a href="https://gwydionmadawc.com/45-about-literature-and-art/orwell-looking-down-on-british-workers/">Orwell on Workers and Other Animals</a>, by Gwydion M. Williams, which makes the intriguing point that 1945 is missing from the world of <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i>.
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While writing the story I chanced on a clue to Orwell’s pessimism that, as far as I know, has escaped scholarly attention. Orwell, <a href="http://gwiep.net/wp/?p=4250">it turns out</a>, had read and been impressed by George Walford's pamphlet <a href="http://gwiep.net/wp/?p=4250">The Intellectual and the People</a>.
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Walford drew on his mentor Harold Walsby's <a href="http://gwiep.net/wp/?p=138">The Domain of Ideologies</a>, the founding text of what Walford later called Systematic Ideology. This argued that the major social outlooks form a historical, numerical, and political series in decreasing order of antiquity, size, unity, and radicalism. The (historically) oldest and (currently) largest group is the apolitical, followed by the conservative, the reformist, the revolutionary, and the anarchist ... with the tiniest, least effectual and most extreme group being the Systematic Ideologists themselves, who understand the whole process but can't think what to do about it.
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More about this another time, but it seems to me significant that Orwell attributed political apathy, ignorance and indifference to – not 'perhaps the largest single group' of the population, as Walford did – but to the vast majority: 85%.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-55185930070243712542020-10-04T14:44:00.003+00:002020-10-05T12:09:31.265+00:00Vaping<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnrRVwetkzwehAqT1JJhyphenhyphenKxpMG-EMkccEPEkoxrkiYbmpd_vEmBJvDlWAx69ra0iUCL3O4JFHqZYYu_Sk9JrjtP8gLIAky2vO87ku3nu_jXmoepx-MrEz8Vfb1ZxlL9ovlHFJS/s4640/IMG_20201005_124026.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="3480" data-original-width="4640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnrRVwetkzwehAqT1JJhyphenhyphenKxpMG-EMkccEPEkoxrkiYbmpd_vEmBJvDlWAx69ra0iUCL3O4JFHqZYYu_Sk9JrjtP8gLIAky2vO87ku3nu_jXmoepx-MrEz8Vfb1ZxlL9ovlHFJS/s400/IMG_20201005_124026.jpg"/></a></div>'Somebody died fae vaping. Yir better aff back on the fags.'<br><br>
--- <i>Lady at bus stop, a few months ago.</i>
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You might think it bad taste to talk about vaping in the middle of a pandemic, and you'd be right. But this hasn't stopped a slew of public health bodies, politicians, and activists from <a href="https://filtermag.org/anti-vaping-zealots-find-opportunity-in-the-pandemic/">doing just that</a>, so I see no reason to unilaterally disarm.
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If you want some proper science and good sense on the topic, follow <a href="https://twitter.com/Clive_Bates">Clive Bates</a> on Twitter, and read his <a href="https://www.clivebates.com/">excellent blog</a>. Meanwhile, here's my own overdue rant.
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I've been meaning to blog about vaping for a while. My Twitter feed sometimes seems to be about little else, rather to my embarrassment whenever I scroll through it. So I'll start by explaining why it matters to me. As with many vapers, my story begins with smoking.
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To cut that long story short: I smoked, first a pipe then cigarettes, from my early twenties to my late fifties. I tried to quit many times. The annual ratchet of tax rises in the Budget reliably brought on another attempt. Surely I'll stop, I told myself, when they're over 50p a pack! Not even the £10 pack did the trick. Neither did Allen Carr's book, willpower, shame, and the pub smoking ban. One day about ten years ago I saw an electronic cigarette in a petrol station, and bought it. It was <a href="https://www.10motives.com/e-cig-devices/product/-disposable-electronic-cigarette-regular-tm016">shaped like a cigarette</a> and had a tip that glowed when you drew on it. After buying a few of these and finding it inconvenient when they ran down I soon was ordering the same brand with <a href="https://www.10motives.com/e-cig-devices/product/v2-rechargeable-electronic-cigarette-10m_v2rm"> rechargeable batteries and replaceable cartridges</a>. I was still smoking, but a bit less than before, and the ecig made pub conversations much more convivial and less often interrupted than they'd become. The kick was feeble, the nicotine faint, the taste indifferent, but it was better than nothing.
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Then a student in a mid-morning break at Napier showed me a more advanced e-cig, with a refillable tank, and told me where to get them. That very lunchtime I hastened over the hill to <a href="https://empvap.com/">Emporium Vapour</a> at Gorgie Road, and bought a starter kit. Within weeks, and without trying, I'd gone from smoking a pack of cigarettes a day to a pack a month. I went from tobacco flavours to fruit, menthol, spearmint... eventually settling on Kiwi and Strawberry, a half dozen tiny bottles of which I've just ordered. I smoked what turned out to be my last cigarette in the early hours of New Year's Day, 2016. Vaping had succeeded where decades of New Year resolutions had failed.
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In the meantime, I'd been through the battle over the EU's Tobacco Products Directive, which saw concerted efforts to ban or severely restrict vaping and frantic, largely self-funded efforts by vapers to save it. We all learned a lesson in how EU laws are made. The vaunted principles of transparency, evidence, proportionality and subsidiarity didn't, let's say, stand out. The outcome was some pointless, petty and harmful regulation that wasn't as bad as we'd feared – and thousands more people in Britain who hated the EU and were active, informed and outspoken about it on social media. I'm not saying it swung the referendum, but it can't have helped.
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The real threat to vaping, however, came from the United States. As long as vaping was a hipster fad, it could be fought by ridicule and junk science, of which there was plenty. The typical experiment involved burning out ecig coils and forcing mice to breathe the resulting toxic smoke for a month. The results of the mouse autopsies could then be turned into excited press releases and even more excitable headlines.
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Another line of attack was that the vaping industry – or, absurdly, the tobacco industry – was 'targeting kids'. In US usage, 'kids' can mean anything from toddlers to graduates, but let's be generous and assume it meant in this case teenagers. The massed ranks of mom and pop businesses and evangelical ex-smoker start-ups that made up Big Vape in those days were allegedly targeting teenagers with 'kid-friendly' flavours: sweet and fruit flavours, sometimes with names reminiscent of the kind of candies actual kids like. 'Gummy bears' was a common talking point. The slogan, repeated to this day, was 'Flavours hook kids'. The claim makes sense until you give it a moment's thought.
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When you do give it a moment's thought, you recall that teenagers are anxious to put away childish things, to take on the trappings of adulthood as quickly they can, and to defy the conventions and pieties of the adult world as annoyingly as they can. This is, of course, one reason why they smoke cigarettes. If you wanted to appeal to teenagers, your ideal vape flavour branding would be redolent of tobacco harvested by slaves, shipped by pirates, imported by smugglers and smoked by highwaymen.
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The real 'target' (i.e. market) for fruit and sweet flavoured vapes was people like me: adult smokers and ex-smokers and would-be ex-smokers. Smokers who take up vaping usually start with imitations of their familiar tobacco flavours, but fairly soon (perhaps because the imitations are not all that convincing – copying tobacco flavour has turned out to be surprisingly difficult) move on to sweet and fruit flavours. If these flavours are presented as having the generic tastes of sweets they enjoyed in childhood (and may not have tasted since, for the sake of their teeth or their waistlines) all the better -- it adds a touch of harmless nostalgia.
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And that market – unlike the pocket-money, illegal market of high-school students – is huge. But open-tank vaping doesn't appeal to all of them. If only there was a product as convenient as cigarettes! A start-up company set out to design just that, and succeeded. Juul is a slim device with a USB-cable rechargeable battery and replaceable cartridges of liquid. It gives the same instant nicotine kick as a cigarette. So I'm told – thanks the above-mentioned petty EU regulations, the high-nicotine pods aren't available here.
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The trouble with Juul was that these devices really did appeal to teenagers, mainly if not wholly the very teenagers who would otherwise have been (or indeed already were) smoking cigarettes. Juul and similar devices are easy to conceal, almost undetectable in discreet use, and leave no tell-tale smell. This duly set off a moral panic – at the same time as the prevalence of actual cigarette smoking among teenagers dropped to a historic low. The 'Flavours hook kids' nonsense has driven ban after ban on flavoured vaping liquids. This was (and is) bad enough.
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Then came disaster.
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Cannabis use is illegal in the US at a federal level, but in the past decade some states have legalised it: first for medicinal use, then recreationally. The possibility of vaping cannabis didn't escape attention, and was soon realised. Legal weed stores sell an eye-watering variety of vape pens and cartridges, as well as cannabis cakes, candies and for all I know actual leaf. Because it's legal in some places but not in others an illegal market soon sprang up. Some of the criminal entrepreneurs supplying it found that they could cut cannabis-based oils with thickening agents, one of them Vitamin E acetate. This turned out to be deadly. More and more people were rushed to hospital, and scores have died, with severe lung injuries. The source of the problem was soon exposed by the legal cannabis industry. It was obscured at first because the victims had often been vaping cannabis illegally (because of their age or location) and admitted only to 'vaping' or even, more alarmingly, to 'juuling'. Blood tests, however, soon showed what they'd been vaping. It wasn't nicotine.
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The lie ran around the world before the truth got its boots on. Certain US public health authorities, notably the Centers for Disease Control, did their utmost to warn against 'vaping' and 'e-cigarette use' in general and almost nothing to warn against <i>vaping illegal cannabis</i> in particular. The misconception, to put it no more strongly, persists and is reinforced by various public health authorities, lazy journalists, and anti-vaping activists to this day.
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That's why the little old lady at the bus stop kindly advised me to go back to smoking.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-45813304981604391502020-06-06T11:50:00.000+00:002020-06-08T09:44:04.185+00:00Best of British Science Fiction 2019<i>Best of British Science Fiction 2019</i>, edited by Donna Scott, is now <a href=" http://www.newconpress.co.uk/info/book.asp?id=96">available to pre-order from Newcon Press</a>. [Update 8 June: It's now <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B089S6M6R1/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=best+of+british+science+fiction&qid=1591601352&s=digital-text&sr=1-2">available to pre-order on Kindle</a>.] Check out this cover and the impressive Table of Contents:
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9NtdnyIr3wU0At6P97N_PcFIWcF1DSJognuT8jdp7yLUBrpxsUCYHDWD-7tzhofnW8_zeRKCxVbioFR3My0qEHVthwPDj656JLbLFbAIdMPDLgjFtX7A8-PEK0MYsA2cdyXx3/s1600/BoB+2019+front4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9NtdnyIr3wU0At6P97N_PcFIWcF1DSJognuT8jdp7yLUBrpxsUCYHDWD-7tzhofnW8_zeRKCxVbioFR3My0qEHVthwPDj656JLbLFbAIdMPDLgjFtX7A8-PEK0MYsA2cdyXx3/s400/BoB+2019+front4.jpg" width="285" height="400" data-original-width="1044" data-original-height="1464" /></a></div>
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<strong>Contents</strong>
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• 2019: An Introduction – Donna Scott<br>
• The Anxiety Gene – Rhiannon Grist<br>
• The Land of Grunts and Squeaks – Chris Beckett<br>
• For Your Own Good – Ian Whates<br>
• Neom – Lavie Tidhar<br>
• Once You Start – Mike Morgan<br>
• For the Wicked, Only Weeds Will Grow – G. V. Anderson<br>
• Fat Man in the Bardo – Ken MacLeod<br>
• Cyberstar – Val Nolan<br>
• The Little People – Una McCormack<br>
• The Loimaa Protocol – Robert Bagnall<br>
• The Adaptation Point – Kate Macdonald<br>
• The Final Ascent – Ian Creasey<br>
• A Lady of Ganymede, a Sparrow of Io – Dafydd McKimm<br>
• Snapshots – Leo X. Robertson<br>
• Witch of the Weave – Henry Szabranski<br>
• Parasite Art – David Tallerman<br>
• Galena – Liam Hogan<br>
• Ab Initio – Susan Boulton<br>
• Ghosts – Emma Levin<br>
• Concerning the Deprivation of Sleep – Tim Major<br>
• Every Little Star – Fiona Moore<br>
• The Minus-Four Sequence – Andrew Wallace<br>
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My short story 'Fat Man in the Bardo', originally published in <a href= https://www.shorelineofinfinity.com/">Shoreline of Infinity</a> 14, and I'm well chuffed to see it here.
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(TOC layout copy and pasted from the redoubtable <a href="https://lavietidhar.wordpress.com/">Lavie Tidhar</a>, who as you can see also has a story in it.)
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-54621093595342025452020-05-06T09:43:00.002+00:002020-05-06T09:51:46.031+00:00Solidarity stories<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizydiaSjxctM65MwYah5t4sI-QAPSq6FbrNmN9rxuP07bYiIVPlVS6lf6SKHMAODyPAlXAFKAxwl5z6EViIOvIprH9yJ1vzaVHBBg0IXgGuoCHpsE_-PDgCcM_oeAP5Ne2yqqP/s1600/51-nA5hPqmL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizydiaSjxctM65MwYah5t4sI-QAPSq6FbrNmN9rxuP07bYiIVPlVS6lf6SKHMAODyPAlXAFKAxwl5z6EViIOvIprH9yJ1vzaVHBBg0IXgGuoCHpsE_-PDgCcM_oeAP5Ne2yqqP/s320/51-nA5hPqmL.jpg" width="223" height="320" data-original-width="349" data-original-height="500" /></a></div>The idea of a society of entirely voluntary arrangements has its charms, but we don't live in one and are not likely to for quite some time. Until that happy day, public services should be funded out of taxation, rather than having to scrounge off the generosity of the public. In emergencies, however, we should pitch in. That's how I square my conscience with making donations, anyway. And if the inadequate supply of PPE to healthcare workers isn't an emergency, I don't know what is.
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So I was happy to contribute a story to <a href="http://www.newconpress.co.uk/info/book.asp?id=164&referer=Catalogue">an anthology of SF, fantasy and horror conceived and edited by Ian Whates at NewCon Press</a>, and compiled and published with breathtaking speed. At a quarter of a million words from some of the leading names in the field, a paperback version would be an epoch-making brick that cost a significant chunk of cash. Electronic and weightless, Stories of Hope and Wonder is a steal at <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B087BGDZC8/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=sl1&tag=scienficticrowst&linkId=9865e2fd6af062cd08c8217c3fbcac9d&language=en_GB">£5.99</a> / <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087BGDZC8/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=sl1&tag=hologratalesthem&linkId=0302af2f0e351fc25f4f48e49338cae5&language=en_US">$7.99</a>. Every penny of the proceeds goes straight to providing PPE and other support to UK healthcare workers. A significant amount, I understand, has already been raised and donated. More is needed.
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They can't wait. Buy it now.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-58519508188224356172020-04-13T09:47:00.001+00:002020-04-14T12:19:18.341+00:00Lockdown gigsI'm in Gourock, writing a space opera trilogy set in Gourock. That wasn't my pitch to the <a href="https://www.orbitbooks.net/">publisher</a>, it's my pitch to myself, the marching song of these books. In the end there'll be very little of Gourock in it. But Gourock is science-fictional already. The world was changed from here, more than once. Every so often you see a nuclear submarine. They'll be in the trilogy.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdesCqt2MDLizoaQu7vFnzBJuTbhxNf2jndBG1pO_VtYrk3T9BV0yJRBMviFHHBUNBBssyAOoU6DK6CJ4lPVbf2R9Z-11IK63wKggTipIMYonw8cL2ekXyHkiVyCr1g5ERf2Wi/s1600/91500394_10158771714618072_7069571196336996352_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdesCqt2MDLizoaQu7vFnzBJuTbhxNf2jndBG1pO_VtYrk3T9BV0yJRBMviFHHBUNBBssyAOoU6DK6CJ4lPVbf2R9Z-11IK63wKggTipIMYonw8cL2ekXyHkiVyCr1g5ERf2Wi/s320/91500394_10158771714618072_7069571196336996352_o.jpg" width="225" height="320" data-original-width="676" data-original-height="960" /></a></div>
Submarines also feature in a novella that's coming out sometime in the next month or two: <i>Selkie Summer</i>, from <a href="http://www.newconpress.co.uk/">NewCon Press</a>. Some years ago, between book contracts, I started writing a paranormal romance as an exercise, leaving it half-finished when the awaited boat came in. An online publisher showed interest in it as a novella, and was happy to wait until I'd finished <i>The Corporation Wars</i>. When I completed the novella two years ago, it was still front-loaded with an opening more suitable for a longer work, and for that and other reasons it didn't quite make the cut. I tinkered with it some more, and passed it to Ian Whates, who liked it and helpfully suggested further improvements. And after many vicissitudes, including a last-minute page-proof realisation that a Skye summer sunset was about an hour and a half later than I'd originally written, it's good to go! I'm very happy with the book's editing and production, and downright thrilled and delighted with <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Ben-Baldwin-343132594365/">Ben Baldwin</a>'s cover.
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I'm not sure if <i>Selkie Summer</i> meets the criteria for paranormal romance, but it's still about a young woman who falls for a paranormal entity. It's set in a contemporary Scotland much like ours, except that certain paranormal entities definitely exist and this is taken for granted as a fact of natural history. Partly as a consequence, there is no Skye Bridge.
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It was due to be launched by me and Ian at <a href=" https://www.cymerafestival.co.uk/ ">Cymera 2020</a>, which has now been cancelled (though it has some online content, and will have more, so keep checking it out). Meanwhile, you can hear me reading from the opening chapter in <a href="https://www.shorelineofinfinity.com/category/event-horizon-online/ ">the online version of Edinburgh's monthly science fiction and fantasy cabaret, Event Horizon</a>.
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Another event that has had to <a href=" https://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/all-fired-up ">move online</a> is the <a href="https://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/ ">Edinburgh Science Festival</a>. I was honoured to be asked to give a short talk on a non-religious topic at the Festival's traditional St Giles service. I happened to have just read a book that got me thinking about contingency, Corliss Lamont's <i>Freedom of Choice Affirmed</i>, so I freely chose to talk about that. And as the contingencies we all know worked out, it's now <a href=" https://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/event-details/talk-about-the-odds ">online here</a>.
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Finally, a plug for a project I'm proud to have contributed to: the just-published <a href="https://birlinn.co.uk/product/the-edwin-morgan-twenties-box-set/">Edwin Morgan Twenties</a>, a set of five selections of twenty poems by the late great Makar, with introductions by Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead, Ali Smith, Michael Rosen and me. You can buy the set for the bargain price of £16 (UK post free) or pick and mix.
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'Space and spaces', the one I wrote the introduction to, brings together many of Morgan's science fiction and space poems -- and one or two that make a more metaphorical use of 'space' to brilliant effect. Like the other selections it's a mere £4 (UK post free) and is available <a href="https://birlinn.co.uk/product/the-edwin-morgan-twenties-space-and-spaces/">here</a>.
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UPDATE 14 April 2020: <i>Selkie Summer</i> is due to be published 19 May 2020 and is <a href="http://www.newconpress.co.uk/info/book.asp?id=162&referer=Catalogue">now available for pre-order from NewCon Press</a>.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-29401478179900655822020-02-17T11:56:00.000+00:002020-02-17T11:57:48.655+00:00The Sage of Freuchie<strong><i>Tom Nairn: 'Painting Nationalism Red'?</i><br>
Neal Ascherson<br>
Democratic Left Scotland, n.d. (2018)</strong><br><br>
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This is an odd pamphlet which is well worth getting. Some day it'll be a collector's item. It's well-produced on glossy paper, with a striking cover and, inside, a fine reproduction of the portrait whose gift and sitter the pamphlet celebrates. In these pages three big names meet: the author <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Ascherson"> Neal Ascherson</a>, the subject <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Nairn">Tom Nairn</a>, and the painter, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Moffat">Sandy Moffat</a>.
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It has already been reviewed, briefly and enthusiastically <a href=" https://democraticleftscotland.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/understanding-tom-nairn/">by Davie Laing</a>, and lengthily and discursively <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n23/rory-scothorne/from-the-outer-edge">by Rory Scothorne</a>. There's no need for me to review it here, inevitable quibbles though <a href="http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-modern-bonnie-prince.html">I may have</a> – I can only recommend it, as a small piece of history, and a useful summary of an argument that is still influencing that history.
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The title, apt as the pun on 'painting' no doubt was for the occasion, does less than justice to the content: a concise intellectual biography of Nairn by the journalist who did a great deal to make his ideas part of common sense. Ascherson saw Scotland in an international context provided by his own <a href="https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2014/08/the-srb-interview-neal-ascherson/">wide-ranging life</a>; Nairn's intellectual formation was <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/scotland-and-europe-iris-murdoch-and-antonio-gramsci-interview/">likewise cosmopolitan</a>; and for both Scotland was key to <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/author/tom-nairn/">dismantling the 'archaic' structures</a> of the British state.
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The pamphlet can be obtained by sending a cheque for £4 (10% discount for orders of 10 or more) to:<br><br>
Democratic Left Scotland,<br>
9 MacAulay Street, Dundee DD3 6JT<br><br>
If the archaic structures of 'cheque' and 'post' are too constraining, you can always enquire of the publisher by telephony and the interwebs:<br><br>
Telephone 07826 488492<br>
Email stuartfairweather [at] ymail [dot] com<br>
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-26942815405214531692020-02-12T17:45:00.001+00:002020-02-12T18:06:38.012+00:00Writers of a Better Nation?<strong><i>The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, and Nation</i><br>
Scott Hames<br>
Edinburgh University Press, 2020<br><br></strong>
How well I remember Scotland in the 1980s! Scunnered by the failure of even a majority vote to establish a Scottish Assembly, snookered by the <a href=" https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/aug/08/george-cunningham-obituary ">Cunningham Amendment</a>, gubbed in the first round of the World Cup, gutted and filleted by Thatcherism, disillusioned by repeatedly voting Labour and getting Tory ... only the writers and artists remained standing, to produce a body of self-confident work that firmly established the nation on the global cultural map. Together with dedicated political and civic activists they in due course lifted its spirits to the heights of gaining its own Parliament. They accomplished a devolution – or independence -- of the mind and heart, well in advance of its political achievement.
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I remember it like this, of course, because I wasn't there. I was in London, reading all about it in the columns of Neal Ascherson and the <a href="http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-modern-bonnie-prince.html">volumes</a> of Tom Nairn. Now and again I'd browse a journal or pamphlet from the Scottish literary or political edge. Scotland from afar seemed to have a more democratic, more socialist and more egalitarian spirit than England – particularly the South- East of England – and this consciousness showed through in the culture it had inherited as much as in the culture it now produced. And since I moved back in the early 1990s, the same story has become received wisdom, not least among writers and artists.
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According to Scott Hames's <a href="https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-literary-politics-of-scottish-devolution.html">new book</a>, the real story is a bit more complicated than that. So much more complicated, indeed, that it's hard to summarise. If he's missed a magazine, a literary feud, a Commission or a Report, it's not for want of looking. The discussion is sometimes dry, the narrative always engaging. The savagery of the spats he disinters from the archival peat-bog is eye-opening. Hames contrasts 'The Dream' of literary nationalism with 'The Grind' of political procedure (characterised in this case more by friction than motion). Two features stand out, all the more because in retrospect they're often overlooked. The first is how radical an aim devolution seemed, and how bright it shone in the literary imagination. The second is how conservative – how <i>conserving</i> -- a manoeuvre its implementation was, driven far more by the need of the British state and the Labour Party to 'manage national feeling' than by the SNP, whose votes were read as fever-chart symptom rather than political challenge.
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In focusing on the cultural and the political, Hames avowedly and explicitly omits the economic and the social. This is fair enough in its own terms, but it's liable to leave the reader's inner vulgar Marxist – if they, like me, they have one -- sputtering. The oversight, if we can call it that, is overcompensated in the novel whose analysis gets a chapter to itself: James Robertson's <i>And the Land Lay Still</i>. It's the most ambitious Scottish realist novel for decades, grand in scale and scope and an immersive read. Ranging from the late 1940s to the early 21st Century, the novel interweaves family sagas and stories of personal individuation with political and parapolitical history to tell one overarching epic: the growth of national consciousness.
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And therein lies one problem with it. It's as if at the back of every honest, decent Scot's mind is a relentless yammer of 'You Yes Yet?' Older generations are permitted to die in the old dispensation, shriven by their invincible ignorance, but those who live in the light of the new have no excuse. If they step off the path to nationhood they sink in the slough of self-loathing – as the two major pro-Union characters, an alcoholic police spy and a Tory MP undone by a secret fetish, in the end do.
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Robertson conducts a large and varied cast through a long time and a complex plot with great skill to a most satisfactory click of closure. But, Hames argues, the difficulty of integrating the characters' lives with a political history that mostly consisted of tiny conventicles and ceilidhs in literally smoke-filled rooms and debates in widely unread periodicals, and that now and then took public form as 'set-piece' events in parliaments and streets, can defeat even the best novelist – even though Robertson was himself on those marches and in those rooms. It's a problem familiar in science fiction: one reviewer cited refers to Robertson's 'info-dumping', a term from the lexicon of SF criticism.
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Hames's final chapters deal with Scots, the language, in relation to Scots, the people – and 'people' too is ambiguous, referring as it can to the nation as a whole or to 'the people' as opposed to the elite. Here Scots is an abrasion almost as raw as Gaelic, and more widely felt. At the risk of rubbing it, here's how it went. Centuries ago, Scots was an official language, known as Inglis. It was used at Court and in courts, in poetry and prose. For readers outwith Scotland, you wrote in Latin like any other literate European. After the Union of the Crowns and the Treaty of Union, the United Kingdom conquered a third of the world, and English replaced Latin as the de facto lingua franca. Scots was pushed out of administrative, then everyday upper-and-middle-class speech. Its several dialects became the language of the working poor of town and country. (Except in the Highlands, where the people were schooled and regimented straight from Gaelic into Standard English, which of course they spoke in their own <a href=" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_English">distinct way</a>.)
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In the first Scottish literary renaissance, MacDiarmid and others sought to revive Scots as a national language, which they called <a href=" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lallans">Lallans</a> or (because of the fusion of Scots dialects) 'Synthetic Scots'. This produced some great poems, but in polemic and reportage it can come across as as affectation. Fights between the Lallans-scrievin old guard and the younger, more outward-facing literary intelligentsia flared in the 1960s and 1970s. But some new writers found another aspect of the language question, and one that far from being esoteric was central to everyday life, at least in the Central Belt. Modern vernacular Scots is different enough even from Scottish Standard English to separate the home and the school, the working class and the middle class. That difference could literally hurt, could smart and bruise, from the classroom tawse and the playground clout. At the same time, and very much as part of what Nairn excoriated as the conservative 'tartanry' of the proud Scot, the Scots language appeared in print as a quaint rustic dialect, in English spelling spattered with apostrophes, from Burns Night to <a href= "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broons ">the Broons</a> patronised to within an inch of its life.
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Now here I do remember personally, from the 1970s. Seeing for the first time urban West of Scotland demotic speech rendered phonetically in print, in <a href="https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/node/id/21">Lament for a Lost Dinner Ticket</a> by Margaret Hamilton, and 'Six Glasgow Poems' in Tom Leonard's <i>Poems</i> (1973), was a mental liberation. Almost as much, for me, as seeing for the first time Highland English dialogue accurately conveyed, in the children's novels of Allan Campbell McLean. The release came from <i>not being patronised or mocked</i>. Only that!
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Not a lot to ask, you might think, but this modest request was seldom met with comprehension, let alone satisfaction. As an issue with which to elide class hurt with national grievance, it packed a wallop. But only, or mainly, on the individual level. In a country and at a time where upward social mobility is closely connected with further education and a change in language, the typical agonies of the intellectual of working-class origin growing away from their roots and the socialist of middle-class origin separated by accent and vocabulary from the class they most wish to speak to (or, problematically, for) are widespread enough to make these private pains a social force.
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Scotland's peculiar development, however, has meant that Scots has very little chance of becoming the national language. Stranger things have happened, but... Naw. More likely, and well under way, is its official celebration as one of several languages spoken in Scotland. This provides gainful employment to some, and bewilderment to schoolchildren who speak what they think is English, but which they are now taught (in English) is another language, Scots.
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As Hames suggests, this linguistic and social devolution within the devolved polity serves to defuse any class and national charge that spoken Scots still has, and offers its speakers symbolic representation in the place of – or at least, quite independently of – any actual power. The identity politics of a section of the working class is assimilated to the identity politics of the nation, to which its characteristic manner of speech is supposed to lend authentic voice. What this contributes to the material condition, let alone the social and political self-confidence, of the working class within Scotland is another matter entirely. All those years after <i>Trainspotting</i>, it's still shite being Scottish.
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Like the devolution settlement as a whole, this uneasy arrangement leaves a lot of unfinished business. Looking back on the Scottish 1980s that I saw only from a safe distance, I have a wry suspicion that <i>somebody</i> was running a Gramscian strategy through those smoke-filled rooms. That self-effacing Modern Prince has yet to have their share of glory. Be that as it may, the smoke-free Scotland of 2020 cries out for an analysis of likewise Gramscian canniness. Scott Hames's book is avowedly not it, but points towards that, and beyond to an unknown 'utopian' future wherein we speak for ourselves.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-77639379014653695522020-01-07T16:36:00.000+00:002020-01-10T09:31:26.532+00:00Everybody knows<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE1wzs-3Eo3b92Nr1tx77t2WuYfNqMUM8Z5fYTGsZR9AOyCxI4EgElfX12VbuW6GGdrDa3ER9__02Y0iAeuQ6fSmcHpULCR7CcRA7zh09uv-KlseVUpb_OVbu9qGCcjClcqf0Y/s1600/leninlives.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE1wzs-3Eo3b92Nr1tx77t2WuYfNqMUM8Z5fYTGsZR9AOyCxI4EgElfX12VbuW6GGdrDa3ER9__02Y0iAeuQ6fSmcHpULCR7CcRA7zh09uv-KlseVUpb_OVbu9qGCcjClcqf0Y/s320/leninlives.jpg" width="208" height="320" data-original-width="1038" data-original-height="1600" /></a></div><i>Lenin Lives!</i><br>
Philip Cunliffe<br>
Zero Books, 2016
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It can be disconcerting to read a book that upends your way of looking at the world. It's even more disconcerting when that book claims your own work as part of its inspiration. About which, more later.
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The book's title and Soviet-kitsch cover are deeply ironic: baiting for some, and bait for others. In the alternate-history world Cunliffe imagines, Lenin is almost forgotten, because he succeeded. (It's tempting to add 'beyond his wildest dreams' but success beyond Lenin's wildest dreams would have meant spreading the revolution to the canal-builders of Mars.)
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For what Lenin and the Bolsheviks set out to do in 1917 was to detonate an international, indeed global, revolution. This was an immediate perspective, where revolutionary romanticism meant staking all on the world revolution breaking out next week, while sober realism meant bearing in mind that it might be delayed for a few more months. In fact even the realists were too optimistic: it was delayed for a whole year. In November 1918 the red flags went up over the naval base at Kiel, and flew over all Germany within days. And then...
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Well, everybody knows.
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But what if the grip of German Social Democratic reformism had been that little bit shakier, and the revolutionary Left that little bit better organised and luckier? Cunliffe speculates on what sort of world might now exist, and how it might have come about, if the revolution that began in Russia had not only spread – as it did – but won, as it didn't.
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In this missed turn of history, a decade or so of wars and civil wars see the capitalist core countries having gone socialist. The major independent underdeveloped countries have gone democratic, and the former colonial holdings have mostly opted to remain in loose voluntary federations that have replaced the empires. It's not all plain sailing but the resulting democratic workers' states of Europe and America are much less repressive than Bolshevik, let alone Stalinist, Russia was in our world. Planning emerges from increasing coordination (as indeed it did under the New Economic Policy) rather central imposition. Industrialisation proceeds at a brisk but measured, rather than a frantic, pace. Art, science, culture and personal freedom flourish. This is a world with no fascism or Stalinism, no Depression and no Second World War. Whether or not the reader finds it feasible or desirable, it's attractively and vigorously portrayed.
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Cunliffe's alternate history has no decisive moment (no <a href="http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/jonbar_point">Jonbar Point</a>, to use the science-fictional term) that I can see. Instead, the international revolutionary working-class movement (which, as Cunliffe usefully and repeatedly reminds us) <i>actually did exist at the time</i> is imagined as having been just a little bit stronger in arm and clearer in mind than it was in our world. It's by no means an unrealistic speculation. Even in our world, it was a close-run thing. So close, in fact, that stamping out every last smouldering ember of world revolution took tens of years and tens of millions of lives. But its suppression is now, at last, complete.
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E. H. Carr, in an article or interview for <i>New Left Review</i>, remarked that all of Marx's predictions had come true, except for the proletarian revolution. Cunliffe's view is gloomier: he thinks that they all came true, including the revolution. It really happened, in 1917-1923, and the revolutionaries bungled it.
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When most readers of the <i>Communist Manifesto</i> encounter the passage about how throughout history classes have waged 'an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes' the example that springs to mind is the Fall of the Roman Empire to the barbarians. What Marx and Engels were really alluding to, Cunliffe argues, was subtly different: the Fall of the Republic, rather than the Fall of the Empire. It was the class struggles of patrician and plebeian in the Roman Republic that ended in mutual ruination, and stymied any chance of further progress centuries before the Empire fell.
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If readers of the Manifesto are socialists, the common ruin they envisage for bourgeoisie and proletariat is a nuclear war or environmental catastrophe. No such luck, Cunliffe tells us: the common ruin has already happened. The class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is over. The good guys lost. Get over it.
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But the non-socialist reader can take no comfort. The suppression of communism, Cunliffe claims, undermined capitalism, sapping its economic dynamism and political stability. With no competing model – however unattractive in many respects – to keep it on its toes, capitalism becomes a couch potato. With no union militancy and shop-floor organisation to contend with, capitalists have less incentive to innovate and rationalise. With no need to integrate the working class in the affairs of state, mass political participation and engagement have been texted their redundancy notices.
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The result, however, is that the elites and the rest of the population are more mutually alienated than they ever were in the class struggle. To the political class and state authorities, the ideas and attitudes of the underlying multitude are as a dark continent, viewed with alarm and suspicion, alternately patronised and deplored. Unmoored from the clash of material interests, politics drifts into a Sargasso Sea of slowly, pointlessly, endlessly swirling debris. Debate degenerates into a grandstanding narcissism of small differences around an elite consensus dedicated solely to keeping the show on the road. Political apathy and populist eruptions are its morbid symptoms. The ruin was mutual, and the ruins are where we must henceforth live.
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This exhausted order could in principle totter along indefinitely, were it not for the instabilities, internal and external, that result. The political and moral authority of the state quietly unravels, even as its hard power and reach expand. As Britain's riots of 2011 starkly exposed, social order itself can dissipate overnight. And the quest for moral authority at home is transmitted all too easily into rash adventuring abroad, in the name of democratic and liberal values. To explain, say, the Iraq war as motivated by strategic or economic concerns, a 'war for oil', as leftists are wont to do, is misconceived. There's no underlying interest to expose: the war's liberal-democratic rationalisation really is what it's all about. As Tony Blair <a href=" https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/mar/01/iraq.foreignpolicy">said</a>: 'It's worse than you think. I believe in it.'
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Readers of my own novels, particularly the Fall Revolution books and some of the more recent ones such as <i>Intrusion</i> and <i>Descent</i>, may find some of the themes outlined above familiar. In the early 1990s when I started writing my first novel, I was convinced that the Left had suffered a whopping, world-historic defeat with the fall of the Soviet bloc regardless of how critical or even hostile they had been to it. However, I did expect that this defeat would in time be overcome.<br><br>
[<strong>Added 10 Jan 2020</strong> The controversial magazine <i>Living Marxism</i> (which became LM and then Sp!ked) spelled out the depth of the defeat and its consequences forcefully in the 1990s, and naturally I paid attention. Cunliffe seems to have drawn on that school of thought too, and in fact has spelled out its logic in Marxist terms more clearly than most. Hence, I think, any parallels. As Cunliffe has kindly <a href="https://twitter.com/thephilippics/status/1214851074990977025">clarified</a>, the main source of inspiration in my work for <i>Lenin Lives!</i> was the alt-history novella <i>The Human Front</i>, which doesn't deal with these themes at all.]
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Whatever else it does, <i>Lenin Lives!</i> answers a question that has <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n13/jenny-turner/who-are-they">baffled</a> better minds than mine: how on earth did a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Communist_Party_(UK,_1978)">splinter of the far left</a> mutate into a cadre of <a href="https://www.spiked-online.com/">contrarian libertarian Brexiters</a>? Two lines of explanation are often explored. The first is that they remain revolutionary communists under deep cover, engaged in some nefarious long-term scheme. The second is that they have been themselves subverted, suborned by the corporations from which they receive funding. I could go into the various reasons why both are wide of the mark, but I've already gone on long enough. By now you can figure it out for yourself:
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It's worse than you think. They really believe in it.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-49577820969969440282019-12-31T11:56:00.002+00:002019-12-31T12:05:38.332+00:00That was the river. This is the seaOver the past few years I've more or less stopped blogging about current politics. Because Twitter, for one thing. For another, my last serious effort at political blogging was during the Scottish independence referendum. Given that I wasn't so much arguing that Scottish independence was a bad idea – though I did – but that the Scottish left had nothing to gain from supporting it, my efforts were fruitless (and thankless, but I expected that).
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So if you wanted to know what I thought about Brexit, Trump, Corbyn etc you'd have to look at my Twitter feed. Even on Twitter, I've more or less stopped arguing. Life's too short and I have books to write. But I should have said more here about recent developments in Britain while they were happening.
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I registered as a supporter of the Labour Party in time to vote for Jeremy Corbyn. I joined in time to vote for Richard Leonard. And I've been reasonably active locally since, knocking on doors and going to meetings. Inverclyde, the constituency where I live, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenock_and_Port_Glasgow_(UK_Parliament_constituency)">used to be</a> solid Labour and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverclyde_(UK_Parliament_constituency)">is now</a> solidly SNP. After a massive swing to the SNP in 2015, the gap narrowed to a few hundred in 2017. We worked very hard to close it over the past couple of years and harder still in the election campaign, to be rewarded by a vastly increased SNP majority.
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As for the rest of the UK...
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Leave was England's Yes.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-14034355930740976712019-11-18T15:46:00.000+00:002019-11-18T17:02:28.775+00:00Blue sky over China<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUewp2yJ22mU9EYIPBuOWYcVRaL9lA7r_nd4Ccj-OCEj2wCM8yN7eGZVHn2vGjRfNnL2cFGMKrR95xZsjuZRO8HN6VMHhyphenhyphennk5Bt0DkA12r1XJx4eOPEGLS8py92NxwdsinbNQ8/s1600/IMG_20191031_112205.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUewp2yJ22mU9EYIPBuOWYcVRaL9lA7r_nd4Ccj-OCEj2wCM8yN7eGZVHn2vGjRfNnL2cFGMKrR95xZsjuZRO8HN6VMHhyphenhyphennk5Bt0DkA12r1XJx4eOPEGLS8py92NxwdsinbNQ8/s640/IMG_20191031_112205.jpg" width="640" height="480" data-original-width="1110" data-original-height="832" /></a></div>
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I returned just over a week ago from eight days in Beijing, courtesy of the China Association for Science and Technology, which on Sunday November 3 held the China Sci-Fi Convention 2019. My airfare, and our hotel stay during the convention weekend and some incidental expenses, were covered by CAST. One further hotel day was covered Tsinghua University. (My wife's airfare, and other hotel days, we paid ourselves.) Throughout our stay, including all but the last of our sightseeing days either side of the convention, we were most cordially guided and helped by science fiction scholar Fan Zhang, and accompanied by student volunteer translators.
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On our arrival we were met at the airport by a young volunteer from CAST, who escorted us to a taxi and took us to the <a href="http://www.riversidehotelbeijing.com/">Riverside Hotel</a> on the outskirts of the city. The hotel lobby was already prepared to greet SF fans. While Carol slept off the jet-lag, Fan took me and Francesco out for dinner with a local publisher in the nearest restaurant, which was miles away and reached by a DiDi (local equivalent of Uber) cab. The restaurant was in a residential suburb of high-rise apartments, in a street with a lot of people on bicycles and mopeds as well as in cars, and was big, ornate, and well-patronised. This was my first experience of eating Chinese food in China. I can recommend it.
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For our first full day Carol and I decided to explore the hotel's own neighbourhood. This turned out to be the sprawling Beijing International Garden Expo Park, which extends from some rather neglected and run-down exhibits from the 2013 expo to a succession of stunning, elaborate traditional Chinese formal gardens.
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One exhibition that we encountered by accident was the Astronautical Theme Park, which had two disused hypermodern exhibition buildings, a closed but still imposing 1.2 scale model space station, and a battery of rocket and spacecraft models on various scales. Grannies and small children wandered through it, over cracked concrete and dry grass. A crow had nested in the upper stage of the tallest rocket. Every few minutes a high-speed train whizzed by on the overhead viaduct. In its melancholic, nostalgic futurism this park was the most Ballardian sight I'd ever seen.
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On we wandered, into a Garden Valley built over an old landfill site, past some fish and lily ponds to a viewing platform high above. The approach was by a ramp so wide and long it was like walking into the sky. From there we looked out over Beijing. The city has a few skyscrapers, a CBD cluster, and lots and lots and lots of high-rise apartment blocks. It was a fine day with only a slight haze, and we noticed a zigzag line across the distant hills. The Great Wall!
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By mid-afternoon we were searching for refreshments. We later found there are indeed plenty of stalls, but along a main route through the park which just happened not to be the one we'd taken, except now and then accidentally. We went into what was called a souvenir shop, which turned out to be full of jade pieces – from expensive-enough bracelets to eye-filling work at eye-watering prices. In yuan, the price tags of these enormous and elaborate carvings had lots of zeroes. After a mental conversion to sterling, they still had lots of zeroes. But you could see why. The shopkeeper (having evidently sussed us as not likely customers) was warm and friendly, urged us to sit on furniture fit for a palace, took photos for us and waved us a cheery goodbye.
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We left the park (which I've only begun to describe) late in the afternoon, via a visit to the shop at the exit gate, which sold soft drinks, snacks and tourist tat. In China this includes quantities of revolutionary kitsch, which seems to fill the exact market niche that royalty kitsch does in the UK. The shop also had a table heaped with of vintage pocket-sized comic-books on patriotic and revolutionary themes.
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The following day, after an interview by Cora Chen for <i>Science Writing</i>, a popular science and science fiction magazine, I was introduced to Cece, my volunteer translator. She managed to do what had defeated me and even Fan: she set me up an account on WeChat, the universal communications app in China. Then Carol and I promoted ourselves from tourists to tour guides and conducted Rob Sawyer, Francesco Verso and Jim Kelly around the gardens, accompanied by Cora Chen and by Cece and Vivian, our translator volunteers.
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The convention was held in the gigantic conference centre behind the gigantic Riverside Hotel, and was quite unlike any other SF convention I've been to. It was officially sponsored, with representatives from government ministries and other institutions giving opening speeches. Simultaneous translation was available throughout. Huai Jinpeng, the leading Party official at CAST, spoke frankly of China's continued need for further development in science and technology as well as science fiction, and of the importance of 'the sci-fi industry' to Chinese socialism. Professor Wan Yu recounted the field's current statistics and status, which are already impressive. The success of Liu Cixin's <i>Three-Body</i> trilogy and the blockbuster film <i>The Wandering Earth</i> have raised the international profile of <a href="http://www.newschinamag.com/newschina/articleDetail.do?article_id=5449§ion_id=4&magazine_id=43">Chinese SF</a>, and written SF is seen as an inspiration and source for TV, film, videogames and their associated merchandise, adding up to a multi-billion-dollar sector with huge growth potential.
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The group I was in included Francesco Verso, Tullio Avoledo, Robert J Sawyer, Lavie Tidhar, James Patrick Kelly, and Ian McDonald. Other writers from overseas, who spoke on other tracks or in the opening ceremony, included Kevin J. Anderson, Mary Robinette Kowal and Russell Davis. We were only a small part of the convention, which featured many high-profile Chinese SF writers and scholars including Hugo winners Liu Cixin and Hao Jinfang, internationally active fans such as Carolina Gomez Lagerlöf, Crystal Huff and Vincent Docherty, as well as presentations and exhibitions from the media and tech industries. Altogether there were at least a thousand fans in attendance, and the convention was <a href=" http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1168896.shtml">well</a> <a href=" http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/global/2019-11/08/content_37521511.htm">covered</a> <a href=" https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201911/04/WS5dbf65ffa310cf3e35575244.html">by</a> <a href="http://en.people.cn/n3/2019/1108/c90000-9630593.html">the</a> <a href="http://www.cctvplus.com/news/20191105/8126301.shtml#!language=1">Chinese</a> <a href=" http://www.china.org.cn/arts/2019-11/06/content_75380218.htm">media</a>.
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On the Saturday we gave talks at Beijing's China Science and Technology Museum (a bright and amazing place, swarming with delighted children) and on the Sunday we had the above-mentioned opening ceremony followed by a session in the afternoon which began with the founding ceremony of the Science Fiction Committee of the Chinese Science Writers Association, continued with talks from venerated Chinese SF scholars and writers, and concluded with panels by us, ably and affably chaired by Professor Yan Feng and Stanley Chan.
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The afternoon session was followed in short order by a banquet. A Chinese banquet consists of many small courses, and many toasts. (Options for the toast were wine, orange juice and a potent Chinese spirit.) Our hosts from every institution involved went around the tables chatting to each individual, group or couple, and each such conversation was concluded by a toast. After that we were hastened through to the conference centre, where a less formal banquet (buffet-style) was going on for the attendees. A local band was performing Frank Sinatra songs. We took a glass or two of wine from the circulating trays, picked up our freebie bags and headed off for an early night.
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On Monday, after a later than usual start, Fan decanted us all to the Holiday Inn Beijing Deshengmen, much closer to the city centre. Rob invited us and Jim to go out with him and a local friend, Nancy. Nancy took us further downtown by foot and by taxi, via lunch at a local diner, to two very different bookshops. The first was Zhengyang Shuju Two, in a courtyard containing a pagoda tower, and specialised in books and memorabilia of Old Beijing.
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The second was the Beijing Book Building, the biggest bookshop in China. It's like a very big Borders, with one small difference. Near the entrance there's a bookcase of 'Leaders' Works' – on one side Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, then on the other an aisle devoted to Mao and Deng and their comrades and successors, and on to the works of President Xi Jinping. A table alongside displayed copies of <i>Reliable Marx</i>, a recently-published popularising work. Next, a couple more aisles on 'Party-Building in the New Era' and 'Honest Administration'. And then, for aisle after aisle and floor after floor, book after book on everything else: art, craft, science, economics, management, history, philosophy, and Chinese and foreign fiction of all kinds – science fiction very much included.
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A hasty half-hour browse there was followed by a taxi back to the hotel, a quick change, and another taxi that took me, Rob, and Jim to Tsinghua University, to a regular weekly class taught by Jia Liyuan (who writes SF under the penname Fei Dao) on writing science fiction. We each spoke for about thirty minutes (with an interpreter) on various aspects of the craft. The class was of about fifty people, more or less evenly divided between men and women, and between science and humanities backgrounds. They listened with great attention and asked searching questions. The campus was still whizzing with bicycles when we emerged at about 10 pm.
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On Tuesday morning Fan took Jim, Rob, Carol and I (with Alice, our translator) to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Besides beauty, the scale of the succession of walls and palaces gives an overwhelming impression of power.
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By contrast the Summer Palace, which we visited in the afternoon, gives an equally powerful impression of tranquillity.
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On Wednesday Fan took Carol and I, Rob and Jim, and Alice to the Great Wall. The views are sweeping, the climb exhilarating, the Wall astonishing. We had a good day for it, clear and sunny and above all dry – climbing a succession of steep ramps and steeper stairs was challenging enough in these perfect conditions, and must be outright scary in the wet. At some parts it's like clambering on a roof. Naturally we were overtaken at various stages by old folk and small children.
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On the (even steeper) route down I paused at the foot of a stone ladder that I'd descended one stoic step at a time to see a young woman <i>dance</i> down, arms out.
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Fan then took us all out to dinner, during which we discovered that Alice was a science fiction fan herself, and in a science fiction club at her university in Beijing. Quite a <i>small</i> club, she explained, with only a few hundred members...
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For our last day in Beijing, Carol and I took a walk through two linked parks south of the hotel, along the shores of Xihai Sea and Hoahai Lake, to a busy historic shopping street with a marked variety of shops – from the boutique where we admired but didn't buy exquisite and expensive painted fans to the dusty, untidy antique shop where I bought a small green stone Buddha for 800 yuan. After buying gifts and souvenirs at shops and stalls in between these extremes we negotiated (with some spontaneous help from a young woman passer-by) a late-afternoon taxi ride to The Bookworm – a thriving English-language bookstore, library, cafe and meeting place which, as we'd sadly learned, was about to have to close down (<a href=" https://www.thebookseller.com/news/beijing-bookshop-bookworm-closes-down-1111586">as indeed it just has</a>).
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There we met Rob, Jim and some local friends for a beer, a quick dinner and a lively discussion, followed by an all too brief session with a science fiction fan group which (like the shop's clientele in general) was a mix of expats and locals. The local fans had interesting things to say about Chinese SF, based on their own reading of it from childhood on. The expats gave an interesting perspective on how fast Beijing is changing. Air quality has improved markedly over the past few years, as Rob Sawyer had noticed as soon as he arrived.
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An early start on Friday, as we met Fan in the lobby at 8 and he arranged us a final taxi, to the airport. Our warmest thanks to him! -- and to all who made our trip so unforgettable.
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Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-30960859026597717512019-09-16T19:27:00.001+00:002019-09-16T19:49:44.914+00:00Other People's Politics<i>Other People's Politics: Populism to Corbynism</i><br><br>
J. A. Smith, Zero Books, 2019<br><br>
Around 2010 or so, I attended a Battle of Ideas panel on populism and/or Euroscepticism, featuring David Aaronovitch and (I think) Bruno Waterfield. In the discussion, someone said that populism reacted to a political system that empowered elites and excluded ordinary people. Aaronovitch retorted that ordinary people had never been more enfranchised: if you were discontented, there were plenty of parties to choose from, petitions to start or sign, FOIA appeals to make... How much more open could a political system be?
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I pointed out from the floor that if you read comments on blogs and below-the-line on newspaper articles (this was before Twitter and Facebook took off), you found a boiling pit of fury and hostility towards every element of the Blair-Brown-Cameron continuity: the EU, climate change policy, immigration, 'political correctness', smoking bans, forever wars, bank bail-outs ... and a real sense that railing against them online was all that could be done.
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To which Aaronovitch responded: 'These could all be by the same two hundred people!'
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I had no come-back to that, not even in my mind. Well, we ken noo.
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There are already several interesting books about Corbynism, from a broadly supportive position: Richard Seymour's <i>Corbyn</i>, Alex Nunn's <i>The Candidate</i>, and Steve Howell's <i>Game Changer</i>. All of them, particularly Nunn's, locate Corbynism in the politics of the post-crash labour (and Labour) movement: the slow build-up of stress that produced the earthquake. <i>Other People's Politics</i> is likewise sympathetic, but examines Corbynism from a different angle, that of its relation to populism. Populism in turn is examined in relation to social media. Social media and populism are mutual accelerants, as perfectly matched as mass media are (or were) to consensus politics. On Twitter we're free to say more or less what we like, within the law and the limits of arbitrarily applied and algorithmically policed 'terms of use'. A far more pervasive constraint is that any utterance can be jumped on, and become the focus of a whirlwind of vituperation: a pile-on. Twitter constitutes us as human dust, intermittently whipped up into a storm. And all the time, our free utterances, our freely registered likes and dislikes, our click-throughs, feed the analytic algorithms of advertising and politics, endlessly and mindlessly grinding away.
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The unexpected rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the Labour Party has some things in common with the unexpected size of the Yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum, the unexpected victory of Leave in the EU referendum, the unexpected victory of Trump in the US, and the unexpected surge of the Labour vote in 2017. Each was more than a surprise. They registered as events that <i>shouldn't</i> have happened, and by all past reckoning <i>couldn't</i> have happened: an anomaly, a shock, an affront. Social media played a big part in all of them – sometimes at the expense of face-to-face campaigning, the ground game, but this under-the-radar aspect contributed to the shock of their actual or near success.
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Ironically enough, Britain's unprecedented and unparalleled post-referendum upsurge of a mass <i>pro</i>-EU movement, with its huge street demonstrations, tragic face-painters and flag-wearers, and hashtag #FBPE, could itself be seen as a variety of populism: one that constitutes a different 'people' against a different 'elite'. Instead of 'the bankers' or 'the establishment', the villains become hedge-funds and disaster capitalists. #FPBE have their own conspiracy theories: Cambridge Analytica, Russian dark money, Putin. Heck, they're even convinced that the BBC is biased against them. From the outside, viewed in the small shiny rectangle of the smartphone screen, #FBPE can seem as closed-minded, obnoxious and deluded as the Brexiters do to them, as the cybernats did to me, and as Corbynism's own online army (in which I'm a very minor footslogger) evidently does to New Labour's middle-aged old soldiers (aka 'centrist dads').
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But, as Smith puts it, populism is always 'other people's politics'. The bright rectangle is always a window, seldom a mirror. Smith walks us through that mirror. If we can bear to look at it, he argues, Corbynism too is a populism, and all the better for it. All populisms say the 'unsayable', but not all of them say the same. A left populism would blame the powerful, not the powerless, for social problems. Trump says things his supporters wish they 'could' say, whereas Corbyn says things his supporters have been for years on end inwardly screaming for <i>someone, anyone</i> with a public platform to say. There's no doubt that Corbynism has constituted a 'people' of its own: the leftists and socialists who never went away but were excluded from any recognition in the mainstream, and who were largely isolated from each other and indeed unaware of each other's existence. Like the cybernats, now a permanent presence in Scotland, they can be repeatedly dismissed as an online bubble – until they suddenly manifest in the real world. 'Where did all these people come from?' – as a Labour candidate is heard to ask in 2017 as her canvassers are reinforced by an army of volunteers, mobilised by Momentum's 'My Nearest Marginal' app.
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Strong and persuasive though this book is on the emotional and ideological intricacies of how a populist appeal can gain traction, and how it can confound the expectations of the sensible centre – tracing, for example, the success of Donald Trump's transgressive rampages, and the conniving nods and winks of irony and deniability in the memetic tactics of the alt-right – it has little to say on the record of left-populism itself, barely glancing at its greatest debacle: Syriza. But to ask that of it would be to ask for a different book. (It's not like there aren't plenty of left critiques of left populism to choose from.) This one does its own job, and does it well.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-54452936665820049662019-06-18T17:00:00.000+00:002019-06-18T17:03:45.495+00:00John McDonnell: My Part in his RiseIn the spring of 1977 I was a resident of Hayes, a research student at Brunel University, and a raw and active supporter of the International Marxist Group. The IMG had a few hundred members and was widely considered to punch above its weight. It did, but in <a href=" https://redmolerising.wordpress.com/">so many directions</a> that it hit mostly air.
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The then <a href=" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_government,_1974%E2%80%931979">Labour Government</a> led by James Callaghan tried to deal with the crisis of the postwar settlement by extending social reforms in exchange for wage restraint. This strategy, begun under Harold Wilson, was known as the <a href="http://www.unionhistory.info/britainatwork/timeline/1974-1979.php">Social Contract</a>, and was already under severe strain. The reforms were significant but seemed inadequate, and in any case their effects were for the most part jam tomorrow. Wage increases were jam today. The government's policies were widely opposed by the left inside and outside the Labour Party, by a militant minority of trade unionists, and by broader unrest among women, black people and disaffected youth. In Northern Ireland, no hope for an end – of any kind -- to the Troubles was <a href="https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/othelem/chron/ch77.htm">remotely in sight</a>. The Labour Government was opposed or pressured from the right, of course: by sections of the state, the City, almost all the press, the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher, and the small but fast-growing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_(UK)">National Front</a> and other fascist groups. Seldom has the <a href=" https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dntR3Sk7d4sC&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=Anderson+%22spotlit+enclave%22&source=bl&ots=bVF1fOCc6s&sig=ACfU3U2inyP6YDOS0iNEpE_wCo6Ppqa3gw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjYvP3E2uviAhULVRUIHaoqAdUQ6AEwAXoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&q=Anderson%20%22spotlit%20enclave%22&f=false ">spotlit enclave</a> been more relentlessly shelled.
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Looking back, standing candidates against Labour in local elections might not seem the best use of the far left's slender resources, but stand candidates we did. The IMG stood four candidates in that year's elections for the Greater London Council. Hardly anybody had heard of the IMG, so its candidates stood as Socialist (IMG). We had badges and everything. I may still have one.
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One GLC constituency in which we stood was Southall, central to which was the largest Asian community -- overwhelmingly industrial working class and small-business in social composition -- in West London. The Socialist (IMG) candidate for Southall was Gerry Hedley, a modest, serious and cheerful militant. A lecturer in art, he had no roots in Southall, but he had support and endorsement from local activists who did. When Hedley addressed one meeting of what seemed like hundreds, from bearded elders to young radicals, he got supportive speeches from the platform in Urdu and Punjabi, as well as English.
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One local labour movement left-wing activist whose support we were keen to get was John McDonnell. I, along with a far more dedicated and experienced comrade, met him in a cafe to sound him out. McDonnell may have agreed with many of our criticisms of Callaghan's Labour, but he was adamant that he wouldn't endorse our candidate. The Labour Party's rules, then as now, were strict. Any member who supported a non-Labour candidate in an election would be slung out on their ear. McDonnell had no intention of that happening to him. In the end, we pleaded with him to at least privately vote for us, and perhaps hint to a few close and trusted comrades that lending us their vote might... McDonnell was having none of it. We parted cordially, empty-handed.
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If we'd been more persuasive, or if he'd been less staunch in his loyalty to the Labour Party, John McDonnell would almost certainly not now be the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. Say not the struggle naught availeth.
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This footnote in history has two footnotes of its own:
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1. GLC May 1977 Southall election results <a href="http://londondatastore-upload.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/GLCE_1977-5-5.pdf">(Source, pdf)</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Greater_London_Council_election">(See also)</a><br><br>
Seive, Mrs Y. Labour 13,330<br>
Schindler, R. Conservative 12,417<br>
Stevens, K. Liberal 2,094<br>
Franklin, Mrs B.P. National Front 1,872<br>
Hedley, G.A. Socialist (IMG) 996
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2. Gerry Hedley became Reader at the Courtauld Institute of Art and an innovative researcher in the field of fine art conservation, where he is still – many years after his untimely death in a climbing accident -- <a href="https://icon.org.uk/events/the-gerry-hedley-student-symposium-conservation-of-fine-art">remembered with great respect</a>.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-43775127168533647552019-03-31T12:19:00.000+00:002019-04-11T11:16:01.262+00:00Time Enough for Thought<a href="https://unbound.com/books/robert-heinlein/"><em>The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein</em></a>, Farah Mendlesohn, Unbound, 2019.
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Full disclosure up front: <a href="https://farahmendlesohn.com/">the author</a> is an old friend. <a href="https://unbound.com/">Unbound</a> is a crowd-funded publisher, and my name is one of hundreds listed who pre-supported this book.
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1550865905l/44090399.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1550865905l/44090399.jpg" data-original-width="316" data-original-height="475" /></a></div>Heinlein was for better or worse one of the great names of science fiction. In his generation and age-group, he stood alongside Asimov and Clarke as one of the genre's public intellectuals: the chaps who got called into television studios to talk about moonshots. Asimov and Clarke, for all their obvious differences and Clarke's agoraphilic sublime, were united in their basic world outlook. Both were liberal secular humanist futurists, and what you saw was what you got. Heinlein was something else: an original moralist, complex and contradictory but always (it seemed) confident. He got under his readers' skins and into their minds in unexpected ways. In that respect, oddly, he can better be compared to Le Guin.
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In my early teens, reading the stories collected in <i>Revolt in 2100</i> ('"If This Goes On—"', 'Coventry', and 'Misfit') had a lasting impact. Heinlein had a knack for the throwaway, delayed-action bombshell: a casual reference to a theology curriculum that included 'mob psychology and basic miracles' being one from that book. And <i>Starship Troopers</i> gave me a lot to think about at the time, though probably not the thoughts the writer intended, which says something for him.
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I've read nearly all the juveniles, many of the short stories and nearly all the novels except the late long ones, which I've always bounced off.
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Heinlein has been the subject of a definitive biography, major critical studies during and after his life, and an immense and growing amount of academic and fan criticism. But he remains so vast and various that there's always more to say, and Mendlesohn says it here. Her approach has been to read (re-read) every publicly available thing Heinlein wrote, and only then to read (re-read) everything in print, and a lot of what's online, about him.
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After a brief introduction and a useful potted biography, Mendlesohn devotes successive chapters to Heinlein's fiction (short stories, juveniles, and adult novels), technique and rhetoric. She then applies her close reading of the texts to Heinlein's handling of civics and politics, racism and antiracism, ethics, sex and sexuality. Heinlein's political shifts are related to his deeper consistencies in interesting and unexpected ways: individual and community, patriotism and radicalism, democracy and revolution, family and free love all turn out to have more complicated dialectics across his work as a whole than a partial reading -- which is, of course, all that most readers have – would suggest.
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Mendlesohn's dismantling of the disaster of <i>Farnham's Freehold</i> -- and her answer to the inevitable appalled question '<i>What the fuck</i> was he thinking?' – is patient and persuasive. The discussion of sex, sexuality and gender in Heinlein's work is full of surprises and rigorously argued.
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This effort to read with fresh eyes has paid off. On almost every page there's a new insight or an arresting remark. Mendlesohn takes Heinlein seriously as a thinker, and makes you think.
Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-77748305770075654132019-03-26T16:53:00.001+00:002019-03-26T17:17:22.553+00:00Boldly GoingI'm proud to say I have a story in <a href="https://www.shorelineofinfinity.com/product/shoreline-of-infinity-14/">issue 14 of <i>Shoreline of Infinity</i></a>. 'Fat Man in the Bardo' takes up the widely overlooked plight of <i>the innocent victims of thought experiments</i>, human, feline and otherwise. Of course, as itself a thought experiment, the story only makes the problem worse, but I'll just have to live with that responsibility. The story appears in very good company: fiction, poetry and non-fiction from a wide range of writers.
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And there's more!
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The enterprising folk at <a href="https://www.shorelineofinfinity.com/">Shoreline of Infinity</a> are putting on an Event Horizon <a href="https://www.shorelineofinfinity.com/shoreline-of-infinity-event-horizon-thursday-14th-march-2019-2/">special for the Edinburgh International Science Festival</a>. The topic is:<br><br><strong>Science Fiction: can it guide us to a glorious future ... or will it lead us to disaster and dystopia?</strong>
<br><br><strong>8pm – 9.30pm, THURSDAY 11th April 2019<br><br>
Pleasance Cabaret Bar, Edinburgh<br><br>
Tickets £8.50/£6.50 from <a href="https://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/event-details/to-boldly-go-shoreline-of-infinitys-event-horizon">the Science Festival website, here.</a></strong><br><br>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://i2.wp.com/www.shorelineofinfinity.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/EVENT-HORIZON-41-sci-fest.png?resize=1080%2C764&ssl=1" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://i2.wp.com/www.shorelineofinfinity.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/EVENT-HORIZON-41-sci-fest.png?resize=1080%2C764&ssl=1" width="640" height="453" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="566" /></a></div>Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4142965.post-37391260877915266192019-02-25T11:47:00.001+00:002019-02-25T12:06:32.018+00:00Event Horizon extends to GlasgowThat fine SF magazine from Scotland, <a href="https://www.shorelineofinfinity.com/">Shoreline of Infinity</a>, has been going from strength to strength. One of its innovations has been to sponsor a regular cabaret in Edinburgh, Event Horizon, featuring readings, music, and the jokes of Russell Jones, poet by day and MC by night. As a student Russell worked in a Christmas cracker factory, where he swept up rejected jokes off the floor and (contrary to regulations) stashed them for later use. Over the years his deployment of these jokes has inspired scientists and students in Event Horizon audiences to work on a time machine to go back and stop him before it's too late.
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Meanwhile, you can now hear these jokes and much, much more in Glasgow, this very week!
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLyonbFYGivf6OYFoSZ50STTQwNYZC8XEwZ2ENFE_jbAOlJJxU4zEYRG3Rn1o_F-gw9KHqTGsi6_9gvzwHt14OIA-XlINByxMMpn43gvww0EeVDxj0nyI-nTLYL2rZrEiqXsPa/s1600/Event-Horizon-39.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLyonbFYGivf6OYFoSZ50STTQwNYZC8XEwZ2ENFE_jbAOlJJxU4zEYRG3Rn1o_F-gw9KHqTGsi6_9gvzwHt14OIA-XlINByxMMpn43gvww0EeVDxj0nyI-nTLYL2rZrEiqXsPa/s640/Event-Horizon-39.png" width="640" height="453" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1132" /></a></div>Kenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03493440163559858462noreply@blogger.com0