Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“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.”—Graydon Saunders
Contact: ken at libertaria dot demon dot co dot uk. Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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The shape of things to come: books
They've also announced that it and the rest of the trilogy is to be published by Orbit in the US. The second volume, The Corporation Wars: Insurgence is due to be published in December 2016, and the third (provisionally titled The Corporation Wars: Emergence) in spring 2017.
Labels: coming attractions, self-promotion, skiffy
The shape of things to come: events
Next weekend, 17-20th March I'm a Guest of Honour at Deepcon 17, Fiuggi, Italy. (The other guest is Walter Koenig.) A small ebook collection (in English, and in Italian) of three of my short stories is coming from Future Fiction.
Friday 6 May at 7 pm I'm giving a talk, reading and signing at Central Library, Stirling for Off the Page, the Stirling Libraries' Book Festival.
11-12 June, Justina Robson and I are Guests of Honour at Fantasticon, Copenhagen, Denmark.
On Monday 1 August I'm giving a Creative Writing Masterclass at the Scottish Universities International Summer School.
I'll be talking about my latest book, The Corporation Wars: Dissidence, on 14 August at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
29 October: Fangorn, Sarah Pinborough and I are Guests of Honour at Bristolcon, Bristol, UK.
And finally (for now) ... next year, I'm the NESFA Press Guest at Boskone 54, which will take place on Presidents Day Weekend (February 17-19, 2017) in Boston, MA at the Westin Waterfront Hotel.
Labels: coming attractions, self-promotion, skiffy
Free evening of SF in Edinburgh
Looking Back
In personal and family matters it's been a good one. In terms of work, though, it's been something of a forced march. Entirely my own fault: I was doing work in 2015 that I really should have done in 2014. Instead, I deluded myself that with enough research and planning in 2014, I'd be able to write the first draft of a novel at a speed I'd never attained before. This made me uncannily relaxed about giving a lot of attention to the Scottish independence referendum campaign, having a good time at Loncon 3, and so on.
In a sense I was right: I did write two novels this year, but they each took longer than I'd allowed for and left little time for anything else. At the moment I have the page proofs of the first, the second is with my editor, and the third is due for delivery mid-April. The plan is for the books to be published at six-month intervals from May 2016, and so far it's on course.
What's it about? Well ...
The general title of the trilogy is The Corporation Wars, and the books are sub-titled Dissidence, Insurgence, and Emergence. It's a far-future space opera about uploaded dead war criminals conscripted to fight an outbreak of robot sentience in an extrasolar system, and kept sane by copious amounts of R&R; in immersive VR environments, some of which are beta-tests of a planned future terraforming and some of which are based on fantasy RPGs. The conflict rapidly becomes much more complicated ... but has this been the plan all along, or has a clever stratagem all gone horribly wrong?
So I've been busy. Among the other things this has left time for:
Giving a course, with Mike Cobley, on writing SF and fantasy at Moniack Mhor; talking, with Nathan Coombs, about space and socialism at a Manchester Spring event (video here); delivering a keynote (links to video and transcript here) at FSCONS in Sweden; and taking part in various book and science festivals.
This year I've written introductions to five Gollancz SF Masterworks, and articles on:
'progressive' SF and human progress; SF and personal change; and spies and double lives in future and alternate Scotlands. Not yet online is my enthusiastic review of Brian Cox's BBC2 series Human Universe, in the Summer 2015 issue of Perspectives.
Not written this year, but published in 2015 for the first time after many vicissitudes, is a discussion with Sherryl Vint on animals, biotech and SF. I also responded to some very intelligent discussion for the Crooked Timber seminar on my novels.
Over the past few months I've been reading every Scottish poem published in 2015 (a still ongoing project, as they keep on coming) to select and introduce the next of the annual Best Scottish Poems, an awesome responsibility and a new challenge.
Among the things all this hasn't left time for is what ate so much of my time in 2014: involvement, however marginal, in actual political campaigning and argument.
Next year? We'll see.
Meanwhile, all the best for 2016!
Tarbert Book Festival
(Click for larger view.)
Upcoming Engagements
First, at 7 pm on Wednesday 7 October, I'll be in Kilmarnock, talking about and reading from the Poems of Iain Banks, as part of East Ayreshire's book festival, Imprint.
The following week, on Thursday 15 October, I and Nathan Coombs will be discussing Socialism and space: Why humanity must look to the stars, at
7 pm at
The Ape and Apple
John Dalton St
Manchester M2 6HQ
Farther ahead but closer to home, I'll be reading at Deadhead Comics in Edinburgh, at a fantastic evening event from 7.30 on Thursday 29 October for Shoreline of Infinity, Scotland's new SF magazine.
Book Festival
Details: Sun 23 Aug 2:15pm - 3:15pm Garden Theatre
Tickets (£10.00, £8.00 conc.) available here.
In case you can't make the event and the signing afterwards, you can pick up signed copies at the Waterstones on-site shop and local branches. And if you miss that, copies signed by me and (if you like) personalised will still be available from Transreal Fiction in Edinburgh.
Scotland after socialism
I can't match his gloomy verve, but I'll make a similar suggestion about the lesser upheaval of 2015 in Scotland. This is a country that never took to New Labour, but has suffered and enjoyed all the changes in class composition and identity to which New Labour was a reaction. And yet we've cherished our self-image as keepers of the flame. Our refrain has been: 'We didn't leave Labour, Labour left us.'
Now, in the name of Old Labour values, we've overwhelmingly elected a party that stands on almost all issues to the right of even the present Labour Party, let alone that of Donald Dewar and John Smith. The SNP is a party with a fresh, charismatic leader who appeals to all classes and who proclaims a business-friendly programme in social-democratic language. In doing this she has enabled us to at last catch up with the post-socialist world, without losing face or backing down. We had to imagine ourselves as Venezuelans, in order to become Blairites.