Ken MacLeod's Blog, page 18

Strong starts for Intrusion (UK) and The Night Sessions (US)

While waiting for the enLIGHTen lights to go on yesterday evening, I saw a tweet from @SpecHorizons, aka James Long, editorial assistant at Orbit:

'Intrusion by @amendlocke is being reprinted, having only been officially released today! #result'

#result, indeed. Later that evening the book's sales ranking was in the top thousand on Amazon UK and top fifty for SF/F.

And today SFX put online a very good (and perceptive) review:

As a portrait of benign tyranny, Intrusion is chillingly effective (and morbidly entertaining), not least because so many of this future state's dystopian elements are rooted in inarguable Good Things. It takes a seriously determined – and seriously cold-blooded – libertarian ideologue to argue in favour of, say, parents' right to condemn their children to suffer and die of preventable diseases. Where to draw the line between private life and public good is not a debate unique to our time, or to dystopian fiction, but the technology of MacLeod's world enables him to present the issues more starkly. Here, women are not just subject to stern government health warnings – and social disapproval – about how they use their bodies during pregnancy; they are now "encouraged" to wear sensor rings that allow their local health centre to monitor every molecule they encounter. This is a society being slowly smothered by the systems and safeguards it demanded at the ballot box, and the hobby-horses of its favourite newspapers.

The Night Sessions is to be published in the US in April by Pyr, and it's already had two good reviews: in Publishers Weekly and RT Book Reviews (that one's subscription only, but my editor at Pyr, Lou Anders, has sent me a pull quote from it and it's enthusiastic).

enLIGHTen switches on

The launch yesterday afternoon of enLIGHTen exceeded expectations. After a deal of mingling, sipping, and nibbling in one of the Royal Society of Edinburgh's splendid halls, followed by introductory speeches, I read out my own story, with additional Scottish voices and accents supplied by Gavin Inglis, and Sam Oliver doing an impression of Ben Franklin. Photos from the event are here.

Then enLIGHTen project manager Sara Grady led the crowd out to St Andrew's Square, where we waited for enough dusk to gather for the projection to be switched on. William Letford recited his evocative poem, we all counted down, and Ali Bowden threw the switch.

And then, flickering up the column in the centre of the square, came a jumble of letters that seemingly self-assembled into a quotation from David Hume: 'Truth springs from argument amongst friends.'

On the bus home I passed Charlotte Square, where the project's installation is a truly eye-filling illuminated and ever-changing globe in celebration of the most famous phrase of Hutton.

Lights! Camera! Action!

My new novel Intrusion is published today, and is available from Amazon and all good booksellers (one of which will have signed (and, if you like, personalised) copies any day now).

(Update: Cory Doctorow's enthusiastic review is now up on BoingBoing. Yay!)

The story's premise is:

A single-dose pill has been developed that corrects, without risk, many common genetic errors in a developing foetus. When a pregnant woman refuses to take The Fix, as the pill is known, she divides friends, family and even the law with a moral dilemma. Is her decision a private matter of individual choice, or is it tantamount to wilful neglect of her unborn child?

To celebrate the book and the source of some of its inspiration, the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum is sponsoring a launch event at Pulp Fiction (43 Bread Street, Edinburgh, EH3 9AH) on 21 March, 6.30 - 8.30 pm. The event will include me reading from the book and discussing it in conversation with Stuart Kelly, literary editor for the Scotsman newspaper group. Also: free drinks!

The event is free but spaces are limited: book online here.

There's a quite different launch event today, for enLIGHTen, an ambitious celebration of the Scottish Enlightenment, and I'm delighted and very much honoured to be taking part in it by reading (with Gavin Inglis and Sam Oliver doing the voices) my flash fiction in honour of Adam Smith.

Invitation only for that one, but a full account - including a link to all the stories and readings - tomorrow, if we're spared.

An observation

Britain is enjoying a week or two of early-evening bright ISS passes, and whenever the Scottish cloud cover breaks for the right five minutes I step outside to watch our only space station sail across the sunset sky.

Several times in the dark ages before I knew about Heavens-Above and @VirtualAstro and the like I spotted what I thought was the ISS but was actually an Iridium flare.

Which is why, in at least two published books, I've described the ISS as going from south to north or vice versa, and as flaring and fading ...

What I've been doing

Well! Something like normal service of rants and reflections will I hope be resumed on this blog before too long. What's been going on is that I'm still trying to come up with a plan for my next novel, and have in the meantime been working on a script for an informational comic about stem cell medicine for OptiStem (thankfully completed, on time, and now in the hands of the talented comics artist and writer Edward Ross, his colleague Jamie Hall, and our splendid editor Dr Cathy Southworth - for further developments, watch this space).

Any other write-for-hire projects gratefully considered, by the way.

Meanwhile, here's a bit of catch-up, working backwards.

This morning a photographer from the Scotsman group of newspapers called to take a photo of me for an interview that Stuart Kelly conducted last week, soon to be published in (I think) Scotland on Sunday, in conjunction with the publication of Intrusion . The photography was done in a nearby park, in high winds.

Shortly before the photographer arrived I replied as follows to an email asking me to endorse the Open Justice Project:

While I agree (with some reservations) that it's a worthwhile project, I don't have time to write anything for it, and I don't want to endorse it because

(a) I know next to nothing about the issue

(b) the little I do know is that court reporting is fraught with peril even for trained professional reporters, and I don't want to encourage members of the public to run these risks

(c) the decline of professional court reporting is the real problem, which makes this something of a diversion

(d) whenever I 'endorse' a campaign something toe-curlingly embarrassing happens, the latest being this, in which I and other writers are described as 'launching' and 'spearheading' a campaign which was in fact launched by local trade unionists and organised by, among others, the hard-working activist Pete Cannell, and about which we merely said - at Pete's request - a few words in support. So now it must seem to those actually doing the work that we're trying to take credit for it.

I could go on, but let's leave it there.

On a cheerier note, there's this (via), a highlight of the third SFX Weekender, which I attended as a guest at the beginning of the month.



Just when you thought Neil Gaiman couldn't be more of a legend.

The event was a new one on me, a sort of mash-up of what I think of as an SF convention (i.e one organised by SF fandom, and in which any writers and artists present - other than Guests of Honour - are very much on a level with the fans) and what I think of as a media convention (i.e. a convention where the professionals - actors, usually - are the stars, and everyone else is audience). Each has their place, and putting elements of both together in a holiday camp in Wales in February shouldn't work, but in some alchemical way it did. The fandom demographic (you know who you are) extends way beyond the people you meet at SF conventions - as witnessed, come to think of it, by the commercial success of SFX, a magazine which to its credit has always maintained an informed coverage of written SF, which chugs along like a grimy old space-tug in the gigantic fleet of other-media SF/F.

I had a good time, but to describe the weekend would be to go over ground already well covered (sometimes critically) by, among others: the Orbit team (to whom thanks); Niall Harrison; Al Reynolds; Paul McAuley; Sophia McDougall; Ro Smith; and Sam Stone (who says very kind things about me).



On a likewise cheery note, two of my short stories from last year are on the 2011 Locus Recommended Reading list.

Fresh Paint

The post below reminds me that I've promised to review Tim Maughan's collection Paintwork, each of whose three stories takes the idea of city environments overlayed with locally-experienced virtual reality - augmented reality - a step or two into the future. They've already been widely and enthusiastically reviewed, and rather than rehash the storylines I'll just flat out recommend them - at a couple of quid for the ebook, it's not much of a risk to check out, and well worth it - and remark on what I think makes them distinctive, which is this.

The cyberpunk vision of the future has been around for a quarter of a century - more than long enough to become default. You can handwave it, you can buy one off the jpeg. And like the shiny and trekky and trippy futures that preceded it, it's become in itself an overlay, a mirrorshade between us and the emergent future in the present that cyberpunk once forced our attention on.

Tim Maughan is, in these stories, doing with now what the original cyberpunks did with then. I hope he does a lot more of it.

City of Lit does city of light

I'm very pleased to be a small part of the Edinburgh City of Literature Trust's imaginative project, enLIGHTen, celebrating the Scottish Enlightenment with light and sound. My contribution is a flash fiction inspired by a quote from Adam Smith:

'Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition'

The quote will be projected near the Royal Society building in George Street, with my story as an accompanying audio download.

To tell you the truth, though, the story was just as much inspired by the nearby statue of James Clerk Maxwell, which shows the great man apparently contemplating a CD. No spoilers, but if I say 'post-singularity', seasoned SF readers will be able to take it from there.

Coming soon: US paperback of The Night Sessions

Via i09, I see that the forthcoming Pyr edition of The Night Sessions is now available for pre-order. The cover, by Stephan Martiniere, is just ace - I've seen it before, of course, as editor Lou Anders took me through various stages of the design process, but this happens to be the first time I've seen it walking the mean streets by itself.

The book itself is a near-future police procedural, featuring atheist detectives, presbyterian terrorists, creationist science-park animatronic hominids, a gothic lolita secret policeman, and Calvinist robots in space.

Or, as the publisher more soberly puts it:

A bishop is dead. As Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson picks through the rubble of the tiny church, he discovers that it was deliberately bombed. That it's a terrorist act is soon beyond doubt. It's been a long time since anyone saw anything like this. Terrorism is history.

After the Middle East wars and the rising sea levels, after Armageddon and the Flood, came the Great Rejection. The first Enlightenment separated church from state. The Second Enlightenment has separated religion from politics. In this enlightened age there's no persecution, but the millions who still believe and worship are a marginal and mistrusted minority. Now someone is killing them.

At first, suspicion falls on atheists more militant than the secular authorities. But when the target list expands to include the godless, it becomes evident that something very old has risen from the ashes. Old and very, very dangerous. . .

Known manifestations

My engagements so far for 2012:

Thursday 2 to Sunday 5 February: with many other authors, as well as noted SF/F fans and artists at SFX Weekender 3, Pontin's Holiday Park, Prestatyn Sands, North Wales. It's hoped (but not promised) that pre-publication copies of my new novel, Intrusion (Orbit, 1 March 2012), will be available for signing in the dealers' room.

Intrusion is, of course, already available for pre-order in hardcover and Kindle editions. Cory Doctorow, who has kindly allowed me to quote from his forthcoming review, describes it as

a new kind of dystopian novel: a vision of a near future "benevolent dictatorship" run by Tony Blair-style technocrats who believe freedom isn't the right to choose, it's the right to have the government decide what you would choose, if only you knew what they knew. ... a haunting, gripping story of resistance, terror, and an all-consuming state that commits its atrocities with the best of intentions.

Iain M. Banks calls it a twistedly clever, frighteningly plausible dystopian glimpse.

Friday 13 April, evening: a panel on transhumanism/posthumanism with, among others, Justina Robson and Steve Fuller at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

Saturday 14 (evening) to Sunday 15 April: Guest of Honour at the lively and highly commendable annual 'fantastic weekend for readers and writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror', now in its sixth year, Alt.Fiction, Phoenix Digital Arts Centre, Leicester.

2012 - year of fell portent

According to half-baked myth and Hollywood (but I repeat myself) 2012 is the year the Mayan calendar reaches the end of its Long Count and the old gods come from the sky and eat our brains, or whatever.

My brain, at the moment, would welcome being devoured by a feather-coated obsidian-toothed deity with a name that reads like it came from a Polish dictionary falling downstairs, but the grisly repast would probably send said deity on a hasty visit to the privy, so I'll just have to sweat this one out.

Happy New Year!