Ken MacLeod's Blog, page 32

'... we might as well just call them all literature'

Scotland on Sunday books editor Stuart Kelly reviews Adam Roberts' New Model Army, China Miéville's Kraken, and my The Restoration Game.

He points to 'one of the great ironies of contemporary literature: the books that ask the deepest and most profound questions tend to be situated in the most marginalised of genres.'

On Bloggingheads.tv with Annalee Newitz

On Thursday I did my very first webcam interview, for Bloggingheads.tv - I had to buy a webcam to do it. Now the world can see how tidy my workroom isn't. io9's Annalee Newitz and I talk about my books and about politics, Craig Ventner's synthetic organism, Scotland, The Night Sessions and The Restoration Game , near-future and far-future SF, and galactic princesses.

Dates for your diary [updated]

Tomorrow evening (Wednesday 9 June 2010) at 7 p.m. I'm kicking off a discussion for Edinburgh Interdisciplinary Discussions on Science & Literature: is science fiction the missing link? at Sofi's Bar, 65 Henderson Street in Leith.

Details:

Science fiction is a literary genre that identifies itself with popularising science and imagining the social consequences of scientific and technological change. It might seem an obvious focus for overcoming the mutual misunderstandings of the 'two...

Dates for your diary

Tomorrow evening (Wednesday 9 June 2010) at 7 p.m. I'm kicking off a discussion for Edinburgh Interdisciplinary Discussions on Science & Literature: is science fiction the missing link? at Sofi's Bar, 65 Henderson Street in Leith.

Details:

Science fiction is a literary genre that identifies itself with popularising science and imagining the social consequences of scientific and technological change. It might seem an obvious focus for overcoming the mutual misunderstandings of the 'two...

Diana Comet Presents...75 Years of Fabulous Writers

A periodic table of women in science fiction and fantasy.

The apparat of Capital

In my novel The Sky Road the heroine, Myra, sees the skyscrapers of New York as housing 'the apparat of capital'. I've just found again the passage that inspired this:

Take the word bureaucracy literally, it refers to those working in bureaus or offices. The observable fact about the socialist economies is that they employed far fewer people in bureaus or offices than capitalist economies at a comparable stage of development. Capitalist cities are high-rise, their skylines dominated by office ...

Red Plenty

I recently got a review copy of Francis Spufford's new book Red Plenty, and, like Brad DeLong, immediately dropped everything to read it. It's a fictionalised account, or a non-fiction novel, about the project in the early 1960s to use computers to plan the Soviet economy. A key figure is the genius Kantorovich, who invented the mathematical technique of linear programming in 1938. (We follow his mind as the idea dawns on him, on a tram.) He and other real characters such as Kosygin and Khrus...

Why 'playing God' is (in principle) a good thing

I have some initial thoughts about the first synthetic cell up on the Guardian's Comment is Free. Feel free to comment, there or here.

And hey, I'm chuffed, and grateful to Andrew Brown for asking me to write it. He phoned me about 4 o'clock yesterday, sent me the article announcing the breakthrough, and I worked on my piece that evening and this morning. It was the first time I've seen embargoed news - it broke at 7 p.m. UK time yesterday - and I can well see how being in the loop like that c...

I agree with Tony Blair

The man of blood and son of perdition is, in this instance, right. Stand by the son of the manse (pictured left). Vote strategically, not tactically: vote Labour. The Lib Dems will cheerfully bank any tactical votes from Labour supporters as votes for them, and use the resulting diminished Labour vote as an argument for coalition with the Tories. So it makes sense to maximise the Labour vote, even where (as in the constituency I live in) the Labour candidate has no chance, and even in Lib Dem...

Links

A few weeks ago SF author Philip Palmer asked me to suggest a science-fiction or fantasy-related song for the 'SFF song of the week' slot on his blog. For some reason all I saw of the requirement was 'SF' and 'song' and my mind went blank as I tried to think of a song with some skiffy content. Oh, now it's easy enough to think of some. But right then, the one I thought of surprised me, and it wasn't at all obvious. But Phil liked it, and I think it was a good choice. Here it is.

Elsewhere, Sco...