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: kenneth dot the initial of my middle name (macrae) dot my surname dot gmail dot com. Blog-related emails may be quoted unless you ask otherwise.
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Yet another classic!
Trainspotters of the political fringe may be amused to note, in that same centenary issue, a stirring call to smash cash, written in 1968 by David Ramsay Steele, one of whose later writings convinced me (eventually) that you can't. He went on to state the case more clearly, comprehensively, and readably than anyone before or since in a very interesting book.
Two links
The Herald magazine on Saturday published an interview with me, which is I think the first time I've ever featured in a lifestyle supplement. Thanks to Mike Calder of Transreal for the use of his shop for the photograph (in the print version only) of me holding a soft toy dinosaur and grinning wanly.
Labels: local, self-promotion
The Awakeness
The response: lots of comments saying 'Oh, I have that too!'
Since writing it, I came across two things that seem relevant to the odd experience.
One is that I remembered a passage I'd read years ago - it may have been an essay in the now legendary anthology The Mind's I - in which the writer imagined abstracting from every personal feature of one's consciousness, and pointed out that what remained would be what is common to all conscious beings. What struck me is that if one could step back into that consciousness-as-such, one would have something like the experience I described.
Another was reading Chris Beckett's Dark Eden. One of the characters, Jeff, is an odd little tyke with the habit of saying, every so often and apropos of nothing: 'We're here. We really are here.' Later in the book we get inside his head, and find that he (unlike everyone around him) sees 'the same Awakeness' in the flat, blank eyes of the alien animals as people do in each other and remember in Earth animals. This is more or less what Schopenhauer said in opposition to Descartes and Spinoza: that animals may not think or reason, but they share the same awareness as we do, just by being aware.
I don't know where that line of thought is going, but if you're interested, have a look at my article, and especially the comments. And give Aeon a browse too - there's a lot of interesting stuff there that you won't find anywhere else.
More Manifestations
Speaking of speaking, you can hear me here being interviewed about The Night Sessions by Daniel Nexon, who blogs at The Duck of Minerva.
On Sunday 21 October, I'll be on a panel, Banning the Brave New World? The ethics of science at the annual Battle of Ideas festival of public debate, which this year is at the Barbican.
And finally ... Iain Banks and I are doing our well-known double act at the Linlithgow Book Festival. In the Masonic Halls, which is a first for me and probably Iain too. Eight quid gets you in (no funny handshake required).
Labels: coming attractions, local, self-promotion, writing
Pointers
Labels: self-promotion, skiffy, writing
Mapping the Post-human
For a few days in the first week of September I was in the Breton port city of Brest (which although medieval is an architectural riot of modernity, nearly every building except its impregnable chateau having been levelled in 1944) at an academic colloquium on Mapping Humanity and the Post-human to which I'd been invited by its organiser, the erudite and vivacious Hélène Machinal. Its programme was wide-ranging, and mostly in French. Although I couldn't follow everything that was said, I think I got the gist of most, and was kindly helped by a student who volunteered to sit beside me and pass notes.
I found it strange to be listening in to serious academic discussion of ideas that originated on the fringes of science fiction, and to hear 'Kurzweil', 'Vinge' and 'extropians' pop up from a flow of French discourse like yellow plastic ducks on the Seine. About half the discussion was on the post-human in mainstream literature and philosophy, but popular culture, movies, and SF were just as minutely and seriously anatomised.
My own presentation touched on my earliest encounter with extropianism and (that cheap laugh out of the way) argued that Darwin had made post-humanism possible: first, by establishing that humanity was a species with predecessors and (by implication) possible successors, and (therefore) that the human mind was the outcome of a material process; and secondly, by shifting the notion of 'species' from an essence to a population, with no intrinsic limit of variation. Once 'the human' ceases to be an essence, it loses its self-evident status as a standard of value. Watson and Crick followed up in 1953 by demonstrating the material basis of heredity, and hence the possibility of consciously changing it.
Two developments that were new in the 1980s and 1990s made post-humanism a project rather than a prophecy. The first was that thanks to Moore's Law and molecular biology, it became possible for the first time for people to imagine that they themselves might live into the post-human era. The second was that socialism, the global project whereby the International was to unite the human race, was over, and with it the counter-project of liberal humanism. Humanity is no longer an imagined community. If it's ever to become so again, something like the socialist project will have to be revived, or replaced by a different project with less hubris but no less ambition.
Otherwise the robots will rise up and eat our brains, if we haven't beaten them to it by bashing each other's heads in first.
Labels: amazing things, evolution, skiffy, writing
Intrusion longlisted for Wellcome Trust Book Prize
Labels: genomics, public engagement, self-promotion, skiffy, writing
'The Surface of Last Scattering' is to become a film!
My short story 'The Surface of Last Scattering', published last year in TRSF (a well-received original anthology commissioned by Technology Review) is being made into a short film. Needless to say, I'm over the moon about this. Scattered is the graduation project of MetFilm School students Joshua Bregman (writer-director) and Victoria Naumova (producer), and they've pulled together an impressive team of students and professionals to make the film and act in it. I'm seriously in awe of, and deeply grateful to, the kind of talent that's throwing itself into realising my story on screen.
If you'd like to be a movie mogul - and let's face it, who wouldn't? - go to their fundraising site at IndieGoGo, contribute, and claim whatever amazing perk (which can include, as well as tangible mementoes and desirable treats, your name on the credits) matches your contribution.
Labels: amazing things, self-promotion, skiffy, writing
Dark Eden
Monday evening's 'Scary Fururistic Fictions' chaired by Stuart Kelly and featuring Chris Beckett and me, was one of the last events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. It went well, with Stuart steering our discussion in interesting directions, and plenty of good questions coming from the floor. I met Chris for the first time an hour or two before, in the Authors' Yurt (the festival's spacious, imaginative and civilized version of a Green Room) and liked him a lot. We'd received copies of each other's books a fortnight or so earlier, and Chris had already responded to reading mine with a thoughtful and appreciative review. By Monday I was about half-way through my copy of his book Dark Eden (which he kindly signed) but that was already enough for me to be enthusiastic about it and to comment on it in the discussion.I finished reading it a couple of days ago. The main reason it took me about a week to read is that I kept stopping to think. It's one of those books like The Left Hand of Darkness that gets you so convinced by and immersed in its world that you come out of it looking at the real world in a new way. By imagining realistically a planet without a sun, and its ecosystem that runs on geothermal energy, Beckett gives us picture after vivid picture of alien beauty that highlights the different wonder of Earth.
As its title suggests, Dark Eden takes an SF trope so tired nobody uses it any more: what if an isolated man and woman on an alien planet were to become the Adam and Eve of a new world?
Well, for a start, their descendants would have lots of genetic defects ...
The rest of the outcome is likewise logical, and ruthless. The echoes of the Old Testament are there, and deliberate, but the tale also recapitulates the more recent origin myths told by Freud and Engels: the small society we start with is a primeval, promiscuous matriarchal horde, into which the actions of the main character - and reactions to them - begin to introduce patriarchy, and with it the family, private property and the state.
Myth and its meanings are themes of the story, and often darkly funny: one of the legends of the mismatched founding couple re-enacted by their descendants unto the third and fourth generation is called The Big Row. Regular readers of hard SF may feel that the back-story's Earth and its nascent starfaring but troubled society are too crudely sketched - until the late, chilling moment where we glimpse them as they were, and remember through whose eyes we've seen them hitherto.
All that's just the background. The story itself is gripping, full of character, incident and adventure.
Now I find myself in an awkward situation. Like I said, Chris has reviewed my book, and we got on well when we met. If I were to give Dark Eden a rave review, it would look like the sort of mutual authorial back-scratching that Private Eye annually skewers with damning quotes from 'Book of the Year' features. No one would take it seriously.
Fortunately, I don't need to do that, because Dark Eden already has many rave reviews, from an impressively wide range of critics and readers, in the genre and out. Read them, then read the book.