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 event
The Scottish Book Trust's imminent Book Week Scotland includes a Pop Up Festival on December 1st at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, featuring among much else me and Iain Banks, in conversation with Stuart Kelly.
An hour of fascinating conversation featuring Banks’ dazzling new Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata, and Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion, a clever, frightening and dystopian vision of the future that has drawn comparison with Orwell’s 1984. Chaired by Stuart Kelly.Even if you've already seen the well-known Banks and MacLeod double act - usually involving incomprehensibly inconsistent recollections of every significant event in our closely linked literary lives and long personal friendship - you'll see something new as we are publicly dissected by Stuart Kelly, the best-read man in Scotland and a dab hand with the scalpel.
This event is part of Scottish Book Trust’s day of celebrations at The Mitchell Library on Saturday 1st December.
Where Rockets Burn Through
For the second time in forty years, I'm a properly published poet, and in very distinguished company at that. Anthologies of science fiction poetry are almost as infrequent: this is the first I've seen since Frontier of Going and Holding Your Eight Hands came out in the Seventies. Edited by scholar and poet Russell Jones, introduced by Alasdair Gray, and inspired by (and featuring) the science fiction poetry of the late great Scottish Makar Edwin Morgan, Where Rockets Burn Through should rise higher and travel farther than its predecessors.
Free launch events: Edinburgh, Thursday 29 Nov and London, Thursday 6 December.
The Edinburgh event will feature readings by several local writers, including me. You have been warned.
Thursday 29 November, 6.00pm (Update - not 6.30, as I had before!)
Blackwell’s 53-59 South Bridge Edinburgh
FREE
Labels: coming attractions, local, self-promotion, skiffy, writing
The Soul of Man after Socialism
Labels: amazing things, evolution, Marxism
Cell Culture - Examining how science and literature interact
How accurately does modern literature portray the life sciences? In what way is the use of science within fiction evolving to create new genres such as “lab-lit”? Is there more in common, than is often imagined, between the way in which both writers and scientists work?Tickets £5 - booking details here.
These are some of the fascinating topics that are up for discussion in an afternoon of fact and fiction examining how fiction portrays life sciences and genetics. The event is being produced by the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, in conjunction with the Scottish Storytelling Centre, on Saturday 3 November 2012.
Cell Culture will feature participants including: Dr Jennifer Rohn, cell biologist, editor of Lablit.com and author of Experimental Heart and The Honest Look; Ken MacLeod, celebrated science fiction author; and Pippa Goldschmidt, short story writer and former writer-in-residence at the Genomics Forum.
The authors will read from their work before engaging in a public discussion which will be chaired Professor Stuart Monro, Scientific Director of Dynamic Earth.
Finally, speaking of events, a wee reminder that Iain Banks and I are manifesting on Friday evening at the Linlithgow Book Festival.
Labels: bookfestival, coming attractions, genomics, local, public engagement, self-promotion
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.