23) The Execution Channel, by Ken MacLeod

A departure from MacLeod's previous space-opera stamping grounds, this is a thriller set in the present or near future of a slightly alternate earth - Gore was elected in 2000, 9/11 hit Boston, and the War on Terror resulted in military operations in Iran and Central Asia as well as Afghanistan and Iraq. Secret technologies, disinformation through blogging, and confused but lethal rivalry between intelligence services all play a part, but the emotional dynamic that drives the narrative is the father-daughter relationship between the two key characters, perhaps the most successful characterisation in any of MacLeod's novels. There is a very memorable climactic scene set in the main square in Oslo as well. Really good stuff.

Bechdel test: scrapes a pass. The daughter has numerous conversations with other women, of which almost but not quite all are about men.

8) The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross

I read this in the wrong order, in a sense, in that it was a couple of years ago that I read the sequel, The Jennifer Morgue (in which I even get a small credit in the acknowledgements). And I had read the second, shorter, section of this book, "The Concrete Jungle", in the run-up to the 2005 Hugo voting (which of course it won). But the first 250 pages, plus Ken MacLeod's introduction, plus Charlie's afterword on the common features of spy and horror fiction, were all new to me.

Having said that, I still like "The Concrete Jungle" best of the Laundry stories. If I had to choose a single word to describe Charlie's writing, I think that word would be "unrestrained". It's not easy to balance that instinctive narrative style with the bathos required to tell stories of civil servants tasked with fighting eldritch horrors from another dimension, and "The Concrete Jungle" is where he succeeds best. Which is not to say that the main chunk of "The Atrocity Archives" is bad, far from it - there are some memorably creepy moments, such as the death of Fred from the accounts department and the exploration of a frozen parallel Earth - it's just that the Hugo voters got it right, as they sometimes do.

And the Ken MacLeod intro and Stross postscript are worth reading too; indeed, the postscript was the only point where I really regretted not having read this before The Jennifer Morgue, as the epilogue to that book seems like a continuation of the same conversation between author and reader. Having said which, this author is one with whom this reader has little difficulty in conversing.

I was in and out of Beneluxcon this weekend, given that it was just up the road in the Novotel in Leuven and featured three particularly interesting authors, Ken MacLeod, Christopher Priest and Alastair Reynolds. There were 100 people signed up (I myself was alphabetically last at #100) but I didn't see more than 40 there at any given time. I was struck by a couple of features of the event which differed from any other sf con I have attended (not that I have been to all that many).

1) The programming was fairly light: both mornings and afternoons featured an hour-long session with a single GoH (MacLeod in the mornings, Priest in the afternoons) followed by another panel featuring more of the guests (apart from the three already mentioned, these included two Dublin writers, David Murphy and Robert Nielsen, and three Dutch/Flemish writers) to pick up on the themes of the first panel. So that was only four hours of actual discussion on each day, though there were also readings, signings, a workshop, a banquet, and a tour of Leuven, none of which I was able to attend.

I felt that this approach probably did ensure that the discussion panels were of higher quality than I have sometimes experienced elsewhere; there was no sense of "OMG I'm on another panel WTF am I going to say" which I have sometimes seen (indeed, sometimes experienced directly) at other cons. It was, of course, embedded in a wider theme of talking about "Visions of the Future", which the con chair attempted with varying success to channel discussions into. And it happened to suit my own intermittent attendance rather well.

2) The second point that struck me is rather less to Beneluxcon's favour. The eight featured guest authors and the four-strong organising committee were all male. Not a single woman appeared on a panel at any time during the weekend. Unless I missed something, the only woman mentioned in the programme booklet was a local fan who had recently died. Very peculiar. There were certainly women in attendance - I had long chats with Agnes (and Graham) Andrews, and more briefly with ex-crazysoph - but I felt a palpable gap in discussing the future of humanity, as only half of it was represented at the top table.

Anyway, I did generally enjoy it. Ken MacLeod's talk on the future of ideology was as provocative as I had hoped, and indeed I would have felt the con was worth the attendance for that alone. Christopher Priest on the inside story of The Prestige was also an entertaining insight into the processes of writing and then having one's work transferred to the big screen. I did very well in the dealer's room, picking up nine vintage paperbacks for €15, including Mutiny in Space. And I note that the organising committee for next year's Beneluxcon in Eindhoven includes someone I knew twenty years ago, so I'm open to attending it, if the guests are interesting and the everything is right.

Ken MacLeod, Christopher Priest and Alastair Reynolds.

20) The True Knowledge of Ken MacLeod, ed. Andrew M Butler and Farah Mendlesohn

It is too long since I have read the Fall Revolution Quartet, because most of these essays would have meant a lot more to me if I had had it nearer the top of the memory stack. Oh well, perhaps an incentive to reread them some time soon. I particularly enjoyed Adam Frisch's piece on the Engines of Light trilogy, the intriguing review of MacLeod's poetry by K.V. Bailey, and the pieces by Ken himself. But am not feeling energetic enough right now to write something here that properly engages with the whole of the book.

5) Backdrop of Stars, edited by Harry Harrison

I picked up this collection (first published in 1968, though I got the 1975 paperback) in Dublin the other month, and Ken MacLeod, no less, commended my choice, saying that it had made quite an impression on him when he first read it. A baker’s dozen of stories by well-established authors (Aldiss, Anderson, Asimov, Ballard – they are printed by alphabetical order), some of which go some way to challenging comfortable political preconceptions (though one – L. Sprague de Camp’s “Proposal” – is I fear serious rather than satirical in its anti-feminism). It also struck me that a lot of the stories were really about death; the very first, Aldiss’ “Judas Danced”, is about an execution and the last, Mack Reynolds’ “Retaliation”, is a post-nuclear holocaust vignette (with a sting in the tale – the viewpoint characters, for whom the author has developed our sympathy, are Russians not Americans). Anyway, a good collection.

10) Glorifying Terrorism, ed. Farah Mendlesohn

This is a collection of short stories, mostly sfnal, some by people on my friends list, pulled together in protest at the recent UK legislation banning literature or speech which glorifies terrorism.

An British friend of mine reacted with condescension when this book came up in conversation recently: the view was expressed that it was basically a publicity stunt, with the people behind it seeking a kind of martyrdom for free speech by being prosecuted under the legislation. I think my friend came close to completely missing the point. The fact that such a case is unlikely to be prosecuted says much more about the silliness of the legislation than about any silliness of intent of the editor and authors. The mere existence of the book on the shelves of the bookshop is itself subversive of a bad law, and helps to raise public awareness, and perhaps to make people question their government's actions more thoroughly. Not that I have struck very hard against the UK legislation myself, in that I bought the book in Dublin and read it in Belgium (and am writing this en route to Austria).

Oh yeah, none of the stories is bad either. Many of them go for standard sfnal riffs of humans occupying alien planets (or vice versa) and the underdog biting back; the most memorable of these for me was "Execution Day", by Marie Brennan. Some take a different tack; I particularly liked Ken MacLeod's piece, "MS Found on a Hard Drive", which assembles various of his musings on the subjects of terrorism and contemporary (or near-future, or recent past) Scottish and Irish politics. (Some of us were fortunate enough to hear Ken reading the first half of it in Dublin at P-Con.) Charles Stross has a neat epilogue as well, suggesting that the Labour Party will come to its senses, but not until long after it is too late. A collection worth looking out for on its own literary merits, quite apart from the political point being made.
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16) Year's Best SF 11, ed. David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

So, why is it that the Hugo and Nebula systems cannot produce shortlists of the quality of this selection? There was only one story out of 31 here that failed to really engage my interest (OK, some of them were very short) and two that I thought were really good and would not have come across otherwise. I liked very much R Garcia y Robertson's "Oxygen Rising", about future war, peacekeeping and sex, and Ken MacLeod's "A Case of Consilience" struck me as one of the great sf and religion stories (OK, it references many of the others, but that if anything is a strength). Anyway, if the Dozois annual collection is even half as good as this, my money has been weell spent.

2) Learning the World, by Ken MacLeod

I don't plan to get into a habit of meta-reviewing, but I have read coalescent and immortalradical here, and ninebelow here, also greengolux's observations, and papersky's praise. I am much more towards the coalescent and papersky end of the spectrum. I really liked it. I thought that it does indeed add something new to the old sf theme of first contact between humans and aliens. It takes the premise of Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, a book I really didn't like at all, and does it a whole lot better - basically, the aliens on their planet have a society which feels much more like ours than do the humans in the approaching spaceship. I thought the various cultures and subcultures, both human and alien, were convincingly fleshed out. (Planets in sf novels are too often portrayed as having just one culture and one language - in extreme cases, appearing to possess a single time zone.) MacLeod is on top form in both depth and humour in his portrayal of the intellectual shock of the encounter for both humans and aliens.

I did feel the novel had one glaring weakness, shared with most of the classics of the hard sf genre to which it clearly belongs. We find out very little about the characters' inner lives. Much of the human side of the story is conveyed through the blog of a teenage girl, which is frankly much more reminiscent of the author's own blog than of the real thing at the younger end of livejournal; I guess I must be reading more teenage blogs than Ken does (and I don't read them much at all). The human characters jump in and out of bed with each other and suffer little emotional embarrassment; as for the aliens, this is the one respect in which we really don't get inside their heads.

However, it's going on my Hugo nominations list.

Thanks to Ken MacLeod for reporting that today's editorial in The Sun is worried about "Sunni Iran" and "oil hungry Teheran" as causes of instability in Iraq. As Ken says, "I'll say this for The Sun, it gives you information won't find anywhere else."

Ken MacLeod has done me the honour of replying to my last post at length, and deserves a final reaction from me - though I don't think we can really push this argument a lot further.

( Read more... )

This is a rarity from me - a serious political entry questioning statements by a writer I admire, and also worrying that I might not have got the joke, if there is one.

( Long post on the kind of political stuff that I left Northern Ireland to get away from, yet somehow I couldn't resist taking the bait this time. )

( What I got in Glasgow )

I have a very tolerant wife.

We resume on Sunday afternoon, when I returned from lunch to find myself witnessing the official photograph of the official signing of the official contract for the new edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, by John Clute, Dave Langford and Peter Nicholls. I was pleased to learn later from Dave Langford that he is fairly optimistic it can be completed fairly quickly (whatever that means), and positively thrilled to hear that the new Encyclopedia will be primarily a low-cost subscription on-line resource, capable of being continually updated. OK, I do like dead trees as a medium, but for a work like The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction the extra benefits of on-line searches and perhaps also hyperlinks to external information will be huge.

I mainly just hung around for the next few hours, bumping into nmg (at last!), Conor Kostick, and davesangel and her mother who had come over to present the James White Award. Had a good chat with brightglance, mylescorcoran and sammywol. Then it was time to go to the Hugos.

I've already written up the Hugo results, but just want to note that I felt a small lump in my throat at the ceremony. I've been writing various web pages about the Hugos for five years now, and at last I was actually there. More prosaically, as well as a particularly high percentage of UK-bsed winners, I have a suspicion (which I will check some time) that a higher proportion (or at least number) of women won Hugos this year than is usual. (I calculated three years ago that a third of Nebulas in the fiction categories had been won by women, but only a quarter of Hugos.) More number-crunching to follow.

Met up with annafdd for a post-Hugo drink, and we witnessed the cheers and applause of the Moat House bar as a kilted autopope strode in bearing his Hugo. We then repaired to the Hilton, admiring of natural20's success at crowd control, and looked around for parties. The Hugo nominees party was rumoured to be a) the place to be and b) opening to all after half an hour; neither of these rumours turned out to be true, and we tried out the Spruotlore/Irish party before eventually gravitating to the Finns. Somehow the Finns had managed to put together the ingredients of a fine time, lots to drink (including a particularly addictive liquorice flavoured vodka), lots of people, and what appeared at the time (though my memory as time goes on is increasingly blurred) to be good conversation. I eventually found my room mate (whose blog I have now syndicated as marusek) talking to Ken and Carole MacLeod, and we returned to our lodgings.

On Monday morning I bumped into autopope and feorag on my way in, and wandered round the dealer's room with feorag (who was somewhat the worse for wear) to buy presents for my family (sadly the picture of the Very Hungry Cthulhu had already been bought) before my 11 o'clock panel. This was supposed to be on the future of politics, chaired by Caroline Mullan, but wandered off a bit into the decline of the Swedish social model, since there seemed to be a lot of Scandinavians both on the panel and in the audience. It was also my last panel as a participant.

My one comment on programming - which in general I greatly enjoyed - would be that, if possible, moderators should have a bit more input into both the description and personnel of their panels. I did seven panels throughout the con; the one I myself moderated had an extraordinarily ambiguous description which left it unclear as to what it was supposed to be about; another had a moderator whose views were completely different to those of the other three panellists, which distorted the discussion; two had at least one panellist who really had no interesting ideas about the topic of the panel (and in one of those two cases the panellist in question was me). I appreciate that it's not an exact science; also in comparison to the many many such events I do for work, I'd say that Worldcon panellists are without exception (of the panels I attended) clever enough and articulate enough to rise above the petty problems I mention, and that Worldcon audiences are among the most forgiving, appreciative and intelligent I have ever addressed. In terms of the logistics of the panels on which I myself appeared I have no complaints, but we were all just talking heads; I noted problems elsewhere with overhead projectors and slide projectors.

Wandered into a conversation with brisingamen and peake, who introduced me to ticking_fool and purplepooka. The latter persuaded me to attend an extraordinary presentation by Duncan Lunan about the Green Children of Woolpit, a 12th century mystery which he reckons points to a high-level conspiracy involving Henry II and the Vatican to conceal the fact that the children had been transported from a human colony on another planet. I shared with those present certain information I received earlier this year from an Eastern European foreign minister which seems to me to undermine one of the key arguments of Duncan Lunan's thesis, but I will say no more of that here.

brisingamen and peake were still at the same table an hour after I'd left them, and we were joined by Julian West as we munched on sandwiches. Then it was time for the Closing Ceremony. As Robert Sheckley was absent through illness, and Jane Yolen had already left, it was up to Chris Priest to respond to the convention on behalf of the professional community, which he did eloquently and gracefully. Though he finished with a good-natured dig at autopope - "I think that in years to come, we shall look back to Charlie winning his Hugo last night, and say to ourselves that that was the moment when science fiction changed for the w- I mean, when science fiction changed forever!"

I seemed to spend the afternoon helping with the dismantling of the Science Fiction Foundation stall, then, long chat with greengolux and various other luminaries of British fandom. fjm very kindly invited me to join a literary dinner, but my plane flight did not allow for this, and I ended up finishing my worldcon with a slightly grotty chicken tikka masala in Glasgow airport in the company of ianmcdonald and Enid.

Minor logistical complaint - I put a bid in on one of the scanner/printer sets that the con was trying to get rid of, but come the crucial moment nobody seemed to be able to tell me if I had won the auction or indeed where the equipment physically was, so I dropped the issue. I would certainly have had difficulty humping it onto the plane, so perhaps it's just as well.

Apart from the two very minor grumbles noted above, I had a great time. Apologies to those weren't there and who've had to endure these ramblings over the last few days. Apologies to anyone I met and haven't mentioned. See you all again soon.

A brilliant short piece from Ken MacLeod:

Imagine a remote part of Europe. Its very name is associated with a superstition so gross that bigotry itself would scoff at it. Suppose that, centuries ago, a public debate among scholars converted the king and people of the region to a rationalistic, tolerant, liberal and humane Christian heresy, and that this heresy persisted as the people's faith despite the persecutions of church and state, of nationalists and communists. Imagine this heresy - with its own churches and seminaries, clergy and congregations, saints and martyrs - being the unquestioned creed of generations, and surviving to this day.

It sounds like some alternate-history invention, but it's the true story of the Unitarians of Transylvania.

It's my colleague's birthday today. She is from Kazakhstan. I happened to have a spare copy of Ken MacLeod's The Stone Canal which as you all know is partly set in Kazakhstan. So I've given it to her as a birthday present.

On reflection, maybe I should have started with The Star Fraction as the first book in the series?

I meant to list also books I've read in the last year by people I know. Books edited or written by lj'ers on my friends list include (obviously) Wondrous Beginnings edited by shsilver and Singularity Sky by autopope. Apart from them, Chris Stephen (Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic) and Anatol Lieven (America Right or Wrong) are friends from the political/journalism world, and Rebecca Levene (Strontium Dog: Bad Timing) was a friend at college though I've lost touch with her since. There are maybe a dozen others who I have at least chatted with, exchanged one or two emails with, or persuaded to autograph books, in particular four authors who I enjoyed hanging out with at last year's P-Con - Ken MacLeod, Juliet McKenna, Jim Hogan and Jon Courtenay Grimwood. It's all part of the dialogue between reader and writer...

Well, some of my entries from Friday seem to have been lost in the grand Chef 8 crash. One was a complaint about losing my lj's style which had attracted comments from annafdd and vnp, so presumably it will reappear in due course. The other was a books update, so I'll replicate it here and delete the original if it ever rematerialises. All three books were from my infinity plus list so notes here are brief.

3) Newton's Wake, by Ken MacLeod. ObLJ: dedicated to feorag and autopope. Enjoyed it, but not quite as much as I had hoped; the Balkan heat may have interfered with my concentration.

4) The Human Abstract, by George Mann. My expectations were low, but actually this is a good effort and my review will be largely positive.

5) Cartomancy by Mary Gentle. As it turns out I'd already read the two best stories here (one in another anthology and one on-line at infinity plus) but the others are at least acceptable and in some cases very good.

It's the place everyone's talking about.

Ken MacLeod reflects on Scottish history.