Catching Up
01/02/2005 . Source: Ken Macleod 

Science fiction author Ken Macleod had recently finished his latest SF novel, provisionally titled Learning the World. Having recklessly agreed to write short stories for no less than four anthologies, three of them deadlined for next year, he now feels as if he is climbing the lower slopes of Mount Stross.

I've recently finished my latest SF novel, provisionally titled Learning the World and even apart from the looming Christmas I've not been short of things to do. Having recklessly agreed to write short stories for no less than four anthologies, three of them deadlined for next year, I feel as if I'm climbing the lower slopes of Mount Stross. I also have my next novel to think about. And I still haven't decided what it's going to be. I have three ideas knocking about in my head at the moment.

The first, on which I've actually done some research and note-taking, is The Bright Command (formerly pencilled in as The Dark Queen's Day), an addition to the still small sub-genre of Dark Lord revisionism. (That's where the multiracial horde with lowly accents and ugly faces who build noisome factories all over fantasyland are the good guys.

I like Lord of the Rings, don't get me wrong, but aren't there moments when it feels a bit like Gone With the Wind without the frocks?) It won't be fantasy. It'll have some fantasy look-and-feel, at least at first, but it's straight SF. The setting is a planet elsewhere in the infinite universe that is another Earth with a different history and geography, but with enough similarity in languages that I don't have to make up funny names.

The second, to which I've given some incoherent thought, is a kick-start to the hitherto non-existent genre of New Cosy Catastrophe: a good pint of Wyndham with a side of Ballardian bitter and twisted. The strapline for The Execution Channel is 'The War on Terror is over. Terror won.'

And finally, a mere evil gleam in my eye, is Storm the Sky!, an epic of the socialist industrialisation of the Solar system. Of course if I really was on the Stross curve I would write all three.

Speaking of Stross, I've been reading his forthcoming Accelerando, and it's really, really good. It has the sort of conceptual density you'd expect from someone taking cyberpunk as default, as read, as a done deal, the way cyberpunk took New Wave, New Wave took Golden Age, and Golden Age took Gernsback.

Charlie's book is about the rest of the century, and the changes he imagines seem sometimes alarmingly close, sometimes far away. It's when you see something new and strange in a familiar place that you realise far we've come and how fast we're going.

The Oxford Bar in Edinburgh is a favourite haunt of Inspector Rebus, hero of Ian Rankin's crime novels. It remains unspoiled by its fictional fame, of which it boasts by a few framed newspaper pages on its walls. It's the sort of comfortable, crowded, old-fashioned smoky pub that the Scottish Executive is bent on saving us from. Conversation is loud.

The other night as I stood at the bar getting drinks for myself and my wife I could see but not hear the ten o'clock news, and the pictures said it all: the happy faces of the Huygens team, and the first images of the surface of Titan. Rocks or lumps of ice shaped by nitrogen winds and ethane streams, seen on television, in a pub. Now that feels like the 21st century.

Ken Macleod

(c) Ken Macleod 2005