Ken MacLeod interviewed

Scottish SF author Ken MacLeod may be a best buddy with Iain Banks, but he's now been firmly established as a rising star in the science fiction firmament in his right.

He chats with Stephen Hunt about why he's trying to find time to read Perdido Street Station, his new book, Engine City, and why most of the futures are capitalist … but they're terrifying!

Are you currently writing full time now, or are you still fitting in the odd day-job?

KM. I've been writing full-time since the beginning of 1997.

When and why did you begin writing? When did you first consider yourself a writer?

KM. I started writing fiction almost as soon as I discovered SF, in my early teens, and wrote some terrible short stories and made lots of plans and notes for novels, none of which I wrote.

But the notes, the ideas, the characters and even some of the titles turned out to be usable later. I didn't actually consider myself a writer until The Star Fraction got accepted.

How has becoming a published author impacted your lifestyle?

KM. It's got me out of the office workplace, which - apart from having colleagues - I don't miss a bit. My non-work lifestyle has been affected a lot less, though being invited to cons is nice.

How do you see the future of science fiction literature in the 21st century?

KM. It has to periodically revitalise itself by turning its attention sharply to what's going on in the world, and to emergent technologies. It also has to aim high in literary terms. This is perfectly possible even in very straightforward, popular forms: Lois Macmaster Bujold is a shining example of that.

Do you tend to read the work of many other SF/F authors?

KM. Yes, and I wish I could read more. The trouble is, I don't like to read SF while I'm actually writing SF, and when I'm not writing SF I'm doing other things. At the top of my 'to read' SF/F stack right now are _Perdido Street Station_ and _The Years of Rice and Salt_.

What's your favourite SF/F movies and TV?

KM. Movies: Blade Runner tops my list of great SF movies. After that, and in no particular order: 2001, Starship Troopers - really! - Alien, Repo Man, The Quiet Earth, Night of the Comet, Trancers.

I'm too disorganised to be a regular watcher of television series, especially ones that get their schedules messed around because the TV companies couldn't care less about SF, but the bits I saw of Babylon 5 were impressive. I liked some of The X-Files, especially at the beginning.

Do you use an agent and if so, who?

KM. Mic Cheetham. She's wonderful. Iain Banks says she protects her writers like a lioness defending her cubs. If a publisher's rights department tries something on, no matter what, Mic pounces before the ink is dry.

How long did you spend in rejection letter hell before you were first published?

KM. No time at all - Mic read the third draft of The Star Fraction, made me see what was wrong with it, and sold the next draft to the first editor she took it to - John Jarrold, who was then at Legend.

Did you always want to be a writer?

KM. Not seriously, no. I started writing SF short stories in my teens, packed with great original ideas like the alien planet that turns out to be Earth. But basically I wanted to be a scientist, after it became clear that becoming a pirate wasn't a career option.

Where, when, and how do you write?

KM. I write either at my computer at home, or in pubs and cafes or outdoors. When I'm outside I write in longhand or on a Handspring with a Targus keyboard. I try to get my writing done in the morning, but as deadlines loom this isn't always possible.

What are you reading now?

Did you come up through the writing short-stories route, or did you get published in novel-form first?

KM. The Star Fraction was my first commercially published story. I'd tried writing short stories before that, but they all got rejected. Since then I've had a few short stories published, but none of them have been in SF magazines.

They've been in much better-paying markets, thank you very much. Well, thank Mic Cheetham actually.

If Cosmonaut Keep was going to be made into a film, who would be your dream producers/actors for the role?

KM. That's a very interesting question, because I've never given it a moment's thought. The answer depends on which strand of the novel was made into a film, because I don't think you could make a film of both the near-future and the far future strands.

The near-future section would work fine with lots of young unknowns and a few veterans. Maybe the ideal director for that would be Paul Veerhoeven - there's a lot of online and media stuff going on in the background, and he's good at using that to relentlessly take the piss out of the societies in his films.

Do you ever attend SF-cons, and what has your experience with them been?

KM. Yes, I certainly do, and it's all been good. The first con I went to was Intersection, the Worldcon in Glasgow in 1995. The launch party for The Star Fraction was there, the book was just out, and nobody apart from my friends there had heard of me.

But Legend had done a great job on publicity - postcards advertising the book were in the freebie bags - and the SF world, fandom and professional, is endlessly welcoming. I met lots of people there that I know to this day.

Would you ever consider writing in a different genre, or are you content with SFF?

KM. I have some ideas for mainstream novels, and for some sort of alternate history or fantasy novels.

What are your hobbies?

KM. You're telling me there are writers who have hobbies?

Do you think there is a distinct style of Scottish SF which is developing along a different path to English SF?

KM. No. Scottish mainstream fiction is distinctive, and so is Scottish fantasy - full of doppelgangers and dualities: Jekyll and Hyde, Glasgow and Unthank. But there are just too few SF writers in Scotland to make up a sample. This may change: there are a lot of new writers on the way.

What advice would you give to budding SF writers?

KM. When you have an idea, write it down. Keep your notes, especially the ones you make when you're young. And keep writing, that's the only way to learn.

What age did you get into science fiction?

KM. I got into SF when I was twelve or thirteen. The first real SF I read was Alan E. Nourse's Rocket to Limbo. It had all that Golden-Age skiffy stuff: generation ships, FTL drives, and psi powers. 'The Koenig Drive had given Man the stars.' Wow! After that I read every bit of SF I could lay my hands on. The Out of this World anthologies of magazine SF short stories, uncensored but marketed for young people, and in respectable school libraries, were for me a terrific introduction to the whole field.

Are you from the 'writing tightly against a full outline school' or the 'make it up as you go along' school?

KM. I fall uncomfortably between these schools. At the moment I'm trying to make a fairly detailed, chapter by chapter outline for my next novel.

How much do you base your characters against people you actually know?

KM. I don't put real people in fiction, except as walk-on parts - Charlie Stross appears, fifty years older and still the same, in Cosmonaut Keep - but some of the characters have elements of real people, and some minor incidents actually happened.

When it comes to your drafts, how much do you tend to re-write?

KM. Like most people with a word processor I re-write as I go along.

What other books do you have planned?

KM. There's the space opera I'm just starting, and what I do after that depends on how it shapes up.

Of the work you've penned, what's your favourite novel to date?

KM. The Stone Canal.

KM. Mainly enormous changes at the last minute. My editor, Tim Holman at Orbit, is very good at spotting plot holes. When he'd read the first draft of The Sky Road, he asked me a question which completely floored me because I hadn't imagined it could possibly occur to anyone. Fortunately huge plot changes can be made by changing remarkably little in the text.

Of the feedback you have heard people come back on about your novels, what's your favourites?

KM. Once I got a letter out of the blue from a guy who said he was a hacker and had read The Star Fraction, and was impressed with its accuracy. That was funny, because he knew what he was talking about, and I didn't, not really.

But what I find most gratifying is when people write or email to say that reading my books has got them interested in political philosophy or anarchism or something like that.

What amount of research do you do for your books? Does the science part of the fiction come easy to you?

KM. I tend to work in material I already know, from my science education and from reading New Scientist and skimming Nature. When I want to research something specific I make sure I overdo it, so that even if I don't know much, I know more than I put in the book.

For example, for Cosmonaut Keep I used what I knew from zoology and marine biology, pulled in the plasma sail idea from a recent New Scientist, drew on some stuff I'd read recently about new versions of socialism, and read The Dreamland Chronicles and studied lots of websites about Area 51. The squids in starships idea was one I'd had about twenty years ago: a case in point for the 'keep your notes' tip.

How much of an influence on your science fiction work has your friendship with Iain Banks been?

How long does it take you to write a novel?

KM. The actual writing takes four or five months. The planning and thinking about it beforehand, and the tidying up afterwards, seem to take most of the rest of the year.

What computer languages can you code?

KM. JCL, COBOL, PL/1, SQL, Oracle - but I haven't written a line of code since I quit the day job.

Do you think there's a sword and sorcery novel somewhere inside you?

KM. I doubt it. Claymores and second sight, maybe.

How do you feel the momentum of your career is building at the moment?

KM. It's fine, and it'll stay fine as long as I can write new stuff that builds on rather than repeats what I've done already.

In a world dominated by rampant consumerism and capitalism, how has the genre reacted to your portrayal of a largely socialist future?

KM. What portrayal? The only novel of mine which portrays a socialist future is The Cassini Division. And I knocked that one down in The Sky Road. Most of the futures are capitalist, but they're terrifying! It's sort of like cyberpunk but with politics, instead of just zaibatsus and ninjas and everybody just taking it.

How do you tend to use the internet?

KM. I waste far too much time on it - one reason why writing on the PDA or in longhand in the pub (over coffees, I hasten to add) can be more productive than writing at home - but I find it useful for research and for keeping in touch with people I like and for sounding off.

Have you ever thought of trying your hand in other genres - crime, history, thrillers etc?

KM. I've thought of history and technothrillers, but I would need to do a lot of research for them.

Some of your books have very British settings; how well received has this been with US readers and publishers?

KM. The British settings haven't been in any way a barrier; some of the more obscure British political allusions, particularly to the far left, have baffled some readers.

Do you think there could have ever been a parallel universe where communism wasn't hijacked by Stalin and the monsters of his Id, and instead took a kinder, more democratic and successful path?

KM. I don't agree that the monsters of Stalin's Id had much to do with it. Stalin was a depressingly normal guy, and he had the support of the great bulk of the apparatchiks, and of what remained of the working class. That is not to deny the heavy responsibility of Stalin for the sheer scale and irrationality of repression in the thirties.

A different path could have been taken. If socialism is to have any future it has to learn every bitter lesson from what went wrong; including the possibility that socialism is what went wrong.

If you could be reincarnated as any figure in history, who would you plump for?

KM. Nobody I can think of. I would rather be reincarnated in the future.

What's your new novel Engine City about?

KM. It's about a man who tries to change a civilization older than China and richer than America, and about the other people who have to deal with the results. Executive summary, for people who know the characters: Volkov subverts Nova Babylonia, and a hundred years later Matt Cairns invades New Babylon from space, then things start to get strange.

Politics often seems to play a large role in your novels; is this something you do consciously, or does it leak in as you write?

KM. On the one hand it's conscious, on the other hand I can't help it, because I have political passions. Mostly rage.

What new sf delights for us are you working on at the moment?

KM. I'm working on a stand-alone space opera called Newton's Wake. Its backstory begins with a very nasty Singularity in the not too distant future, and the story itself escalates to increasingly vast scales.

At the moment I'm in the middle of a major rethink of it, which came about while writing the detailed outline and finding my original conception wasn't working. So I'd better get on with it.

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