Ken MacLeod

In 1998 The Edge arranged interviews with Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod, on the publication of Banks' Inversions and MacLeod's The Cassini Division. Andrew Hedgecock drew the appropriate straw. This is the MacLeod interview. The Iain Banks interview is also on this site.

Ken MacLeod is the author of three elegantly plotted and inventive SF novels: The Star Fraction (1995), The Stone Canal (1996) and The Cassini Division (1998). His fiction combines rigorous analysis of technological and political possibility with philosophical speculation, vivid characterisation, and compelling storylines.

Raised on Lewis, one of the Western Isles, and in Greenock, Inverclyde, he studied Zoology at Glasgow University, researched in Biomechanics at Brunel University and worked as a computer analyst/programmer at Edinburgh University before becoming a full-time writer.

You're a comparatively late starter, is writing something you've always wanted to do?

I've always been attempting short stories, writing down ideas for novels and so on. Some of the scenes in The Stone Canal go way back to stuff I wrote in my teens and early twenties. At that time I didn't have the persistence or self belief to go on and develop it, and I guess it was partly Iain [Banks]'s growing irritation at my procrastination that eventually pushed me into it. First of all writing short stories, none of which got published for reasons which are quite obvious looking at them now, and then, when that didn't work, deciding that I was going to write a novel, without any hope of publication, just to prove to myself that I could write a novel. I'd just finished the attempt to be a scientist. I'd written up a thesis, many years after starting it, so I was confident I could write something of book length.

Did you always want to be a science fiction writer?

Yes, I'd always read SF and seen that as what I wanted to write, like a lot of people who are fans to start off with. I think every fan is someone who wants to be a writer of SF. I went through what may well be the usual thing of discovering SF in my early teens and reading virtually nothing else until my early twenties. When I finally got round to reading ordinary middlebrow contemporary fiction, I was quite astonished at the much greater emotional depth compared with SF. I was absolutely unprepared for something like John Braine's Room at the Top, a very standard middlebrow English novel, and when I read it at the age of about twenty or so it blew me away. And then I thought SF was a very arid literature by comparison. So I dropped it for quite a number of years and only got interested again when I started looking at Interzone, the first British SF magazine that had any staying power. Interzone got me interested in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, so I read their books and thought, yes, something is happening at last.

So Room at the Top was a revelation: which other mainstream novels have you enjoyed?

I was well impressed with William Boyd's The New Confessions and Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, a big historical novel about the French revolution which gives a sense of what a fight for political power is all about. And, from another genre, Kalinsky Heights by Lionel Davidson: I can pick up a thriller now and again and read it till my eyes are red, but I don't go out of my way to get them.

I was talking with Iain Banks about the Scottish tradition of genre-bending, and he expressed his admiration for Alasdair Gray's Lanark –

I do think this tradition goes back a long way. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote one of the classic modern fantasies with The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and that was pretty foundational. I think it relates to the peculiarity of Scotland as a country somewhat closer to its pre-industrial past, even in a generational sense, than large parts of England. I only have to go back two generations to my grandparents and indeed, I really shouldn't say this, to my parents, to get traces of Celtic superstition. These folk elements are part of it. Another part of it, going further back on a rather similar theme to Dr Jekyll, there's James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which deals with the same duality and polarity. And the other shared element in those books is the intense Calvinism.

Which SF authors do you admire?

That Scottish writer, Iain Banks. Gibson; Sterling; Greg Egan I greatly admire for the way he'll take an idea and extend it tellingly beyond what you'd expect; Stephen Baxter; Paul McAuley; Kim Stanley Robinson, the hard SF imagination being applied in a humanistic way; and Peter F Hamilton – I'm just astonished at the scale of that guy's imagination. That's not to say I've read all of their novels, it would take a lot more time than I have. But the ones I have read I'm thoroughly impressed with.

How do you feel SF is reviewed? Can critics cope with genre fiction?

Iain and I see literary fiction as a genre in itself (we call it LF) whose critics aren't qualified to tackle SF. It's rare to see SF books reviewed in the broadsheets, and when they are it's often at a level of deep incomprehension and misunderstanding. This has not always been the case: looking at the blurbs on the backs of old paperbacks, many of the SF works of the 1960s do seem to have been reviewed competently in The Guardian and the TLS. They wouldn't touch these things nowadays.

So you rely on specialist magazines for coverage?

Yes. The reviews of The Stone Canal and The Star Fraction in Interzone were good, thorough reviews, but very critical: they were certainly not over-enthusiastic. I learned a lot by thinking about them. That's what reviews should do. I'm not looking for them to be an adjunct to the publicity department of my publisher! The capacity of SF and fantasy magazines to produce useful criticism has greatly increased. I remember the wonderful reviews you used to get in New Worlds Quarterly by John Clute and M John Harrison, often very scathing about traditional SF and often very wittily written too. They said very clearly: 'We're not going to take rubbish anymore, we're not part of a happy band of brothers who are going to stand shoulder to shoulder and praise each other to the skies.' That's what Clute, much later, called 'the protocol of excessive candour'. And that protocol has served SF very well in the last few decades.

And left it with a very well-informed audience?

Yes, so the fact that the broadsheets don't give SF any decent reviews is much less damaging to the genre than it otherwise would be. The quality of the critics in SF now is increasingly high, and the informed, articulate and committed audience isn't interested in what the TLS has to say. They want to hear from the critics they respect.

Is there still a healthy audience out there for SF?

Yes, but there's a much vaster audience for fantasy and horror: those are very much more visible and marketable forms. When I was a kid the Pan Books of Horror were hugely popular among my contemporaries at school. The future of SF depends on the future of reality: my general feeling is that we are in a period of reduced expectations and lower horizons. The choice before SF is either to accommodate that or to fight against it, and I hope it contributes to fighting against it. I think the form will be healthy to the extent that it does that: it can raise people's sights in terms of confidence about our own capacities, politically, socially and technologically. At present every new technological advance is greeted with worry, concern, anxious editorials in the serious press and the foundation of an ethics committee.

In your latest novel, The Cassini Division, there's a situation of world anarchy and a sense of everything being possible socially and politically. Were you influenced by the anarchist pirate bands in Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night?

I've never read Burroughs, but I think I'm coming to this from a completely different angle. The picture of the world in The Cassini Division, a socialist Earth with 30 billion people living in an easy nanotech environment, came from several sources. One was the old Socialist Party of Great Britain pamphlets: they wrote a few short but detailed descriptions of how they thought the world could be organised without money, states or trade.

Is this How We Live And How We Could Live?

Yes, and Socialism as a Practical Alternative. In a way the skeletal framework of a society described in The Cassini Division is based on this. They have 'The Social Administration' which deals with things but doesn't have any authority as such, it doesn't have any power over anybody. This draws on the speculations of people like Eric Drexler, on nanotechnology conferring terrifying power on individuals. So, on the surface, we have a world of peace and plenty, but its fundamental basis is mutually assured destruction. Everyone is nice to everyone else because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

This ethos reminded me of the set-up at the end of Tiger Tiger by Alfred Bester.

Oh yes! The power of Pyre-E. Michael Moorcock did a wonderful article on libertarianism and SF. He wondered why so many anarchists enjoy Heinlein and Tolkien: he found this trend quite inexplicable and abhorrent. He gave the example of what Gulliver Foyle in Tiger Tiger does with Pyre-E. He gives it to everybody, saying: 'Make what you can of it.' And, yes, that's definitely the spirit behind The Cassini Division too.

When you write SF are you conscious of its deeply conservative tradition? Are you writing in reaction to, say, the Heinlein stuff, or are you just ploughing your own furrow?

I'm not really writing in reaction. It's not like Iain's comment about wanting to re-conquer the moral high ground of galactic empire for the left. I have a softer spot for the old militaristic gung-ho Heinlein and Niven characters than he does. I wanted to write stories that put fundamentally socialist views in a way that would meet the criticisms of libertarians. I never had any hesitation about acknowledging my debts to libertarians of various kinds, and my anarchist friends seem to like the books as much as my socialist friends.

You present a terrifying vision of a balkanised world in The Stone Canal. Is this a prediction or an immediate and fearful response to the difficulty of the 'New World Order'?

You've put your finger on it. That's what it is all about. 'If this goes on . . .' It's a dreadful warning and only a prediction in that sense. And if this does go on, then it's not a difficult prediction to make. The background to The Star Fraction, which also became the background to The Stone Canal, was written with a huge emotional charge of fear at what was going on in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The images in those books of the future of Britain and Europe came from the destruction of Yugoslavia and the Gulf War, events which represented the end of the world I had grown up in. That is what underlies the sense of anger and loss in The Star Fraction.

And a reaction against Francis Fukuyama's ludicrous 'End of History' thesis?

Yes, there's little evidence of history coming to an end as far as I can see.

And what about the domestic political scene? Is there much for you to react against here?

Some of what I've reacted against have been the follies of the left, as well as the crimes of the right, and indeed the crimes of the left too. So no change there, there's plenty to get annoyed about. But I did enjoy election night. We went wild. We had a huge party with Iain and all our friends. Another champagne cork popping with every Tory bastion that fell.

So where you still up for the fall of Portillo?

We were, yes. But it was more a celebration of what was being swept away than any enthusiasm for the new order.

Your first three books were laden with political discussion. How did you manage to get them published?

I never had anyone raising any question about that at all. The only things that were cut were cut on the basis of literary faults; long, boring discussions in pubs for example, particularly in the first few drafts of The Star Fraction. Too much was being conveyed by conversation. Still is probably. But no-one has ever suggested cuts for any other reason.

I imagined a stereotype of a tyrannical editor saying: 'No, no all this sort of stuff has to go'. Are they more broad-minded about political debate because they know audiences are receptive to it?

I'm sure the tyrannical editor exists, but I've never encountered one. People read SF for non-literary reasons as well. You can enjoy a discussion in an SF novel in a way that you wouldn't necessarily do in a mainstream novel or a thriller. The only situation where politics seems to make it difficult to get published is in the US, where the issue does come up: books are seen as too British and too political, British politics are deemed to be incomprehensible to US readers, and so on. The really funny thing about that, the irony, is that the readership I've had in the US has been very enthusiastic. The Star Fraction won the Prometheus award for the best libertarian SF novel of the year, and The Stone Canal has just been a finalist for the Prometheus this year. The people who write about them on the Internet, the ones that get the few copies that get through, have been very enthusiastic too.

But people in the UK forget that there are socialist and libertarian traditions in the US, underneath the stereotypical reactionary politics.

There's certainly a stronger tradition of investigative journalism there, in magazines like Covert Action. This partly feeds into the American obsession with conspiracy theories, and the left is very much wrapped up in that as well. Chomsky does a lot of very thoroughly documented stuff on how the media handles events and what the ruling class is up to. He finds the actual protocols of the ruling class hidden away in publicly accessible archives and digs them out. He tells us what the grand plans for the 'New World Order' are. We don't have quite so much of that in Britain. The only British parallel would be with Robin Banks' journal Lobster – which, if he'd been working in the US, would be much more widely known than it is here. At a time like this it's very important to have people who dig into what is actually going on. Perhaps it's an even more vital activity than developing political theory or building parties. Maybe you can raise people's consciousness more effectively with facts than theories.

You're happy to throw all this complex material into the melting pot, and there's a tremendous amount going on in your books.

Well, somewhere out there is the ideal reader who is going to get all these allusions.

But can the spectacular surface narratives of your SF books carry the weight of the philosophical discussion and political debate that you're trying to present?

I think so, and I continue to believe the SF form is ideal for it. If you think about issues of social engineering, which raise deep philosophical questions, you almost inevitably find yourself thinking along science fictional lines. If you imagine a society transformed, you're already doing the groundwork of SF: you can't run thought experiments about AI [Artificial Intelligence], for example, without doing SF.

What do you feel is the prognosis for the development of technologies such as AI?

In The Cassini Division I show some hostility to AIs taking over the world. I'm actually appalled by the vision of mankind being replaced by machines. To be honest, I don't for a second believe the idea of machine consciousness. In my books I use it as a given, but it is just a literary device. For example, in The Stone Canal, the narrative never lets you into the head of a human being, just the machines: but I don't think in reality that we're going to have to confront these questions for hundreds of years, if ever. AI is always 'just twenty years away'. It's been like that for as long as I can remember.

You worked in computing at the University of Edinburgh . . .

It's not quite as glamorous as it sounds. I was doing systems development work, systems analysis and applications maintenance programming for management information services. I wasn't doing anything high tech or the AI work that Edinburgh is world famous for.

But you worked in bio-mechanics research at Brunel. You started out as a scientist and your books show an obvious relish for possibilities in genetics, bio-mechanics and AI. To what extent did your research background inform your novels?

I don't know a great deal about these fields in technical terms: to be honest, I've just got a New Scientist reader's knowledge. The only real way my experience at University and in programming gets into the books is perhaps a slight feel for what these areas are like to work in. In The Star Fraction, I took Brunel University forward to the 21st Century. I had great fun describing the campus after all these events had taken place. It was still basically the same ghastly Campus.

It's a weird place, like something out of a JG Ballard novel – a bizarre, windblown site. Did it also inform your vision of London collapsing into chaos in The Cassini Division?

Not really, I've always had a penchant for cities collapsing into chaos and ruin. It's because where I grew up originally, on the island of Lewis, you're living in the ruins of a rural civilisation: there are buried walls everywhere and old roads that nobody uses anymore. There's a very strong sense of a past that, however backward it was, was in some ways grander in the scale of what it did than what you have on the islands today. There was probably a higher population and more cattle. More crops were grown too. And then I moved to Greenock when I was ten: that was a town which was rapidly de-industrialising so there were abandoned factories, old railway lines, sites overgrown with Willow Herb. These images sink into your mind, especially when you play in these places when you're a kid.

You write very entertainingly about student life in Glasgow in The Stone Canal. Is that autobiographical?

In part it is autobiographical, but it's obviously highly coloured. The only bits that are literally true are trivial bits, little lines of conversation and so on. In the main, the characters are not based on anyone that I knew.

Were you ever tempted to turn this material into a mainstream comic novel?

Since I started writing SF, and particularly since writing The Stone Canal and finding that I was enjoying doing the scenes set in the 1970s, it occurred to me that I would quite like to write a straight novel. One idea I had was to write a contemporary novel with the character David Reid from The Stone Canal, but about his life now. The novel itself would have a feeling of closure, and it would just be a neat idea (as the Americans say) to have some readers knowing that he went on to live hundreds of years after the 1990s.

All three of your books to date have eccentric characters and absurd technologies, like 'fundamentalist approved software'. How do you walk the line between having fun with the conventions of the genre and wrecking the premise upon which the story depends?

I really don't know. I hope I do it intuitively. What happens, to confess the gory details, is that I get an idea which makes me laugh and I write it down. In fact I write down just about every idea I have, whether it's relevant to what I'm writing or otherwise. Then I look for a way to work it in smoothly, and quite often the humour of the idea triggers off some other associations. Humour is quite often about incongruity, and at a very high level these novels are about incongruities: you've got the communist mercenary in The Star Fraction and the egoist-individualist-anarchist in The Stone Canal, who keeps on acquiring more and more responsibility: he gets a girlfriend, a wife, kids, a mini-state to look after and, ultimately, he's got the whole world on his shoulders. The Cassini Division has its own ironies and incongruities embedded in the nature of its society and I think these situations tend to spark off humorous associations which can them be worked into the storylines rather than simply being embedded in them as discrete jokes. They can look like they've evolved naturally out of the situation. Actually, they haven't. And, for me, the humour is certainly part of the pleasure of writing.

What inspired you to pepper your books with motifs, like planetary colonies, which had been highly unfashionable for a good few years?

I remember an SF panel discussion where Paul McAuley was holding forth on what he called 'dead tech' – stuff you wouldn't dare put in SF any more like robots, warp drives, wormholes and planetary colonies. Then he looked at me and laughed and said: 'But of course you're British so you do it all ironically, so that's all right.' I think the only real dead tech is those wondrous things from the 1950s like tractor beams – the wackiest stuff SF has ever come up with. But I think what was behind that, in a social sense, was that we went from a period of gloom and doom at the end of the 1970s to a time when things began to pick up a bit in the 1980s. For people involved in Information Technology and the new service industries, a book like Neuromancer made sense. The guy who was programming the computers in our office always talked like he was getting around cyberspace. So there was a vocabulary developing, even around the simple systems of the 1980s. The technological speculations in The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division came from reading people who were both scientists and science fiction fans.

Do you think your books would make good films, or would all your carefully constructed irony and wit be swamped by extravagant imagery?

You'd have to translate that stuff into a different cinematic dimension, like in the film of the French Lieutenant's Woman where they handled the subtle post-modernist layering of story and storyteller by doing something different from the book. They had a film within a film rather than two alternative versions of the same narrative. In the film version of Catch 22 a lot of the humour of the book was lost at one level, but they achieved some interesting new ways of using the jokes and Heller's deeply satirical consciousness. A snippet I remember from the film, which wasn't in the book, was a scene in which Yossarian is in the office of one of his officers and there's a portrait of Stalin. It's only as the camera pans round that you realise there are also portraits of Churchill and Roosevelt. •

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