Learning
the Guest of Honour…
On his weblog The Early Days of a Better Nation, Ken MacLeod recounts a panel at last year’s Novacon where he was moved to cry from the audience: “I would be very worried if my kids read SF.” He explained that he feared an adolescent fascination with SF went hand in hand with alienation and insecurity.
“Yes, Ken,” said Peter Weston, “but you've improved .”
Personally, as someone who’s read SF for thirty years, I feel no more alienated and insecure than the next degenerate freak. In fact I’d go along with the balance of Weston’s thesis that SF does you good.
I’d add that Ken MacLeod’s writing certainly does you good. His latest work, Learning the World (pub. By Orbit in the UK and Tor in the US) is shortlisted for both the Arthur C. Clarke and BSFA awards, a decade on from the appearance of Ken’s first novel, The Star Fraction , which introduced the Christian fundamentalist state of … Islington. It began a sequence of novels which serve as a demonstration of how to get it right if you’re going to use your personal history and places you’ve lived in a work of fiction. All writers do this, of course, but it can jar horribly in inept hands, instead of adding to the romance and involvement. Ken also pulled off the demanding accomplishment of producing a sequence of books that each stands alone, set in different places, different times, that nonetheless lock together to form an entertaining future history of mankind and gave us the term fast folk .
I suspect the reason Ken’s work is successful may be because, as above, he’s suspicious of science fiction. He doesn’t take it for granted and feels the need to ask “what is this for?” even though it’s how he earns his living.
Meanwhile, Learning the World reprises the first contact theme, although the futuristic aliens are us, and the planet-bound twentieth century style civilisation is the aliens. There’s a comment on Amazon:
“The aliens are about as alien as your next door neighbour, but the future humans seem pretty strange.”
That summarises a lot of Ken’s best work as a leading exponent of one of SF’s most compelling themes that, pace Haldane, not only are we stranger than we imagine, we’re going to become stranger than we can imagine.
What’s more, Ken is as articulate and forthright (while remaining eminently approachable) in person as he is in print. A regular on the UK convention scene and at many Novacons, we’re delighted to have him as our Guest of Honour.
