The launch for Ken Maclreod’s new novel (not actually on sale till July) went well.

As well as Ken, Charles Stross and Andrew J Wilson gave readings and there was then a question and answer session for the three panellists.

The subjects discussed were what do you think might go wrong next (ie what disasters/problems might be coming soon) and, interestingly, what will go right?

The demise of newspapers and the subsequent loss of democratic oversight of government, enhanced rubbishing of science and the possibility of a new virus all entered the first category.

Reasons to be cheerful?

War kills fewer people as a percentage of the world population now than in any previous century and affluence is likely to increase. (Abject poverty is at its lowest percentage ever.)

This was the section where Ken raised the biggest laugh of the night when he opined (I paraphrase) that, all things considered, in the bigger scheme of things a few small nuclear wars wouldn’t be all that much to be bothered about.

The launch of Ken MacLeod’s new novel The Restoration Game will take place on Wed 17/3/10 at The Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh. I’m hoping to make it but may arrive late as the event is starting at 7 pm.

This has apparently been booked for some time but due to a shift in its schedule the book itself will not be published till July, I think; but Ken will be reading from it on the night. A few other Edinburgh SF luminaries will also appear.

Someone got to my recent blog post by searching in google for scottish science fiction. The Wikipedia page under that heading is woefully inadequate while providing some historical perspective but I found this interesting link to an address by Alan McGillivray to The Association For Scottish Literary Studies which he gave in 2000. He naturally focuses on Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod as the only Scottish SF writers around at that time (though my A Son Of The Rock had appeared by then) and looks forward to the growth of Scottish SF which has, in fact, now occurred.

While reading it I realised that I had unaccountably forgotten to mention in my post the novel But’n’Ben A-Go-Go by Matthew Fitt. This SF novel is singular (and spectacular) in that it is written entirely in Scots. That certainly beat my attempt at Scottish SF into a cocked hat as I wrote/write in English. My apologies to Matthew for the omission.

Throughout the 1950s, the early 1960s, through the late 60s efflorescence of the New Wave and into the 1970s and 80s a stream of English authors came to prominence in the SF field and had novels published in Britain. To my mind there was a clear distinction in the type of books all these authors were producing compared to those emanating from across the Atlantic and that certain characteristics distinguished the work emanating from either of these publication areas. While Bob Shaw was a notable Northern Irish proponent of the form during this period and Christopher Evans flew the flag for Wales from 1980 something kept nagging at me as I felt the compulsion to begin writing. Where, in all of this, were the Scottish writers of SF? And would Scottish authors produce a different kind of SF again?

Until Iain M Banks’s Consider Phlebas, 1987, contemporary Science Fiction by a Scottish author was so scarce as to be invisible. It sometimes seemed that none was being published. As far as Scottish contribution to the field went in this period only Chris Boyce, who was joint winner of a Sunday Times SF competition and released a couple of SF novels on the back of that achievement, Angus McAllister, who produced the misunderstood The Krugg Syndrome and the excellent but not SF The Canongate Strangler plus the much underrated Graham Dunstan Martin offered any profile at all but none of them could be described as prominent. And their works tended to be overlooked by the wider SF world.

There was, certainly, the success of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark in 1981 but that novel was more firmly in the Scottish tradition of fantasy and/or the supernatural rather than SF (cf David Lindsay’s A Voyage To Arcturus, 1920) and was in any case so much of a tour de force that it hardly seemed possible to emulate it; or even touch its foothills.

David Pringle noted the dearth of Scottish SF writers in his introduction to the anthology Nova Scotia where he argued that the seeming absence of Scottish SF authors was effectively an illusion. They were being published, only not in the UK. They (or their parents) had all emigrated to America. Though he has since partly resiled on that argument, it does of course invite the question. Why did this not happen to English SF writers?

It was in this relatively unpromising scenario that I conceived the utterly bizarre notion of writing not just Science Fiction but Scottish Science Fiction and in particular started to construct an SF novel that could only have been written by a Scot. Other novels may have been set in Scotland or displayed Scottish sensibilities but as far as I know I’m the only person who deliberately set out to write a novel of Scottish SF.

It could of course simply be that there was so little SF from Scotland being published because hardly anyone Scottish was writing SF or submitting it to publishers. But there were undoubtedly aspirants; to which this lack of role models might have been an off-putting factor. I myself was dubious about submitting to English publishers as they might not be wholly in tune with SF written from a Scottish perspective. I also thought Scottish publishers, apparently absorbed with urban grittiness, would look on it askance. I may have been completely wrong in these assumptions but I think them understandable given the circumstances. There is still no Scottish publisher of speculative fiction.

With Iain M Banks and Consider Phlebas the game changed. Suddenly there was a high profile Scottish SF writer; suddenly the barrier was not so daunting. And Phlebas was Space Opera, the sort of thing I was used to reading in American SF, albeit Banks had a take on it far removed from right wing puffery of the sort most Americans produced. Phlebas was also distant from most English SF – a significant proportion of which was seemingly fixated with either J G Ballard or Michael Moorcock or else communing with nature, and in general seemed reluctant to cleave the paper light years. Moreover, Banks sold SF books by the bucketload.

There was, though, the caveat that he had been published in the mainstream first and was something of a succés de scandal. (Or hype – they can both work.)

[There is, by the way, an argument to be had that all of Banks’s fiction could be classified as genre: whether the genre be SF, thriller, in the Scottish sentimental tradition, or even all three at once. It is also arguable that Banks made Space Opera viable once more for any British SF writer. Stephen Baxter’s, Peter Hamilton’s and Alastair Reynolds’s novel debuts post-date 1987.]

As luck would have it the inestimable David Garnett soon began to make encouraging noises about the short stories I was sending him, hoping to get into, at first Zenith, and then New Worlds.

I finally fully clicked with him when I sent The Face Of The Waters, whose manuscript he red-penned everywhere. By doing that, though, he nevertheless turned me into a writer overnight and the much longer rewrite was immeasurably improved. (He didn’t need to sound quite so surprised that I’d made a good job of it, though.)

That one was straightforward SF which could have been written by anyone. Next, though, he accepted This Is The Road (even if he asked me to change its title rather than use the one I had chosen) which was thematically Scottish. I also managed to sneak Closing Time into the pages of the David Pringle edited Interzone – after the most grudging acceptance letter I’ve ever had. That one was set in Glasgow though the location was not germane to the plot. The idea was to alternate Scottish SF stories with ones not so specific but that soon petered out.

The novel I had embarked on was of course A Son Of The Rock and it was David Garnett who put me in touch with Orbit. On the basis of the first half of it they showed interest.

Six months on, at the first Glasgow Worldcon,* 1995, Ken MacLeod’s Star Fraction appeared. Another Scottish SF writer. More Space Opera with a non right wing slant. A month or so later I finally finished A Son Of The Rock, sent it off and crossed my fingers. It was published eighteen months afterwards.

I think I succeeded in my aim. The Northern Irish author Ian McDonald (whose first novel Desolation Road appeared in 1988) in any case blurbed it as “a rara avis, a truly Scottish SF novel” and there is a sense in which A Son Of The Rock was actually a State Of Scotland novel disguised as SF.

Unfortunately the editor who accepted it (a man who, while English, bears the impeccably Scottish sounding name of Colin Murray) moved on and his successor wasn’t so sympathetic to my next effort – even if Who Changes Not isn’t Scottish SF in the same uncompromising way. It is only Scottish obliquely.

So; is there now a distinctive beast that can be described as Scottish Science Fiction? With the recent emergence of a wheen of Scottish writers in the speculative field there may at last be a critical mass which allows a judgement.

Banks’s Culture novels can be seen as set in a socialist utopia. Ken MacLeod has explicitly explored left wing perspectives in his SF and, moreover, used Scotland as a setting. Hal Duncan has encompassed – even transcended – all the genres of the fantastic in the two volumes of The Book Of All Hours, Alan Campbell constructed a dark fantastical nightmare of a world in The Deepgate Codex books. Gary Gibson says he writes fiction pure and simple and admits of no national characteristics to his work – but it is Space Opera – while Mike Cobley is no Scot Nat (even if The Seeds Of Earth does have “Scots in Spa-a-a-ce.”)

My answer?

Probably not, even though putative practitioners are more numerous now – especially if we include fantasy. For these are separate writers doing their separate things. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether they have over-arching themes or are in any way comparable.

PS. Curiously, on the Fantastic Fiction website, Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds are flagged as British – as are Bob Shaw, Ian McDonald, Christopher Evans and Mike Cobley – while all the other Scottish authors I’ve mentioned are labelled “Scotland.” I don’t know what this information is trying to tell us.

*For anyone who hasn’t met the term, Science Fiction Conventions are known colloquially as Cons. There are loads of these every year, most pretty small and some quite specialised. The Worldcon is the most important, an annual SF convention with attendees from all over the globe. It’s usually held in the US but has been in Britain thrice (Glasgow 2, Brighton 1) and once in Japan, to my knowledge. The big annual British SF convention is known as Eastercon because it takes place over the Easter weekend.

Orbit, 2009, 368p

With The Night Sessions Ken MacLeod strides firmly onto SF detective territory and adds his own unique twist. Following on from The Execution Channel (to which it is not a sequel) it is the second of Ken Macleod’s forays into near (well, nearish) future thrillerdom and features acts of terrorism and the police efforts to solve them. It could also be firmly described as Scottish SF as it is set almost wholly in Scotland.

[Aside: Even since before I started this blog I have been pondering writing a piece about Scottish SF. With this book as a spur I may inflict it on you soon.]

There are excursions into New Zealand, though, while solettas – which reduce global warming by directly screening the sun – and a couple of space elevators provide Science Fictional colouring. Another important element is the inclusion of robots/AIs. The police have robot assistants called lekis which, while large, seem to be spider-like, or tentacular at any rate, as well as a collection of smaller bug-like machinery which can infiltrate small places and provide points of view linked in to the police communications system. Other robots are revealed to be useful in construction in space.

The events of the book take part in a world where wars over oil (aka the Faith Wars) have defeated the forces of organised religion – at Armageddon/Megiddo no less – and made these organisations marginal at best, if not quite underground operations. The first terrorist victim is a Catholic priest, the second, in an echo of Covenanting times, an Episcopalian Bishop of St Andrews.

The plot concerns the getting of religion by a group of robots, given the word by a Presbyterian in New Zealand whose sermons – a neat play on the word sessions by MacLeod here – are relayed in real time to members of a sect (of the Third Covenant) in Linlithgow.

As is to be expected given the subject matter, MacLeod’s knowledge of biblical texts is to the fore. There are also some SF in-jokes which the casual reader (if there is such a beast) may miss.

The Night Sessions is a fine blend of the SF and thriller genres. The writing flows, the clues are placed where they are needed and (spoiler alert?) the denouement depends on one of the SF elements. MacLeod could obviously handle a straight detective novel with no difficulty but doing so would perhaps not have allowed him to explore the theme of religion in quite the same way.

Time was when the Science Fiction crime/detective story was a rarity. This may have been because there is a fundamental disparity between the two forms. In Science Fiction the essence is that the tale is of something changed or changing, by the end of the tale the world is no longer the same. In crime fiction, by contrast, order – normality – is restored, the world is made safe again. There is also a necessary withholding of information in the crime story (or at least a need to disguise it.) In Science Fiction the more information is granted to the reader the more real the changed world seems, the more we believe in it.

The first truly successful SF crime stories that I recall were written by Larry Niven and featured teleportation booths. In A Kind of Murder the resolution and solving of the crime depends solely on a ramification of this SF element. Niven then went on to write novels featuring the detective Gil the ARM Hamilton who as the result of an accident lost one physical arm but then developed a psychic one which he subsequently used in his investigations.

Perhaps because of the infiltration of so much of what was SF into both the modern world and the modern detective story/thriller, especially televisually; perhaps because the conventions of the detective story are so embedded, the SF crime story is nowadays no longer so problematic and SF detectives are far from rare.

These thoughts were prompted by the SF book which I am reading at the moment, The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod. It has elements of the detective story and part of the action takes place in Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is a marvellous setting for detective/horror/supernatural fiction as it is so wonderfully Gothic. There is the unmissable landmark of the castle brooding on its rock, Arthur’s Seat, Calton Hill with its curious, apparently unfinished buildings in the classical style, the bizarre under and over layout of the streets just off the Royal Mile, the contrast between the Old Town and the New (and nowadays the peripheral estates.) The Old Town itself has so many mediæval associations – not to mention underground warrens – several atmospheric churchyards with attached cemeteries and of course there is the bodysnatching/Burke and Hare connection; all of which make it almost perfect for the unfolding of skullduggery of various sorts. Glasgow, by contrast, while its estates are bleak, has only the area by the Cathedral which is truly old. Its streets tend to be more grid like – with no dark, tunnel-like thoroughfares analogous to The Cowgate (unless you count the Hielanman’s Umbrella.) For all its energy and (misplaced?) reputation for violence it seems so much more prosaic a place, more bustling certainly, but more modern, more down to earth, less prone to fancies.

Orbit, 2007

Ken MacLeod won instant critical praise and readership with The Star Fraction and the remainder of The Fall Revolution series of space opera type novels. He followed those with the equally celebrated Engines Of Light trilogy. All these books were noteworthy in that they had overtly political overtones of a type not often seen in SF, which is to say they engaged with left leaning perspectives. Lately he has moved away from series to stand-alone novels exploring other tropes from the SF firmament, in Newton’s Wake and the excellent Learning The World – where MacLeod gave us a generation starship and first contact novel all in one.
The Execution Channel, which is not done many favours by the somewhat misleading though enticing strapline on the cover, is another change of tack, an intricately plotted, tightly written near future type thriller involving bloggers, conspiracy theorists, MI5, the CIA, the French secret service etc. in an alternative world where Gore won in 2000 but 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan still happened – and, in contrast to our world (so far,) so too has Iran. Unlike End Of The World Blues, here the SF elements of the story – there is mention of Planck anomalies and Heim Theory spaceships – are integral to the plot and denouement.
The air bases at Leuchars and Lossiemouth have been given over to US forces. A peace-type camp monitors events at Leuchars. After a camp member, Roisin Travis, receives a cryptic message from her brother, a British soldier in Afghanistan, and she witnesses the arrival of a strange object, the campers leave hurriedly and attempt to send out the pictures she has taken to newspapers and other interested parties worldwide. An unconventional explosion producing a mushroom cloud then destroys the base and they become subject to a manhunt by the security forces.
In the meantime she has warned her father, an IT expert whose company has done work for the government, and who is now travelling to meet her at a prearranged rendezvous. Both get caught up in a ramping up of the emergency – motorway flyovers brought down, Grangemouth Oil refinery blowing up, aircraft flying into terminal buildings, with Travis senior also helping to deflect backlash attacks on Muslims, scapegoats for these attacks, along his way. In the course of this one wonders how much spy fiction MacLeod has read, or spooks he has spoken to, as his descriptions of tradecraft read well.
The convolutions of the plot are admirably worked out, the characters engaging and the SF twist came as an agreeable (if partially breaking suspension of disbelief) surprise.

The Execution Channel in the book is the product of a kind of spy software in CCTV cameras feeding captured images of pain and death through secret conduits in widely disseminated relay satellites to the eponymous broadcasting outlet. The concept – while an intriguing comment on “reality” TV trends in our world – is neither overplayed nor gratuitous. At one point it serves a plot function.
There is an “Extras” section at the end of this paperback edition, missing from the hardback I note, which includes an interview with Ken Macleod – no problem with that – but also an entirely superfluous extract from a book by a different author entirely. (I know publishers want to promote their books but this is simply an annoying way to go about it.)
Ignore that though. This book is in my top three reads of this year.