coalescent | Macleod's Wake

Two scottish gentlemen (waistcoats and cigarettes and all), sitting in a smokey, slightly dingy cellar bar, discussing esoteric points of philosophical, political and historical theory: it sounds almost like a scene from a Ken Macleod novel, and it almost could have been, except for the fact that the event in question was an interview of Macleod himself (introduced as 'the greatest living libertarian trotskyist science fiction author', or similar), conducted by Telegraph journalist Andrew McKie, with an attentive audience all around.

Yes, last night was the monthly BSFA event, and if I'm slightly disappointed that there wasn't much discussion of Newton's Wake - Macleod's latest, which I'd borrowed from Andrew and read specially! - the feeling is more than compensated for by the thoughtful nature of the discussion that there was, including a wonderful, visionary quotation that will form the epigraph to Macleod's next novel (Learning the World, from which he also read a brief extract). The quote was written in about 1872, and I'm really hoping someone can remind me what it was.

Perhaps the reason that most of the discussion focused on the Fall Revolution and

Engines of Light books was that they are seen as more complex works. But to me, one of the really great things about the sf writer's toolbox is that although rocket ships and enigmatic artifacts have all sorts of juicy metaphorical and symbolic potential, and despite the fact that creating worlds out of whole cloth allows a unique perspective on our present, when you get down to it these are also all things that are, plain and simple, cool. It's almost more of a toybox than a toolbox; and in Newton's Wake (his eighth novel, and the first to fully stand alone), Macleod is clearly enjoying playing with his toys. The examples above all feature prominently, as do wormhole networks, death rays and aircars - all the old pulpy tropes are confidently deployed, and stirred into the mix with a completely disarming sense of fun.

The setup, in brief, is this. In the not-too-distant future, Europe and the US go to war. In the early minutes of this war, weak AIs on the American side bootstrap themselves up to full transcendence, triggering the event later known as the Hard Rapture: a full-on, biosphere-altering singularity. Fairly quickly the godlike AIs disappear into the quantum weave of the universe, and the remnants of humanity are left scrabbling in the ruins. Two factions develop. The Returners are for reclaiming the Earth, and the souls uploaded during the Singularity; and the Reformers, known also as the Runners, want to light out for pastures new, and do so.

The two groups lose contact with each other. Those left behind discover a network of wormholes, of somewhat obscure origin, that enables travel to other worlds. New powers develop. There are the communist DKs; the technophilic but cautious, vaguely buddhist Knights of Enlightenment; and the Luddite farmers known disparagingly as America Offline. And last but not least there are the Bloody Carlyles, Glaswegian gang-family, who take control of the wormhole network and make their living (or at least the vaguely legitimate portion of their living) from controlling trade through it. All of this is backstory, however: our entry-point into the story proper comes centuries after the establishment of this status quo, when the main viewpoint character, energetic 'combat archaeologist' Lucinda Carlyle, arrives on a new world. There she discovers (a) an immense, enigmatic artifact that may be posthuman or entirely alien, and (b) that the planet already has a name - Eurydice - and is home to the lost Reformer society, plus some Returner resurrectees, based in the retro-futuristic metropolis of New Start.

A frankly dizzying amount of plot ensues (particularly considering the novel's relatively modest page-count), in which the main interest comes from how the Eurydiceans are re-integrated (or not) into the sphere of human politics; as in earlier novels, Macleod sets up his societies mainly so they can be knocked down in interesting ways, when egos and ethos collide. But this is, as we are explicitly told by a handy subtitle, a Space Opera, and as such more extravagant than Macleod's previous novels. In fact, this is a book that takes more joy in the simple matter of being science fiction than anything else I've read this year.

The joy, however, is tempered by self-awareness. A major plot strand sees Eurydicean Andrew Lloyd-Webber-alike Benjamin Ben-Ami (composer of 'Shakespearean' productions such as The Tragedy of Leonid Brehznev and Guevara!) working on a new Opera, about the fallout of the war that triggered the Hard Rapture, entitled Rebels and Returners. Predictable digs at those unable to separate authorial intent from the characters he creates aside, the main goal of this strand seems to be to point up the heavily stylised nature of the form, and by extension, the stylisation, and thus the limitations, of space opera.

This isn't a plausible future. It might maybe have been fifty years ago, but now it's just a construction, one as ludicrous in its way as any pure fantasy you care to name. The very familiarity of all those cool tropes, so casually thrown around, reinforces the understanding that Macleod's characters are merely players on a stage of calculated artifice (there's a nagging feeling that the characters know it, too, and are just dressing up to say Macleod's lines for us). And this may be a stretch, but it seems to me that within the novel, both aspects of this artistic speculation have literal counterparts. In a future where people can be uploaded, downloaded, resurrected and reconstructed, and in a cosmology where everything is guaranteed to happen again in the next Grand Cycle, the question of what it means to be aware is necessarily foregrounded; and the value of the sort of orphan worldbuilding that Macleod is practicing contrasts with the more literal type of worldbuilding - terraforming - carried out by some of the novel's societies.

All that said, let's be clear - this is, first and foremost, a rattling good yarn, with the social and political speculation, for once, taking a back set. It's an adventure story; a Macleod with more bang for your buck. I get the feeling he thoroughly enjoyed writing it, along the way taking the chance to poke fun at the expectations engendered by 'a Ken Macleod novel', and the feel-good vibe is infectious. This is science fiction, but relax: you're in safe hands.

So the meeting spurred me to read one good novel, which has to count for something, and whilst there I happily acquired three more: a paperback copy of Maul; a proof copy of Ian McDonald's River of Gods (woohoohoo!); and a trade of Redemption Ark. The latter came from the raffle. My first pick from the available prizes would have been the proof of Tony Ballantyne's Recursion (not published until july; 'will appeal to fans of Michael Moorcock and Stephen Baxter', apparently, which is interesting considering they're not authors I would immediately associate), but of course somebody else snapped that up first.

One other question: there was, inevitably, some discussion of 'the new British space opera'. Who writes it, how long it's been going for, that sort of thing. What nobody could satisfactorily answer for me was which novels, aside from The Centauri Device, could be said to constitute an old British space opera. Was there ever such a thing (although it wouldn't have been considered as such at the time, obviously), or is it simply the case that all the old space opera was American?