Literary recommendations: Ken MacLeod

[Kendall Clark]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 01:15:58AM +0000, Justin Schwartz wrote:
> OK, you put The Corrections on my list. At a lower level, but also fun, my 
> train reading these days has been the sci fi novels of Ken MacLeod, a Scot 
> post-Trot who is trying to come to terms with a post-1991 world by positing 
> various futures in which 4th Internationslists play a large role: running 
> Khazakstan, or a snippet of it (The Sky Road--gives Against the Current a 
> mention!), establishing neo-Miseian right wing libertarian utopias with 
> machine slaves (The Stone Canal) after falling from their socialist faith, 
> creating a nano-tech based anarchist socialist utopia on Earth while 
> fighting off the uebermenschen posthimans who have colonized Jupiter (the 
> Cassini Division), etc. Writes well. Hates, I mean HATES, Greens. Is a bit 
> clunky with feminist issues. Many here will like him a lot. Give him a go, 
> How can we hate books with epigraphs from Engels and Dietzgen? jks

I just picked up all of MacLeod's first 6 (or so) books, started the
first, The Star Fraction, earlier tonight. Good stuff. The prose is
better than average for scifi; it's not incandescent, he's no Samuel
R. Delany (the most underappreciated American novelist since 1965; or,
better: the most underappreciated because genre ghettoized) but that's
not really a criticism at all.

I'll modify Justin's commendatory terms a bit: How can I hate books
with epigraphs from Engles and Dietzgen, and with chunks of
pseudo-programming language (looking sorta Algol-cum-Smalltalkesque)
sprinkled throughout?

A few philosopher friends of mine use scifi pretty heavily to teach
epistemology, philosophy of science, political and social philosophy,
and MacLeod's stuff is among the newest additions to their reading
lists.

On the subject of scifi recommendations, you can do vastly worse than
adding Delany's Nova, Dhalgren, Babel-17, and Empire Star to your
reading lists, all of which have been recently reissued in attractive
new editions by Vintage. The most recent of Delany's two memoirs,
1984, contains, among other riches, an articulate, revelatory social
microhistory of gay Manhattan at the onset of the AIDS pandemic. His
Trouble on Triton is, well, I'm still not sure *what* it is, other
than a thrilling, very complex and intellectually satisfying read, the
most fully realized utopian (subtitled "An Ambiguous Heterotopia")
thought experiment I know, written as a kind of dialogue between
Delany, Le Guin, and Foucault. His Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
-- in turns memoir, sexual ethnography, and urban theorizing --
eloquently demonstrates what the Disneyfication of Times Square has
meant to real people.

Sorry to ramble on, but I hate to miss chances to spread the word
about such a powerful, original and neglected writer.

Best,
Kendall Clark