Occupation Writer Education University of Glasgow Role Fiction writer | Name Ken MacLeod Genre science fiction Movies Scattered | |
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Born Kenneth Macrae MacLeod
2 August 1954 (age 69)
Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Scotland ( 1954-08-02 ) Awards Sidewise Award for Best Short-Form Alternate History, BSFA award for best novel, Prometheus Award for Best Novel Influenced by Iain Banks, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner Books The Star Fraction, The Cassini Division, Cosmonaut Keep, Intrusion, The Stone Canal Similar People Iain Banks, Charles Stross, Stephen Baxter, Peter F Hamilton, Bruce Sterling | ||
Ken macleod talks science fiction at the national library of scotland
Kenneth Macrae "Ken" MacLeod (born 2 August 1954) is a Scottish science fiction writer.
Contents
- Ken macleod talks science fiction at the national library of scotland
- Ken macleod at novacon 40
- Biography
- Writing
- Books about MacLeod
- References
Ken macleod at novacon 40
Biography
MacLeod was born in Stornoway, Scotland on 2 August 1954. He graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and written a masters thesis on biomechanics. He was a Trotskyist activist in the 1970s and early 1980s and is married and has two children. He lives in South Queensferry near Edinburgh.
MacLeod is opposed to Scottish independence.
Writing
He is part of a group of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Stephen Baxter, Iain M. Banks, Paul J. McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross, Richard Morgan, and Liz Williams.
His science fiction novels often explore socialist, communist, and anarchist political ideas, most particularly the variants of Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism or extreme economic libertarianism. Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution, and post-human cyborg-resurrection. MacLeod's general outlook can be best described as techno-utopian socialist, though unlike a majority of techno-utopians, he has expressed great scepticism over the possibility and especially over the desirability of strong AI.
He is known for his constant in-joking and punning on the intersection between socialist ideologies and computer programming, as well as other fields. For example, his chapter titles such as "Trusted Third Parties" or "Revolutionary Platform" usually have double (or multiple) meanings. A future programmers union is called "Information Workers of the World Wide Web", or the Webblies, a reference to the Industrial Workers of the World, who are nicknamed the Wobblies. The Webblies idea formed a central part of the novel For the Win by Cory Doctorow and MacLeod is acknowledged as coining the term. Doctorow and Charles Stross also used one of MacLeod's references to the singularity as "the rapture for nerds" as the title for their collaborative novel Rapture of the Nerds. There are also many references to, or puns on, zoology and palaeontology. For example, in The Stone Canal the title of the book, and many places described in it, are named after anatomical features of marine invertebrates such as starfish.
Books about MacLeod
The Science Fiction Foundation have published an analysis of MacLeod's work The True Knowledge Of Ken MacLeod (2003; ISBN 0-903007-02-9) edited by Andrew M. Butler and Farah Mendlesohn. As well as critical essays it contains material by MacLeod himself, including his introduction to the German edition of Banks' Consider Phlebas.