Carbon-Based Bipeds: Aug 5th
HAL's Book Club: Interview with Ken MacLeod
Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!
Welcome to the latest edition of the Arthur C. Clarke Award science fiction book of the year newsletter, and a special hello to all of our new subscribers who have joined us in the last few days!
In case you subscribed after our Award Winner special edition, we’re delighted to announce (again) that IN ASCENSION by Martin MacInnes, and published by Atlantic Books, is the 38th winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award science fiction book of the year.
This edition though we’re future-focused and looking forward to the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention, otherwise known as Worldcon, in Glasgow.
All three Clarke Award directors will be in attendance, and you can spot us by our very on-brand pin badges, so please do come say hello!
We’re also delighted to welcome Worldcon Guest of Honour Ken MacLeod to this newsletter for a HAL’s Book Club special interview discussing the publication of his first short story collection in 18 years, A Jura for Julia published by NewCon Press, which will be launched at the Con.
HAL: Hello Ken, thank you for joining us today, and may I ask what was the first convention event you attended, and what are you most looking forward to about Worldcon (other perhaps than being GoH!)
KEN: My first convention was the Glasgow Worldcon in 1995. I was on the programme because my first novel, The Star Fraction, had just been published. My first convention event was at noon on the Thursday, just after I arrived: Do Scottish SF writers have a special take on the subject? If so, what? With Iain Banks, Chris Boyce, Michael Cobley, Duncan Lunan, Ken MacLeod
It was my first panel, and I don't remember a thing about it! Likewise, I don't remember which events I attended.
What I'm most looking forward to (apart from being a GoH) about Glasgow 2024 is meeting old friends and hopefully making new ones.
HAL: My memory circuits recall my first Worldcon as a glorious blur. Do you have any recommendations for first time attendees to make the most of their experience at an SF con?
KEN: A glorious blur is a good way to remember a Worldcon! If a Worldcon is your first SF convention, it's a blast! To make the most of it, look at the programme beforehand and pick what items you'd like to go to. If you don't know anyone who is going, a quick way to meet new people is to volunteer. Cons always need volunteers, for however long or short a time you have to offer. Don't be shy. Use the party or conference conversation trick: one person might want to be alone, two might be having a personal conversation, three or more talking and you can wander up and wait for someone to speak to you (or wander off if no one does). It works!
HAL: Can you tell us about the new short story collection. What can we expect? Why these stories?
KEN: A Jura for Julia contains twelve short stories already published, between 2009 and 2023, and one -- the title story -- specially written for the collection. There's a far-future space-opera spin-off, 'Lighting Out'; a squib, 'Wilson at Woking'; a Lovecraft-meets-Singularity cosmic horror story 'The Vorkuta Event'; there's a thought experiment about the victims of thought experiments, and there's a few near-future tales and alternate histories. I chose these particular stories because I like them, and my editor Ian Whates liked them too.
HAL: Short stories are often discussed as the creative life force of SF innovation, and yet the Catch 22 is that authors will often move away from them as their careers progress. What is the relationship of short stories to your own creative process and how might this have evolved over your career?
KEN: I was lucky enough to attend schools that had in their libraries volumes of Out of This World, anthologies of stories from SF magazines selected for young readers, which ran from 1960 to 1973. It was a great introduction to Golden Age SF and its toolkit of blasters and tractor beams and hyperdrives and all the rest, as well as lots of fascinating SF concepts. So naturally in my teens I started writing SF short stories (all awful). Later I was much taken with the New Worlds paperbacks, both for the short stories and the critical articles and reviews by John Clute and M. John Harrison. I wrote more short stories (still awful). I even sent one to New Worlds, and got a rejection note from Hilary Bailey. Then came Interzone, which in the 1990s was publishing some of the best SF short stories going. I sent them one or two short stories, likewise awful. The last rejection note I got from Interzone suggested I submit the story to a local fanzine. I did, and the local fanzine rejected it. So years later I was delighted that a completely recast version of that story, 'Nineteen Eighty-Nine', was accepted for the first issue of ParSec, and it's now in the collection.
But, after my second or third novel came out, I started getting asked to write short stories. So my first published short story was 'Moonlighting' in The Sunday Times Magazine, and my second was 'Resident Alien', in Computer Weekly. That story became chapter 2 of my novel Cosmonaut Keep. Most of my short stories have been written for themed anthologies, including my first story in a science fiction publication, 'A Case of Consilience' in Nova Scotia: New Scottish Speculative Fiction in 2005. That story has been described (by me, admittedly) as the best story of Scottish Presbyterian xeno-evangelism of the present millennium, and as far as I know this remains true. I'm very pleased to have a story in Nova Scotia Vol 2: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland, which is just out for the Glasgow Worldcon, and very good company to be in. Some of my stories have been spin-offs from novels: in A Jura for Julia there's 'Lighting Out' and 'The Shadow Ministers'; others have been ideas that have been lying around since I scribbled the idea in a little black notebook. I have decades of little black notebooks, a back catalogue of unwritten stories to draw on. There are a few stories I wrote on spec, for Shoreline of Infinity and ParSec.
In terms of creative process, the way it often works is there's a bare idea, or even just a title, and then I need another idea to wrap around it, like another strand of DNA, and off it goes.
HAL: Can you tell us a short story or stories that have always particularly inspired/impressed/infected you and why?
KEN: Brian Aldiss's 'Who Can Replace a Man?' impressed me enough when I read it in my teens for it to influence how robots talk and behave in The Corporation Wars. 'The Killing Ground' by J. G. Ballard, for imagining Britain as Vietnam. 'The Last of the Deliverers', by Poul Anderson, was the first story to get me imagining anarchy, of a kind. 'Coming from Behind' by M. John Harrison, for what resisting does to the resistance, and for aliens who talk like the I Ching. 'The Author of the Acacia Seeds' by Ursula Le Guin, for its ever-widening circle. 'The Gernsback Continuum' by William Gibson, for all the perfect sentences.
HAL: And finally, if as Guest of Honour you found yourself empowered able to issue one binding decree (or enthused recommendation) to the SF field, what might it command might you give?
KEN: Read, buy, subscribe to Shoreline of Infinity and ParSec, the best new science fiction magazines from Scotland and England!
Incoming Transmissions
Shoot for the Stars
Multiple award-nominated and award-winning authors and editors Jendia Gammon and Gareth L. Powell have launched a new publishing imprint, Stars and Sabers.
Their first anthology, Of Shadows, Stars and Sabers, is (ahem) full of stars of the SF,F&H fields, and currently promoting via Indiegogo.
All These Worlds Are His
Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke 2016 and (probably) winner of the UK’s hardest working author award, Adrian Tchaikovsky has an in-depth profile courtesy of reactormag.com
