#Ken MacLeod

[sharpened--edges]

That oppression corrupts the oppressors is well enough known. That resistance to oppression can profoundly change those resisting, and for the worse, is less widely recognised—particularly among those who give that resistance their sympathy and solidarity. The ennobling aspect of resistance—of standing up, of fighting back, of driving the invader from the homeland—is seen and celebrated. The corrupting aspect—the hardening of the heart, the acceptance of casualty and atrocity, the replacement of the moral calculus with a cold-eyed calculation of advantage, of revenge and reprisal—is put out of mind, and sometimes for what seem the best of reasons. That too is part of the damage done.

Ken MacLeod, introduction to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word for World Is Forest (Gollancz, 2014), pp. 2–3.

[scififr]

Beyond the Hallowed Sky, Beyond the Reach of Earth, Beyond the Light Horizon, par Ken Macleod (Orbit, 2021 à 2024)

Vers la fin de ce siècle Lakshmi Nayak, doctorante en physique, reçoit un courrier à l’évidence venu du futur et écrit par elle-même, qui ouvre la porte aux déplacements FTL ! Et elle s’aperçoit rapidement que cette technologie est déjà connue et utilisée secrètement depuis les années 2020…

A mon avis, l’auteur a pris sa « liste d’idées » et s’est donné comme objectif de toutes les réunir dans une seule histoire… Cela aurait pu produire une « hamiltonerie » de qualité. Mais non. J’ai lu le second tome en diagonale. J’ai abandonné le dernier vers la page 100.

[very-grownup]

It was her turn to stare. "So why don't you all just rise up and overthrow the commies?"

"Because hardly anybody bloody wants to, that's why! Look, the Party really does get elected! All we have to do is vote them out!"

Camila remained convinced it was all some kind of scam; that guns issued by the government didn't really count, and that elections with bans on rich people buying politicians couldn't be free.

- Cosmonaut Keep, Ken MacLeod

[cynosurus]

the inevitable entanglement in whatever bureaucratic barnacles have encrusted themselves around the planning system

- Ken MacLeod in Beyond the Light Horizon

Can't really summarise, but part of possibly the best discussion of socialist economy in a fictional work. We need a lot more like this!

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Beyond the Hallowed Sky | Author: Ken MacLeod | Publisher: Orbit (2021)

[moonysmagicwand]

Crowley - He is everything

Dean Winchester - He is just a Ken

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Elon Musk: "Free speech absolutist"

Shame on the supposed leftists and "anti-imperialists" who promoted his bullshit.

[hexpositive]

Hex Positive, Ep. 050 - Exploring the Ogham with Mara Levy

Now available on your favorite podcast app and on the Nerd and Tie Podcast Network!

Sometimes you make a new friend and they share something that really gets your brain going! So this month, Bree welcomes Mara Levy to the virtual studio for a discussion about ogham - its’ history and meaning and use in both ancient and modern magic. (Perennial notetakers will want to have pencils handy when we talk about the kennings!)

Visit Mara at Rainbow Spring Wellness in Silver Spring MD (and on Instagram!) and check out my Wordpress for full show notes, sources, and recommended reading.

Visit the Willow Wings Witch Shop on Shopify and check out this month’s featured items and Upcoming Events. Make sure you also visit the Redbubble page for even more cool merch!

Check my ⁠⁠Wordpress⁠⁠ for full show notes, as well as show notes for past episodes and information on upcoming events. You can find me as @BreeNicGarran on TikTok, Instagram, and WordPress, or as @breelandwalker on tumblr. For more information on how to support the show and get access to early releases and extra content, visit my ⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠.

Proud member of the ⁠⁠Nerd and Tie Podcast Network⁠⁠.

MUSIC CREDITS

Intro & Outro – “Spellbound” & “Miri’s Magic Dance” Host-Read Ads – “Danse Macabre – Violin Hook” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

[charliejaneanders]

Huzzah! My final book review column of 2024 is out in the @washingtonpost! This time, I look at three new space opera books, and see just how varied and exciting space opera is getting lately.

Gift link: wapo.st/3OYUTPH

A few years ago I wrote a piece for Esquire about space opera (www.esquire.com/entertainmen...). The gist was that The Expanse (and Alien) had moved space opera into focus on "blue collar" characters who were thrown into huge situations. There were so many books along those lines.

So it was interesting to look at three new space opera books that don't really fit the Expanse model. Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan is so fun and colorful — it felt like a cousin to Space Opera/Space Oddity by Cat Valente. Space politics seen thru the lens of culture.

Sweep of Stars/Breath of Oblivion by Maurice Broaddus have the feel of an old-school space opera at first. The fate of worlds is at stake, starships are boldly exploring, a lot of characters are leaders. But these are philosophical works about holding onto yourself in extreme situations. So much fascinating stuff about African diaspora and the philosophies behind Muungano come into play in these books. They're so rich and so full of interpersonal, introspective discovery rather than just discoveries in deep space. They're exciting on so many levels.

The Peter F. Hamilton book, Exodus, feels the closest to a classic space opera — it has a lot in common with Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, some of the stuff Charles Stross was publishing a while back. But the politics get pretty twisty and complicated — mind control is the real killer widget here.

[canmom]

dànachd canmom aig worldcon - pàirt 3: disathairne

My worldcon adventure had to end early because I got covid, so time I wrote up the weekend!

(The titles of these posts have been in Scottish Gaelic, an indigenous language currently spoken by about 1-2% of the Scottish population (not to be confused with Scots). A percentage which at this point does not include me, so I've been relying on machine translation - apologies for any errors. Curiously, if you don't capitalise the names of the days in the input, google translates the first word as dàn-thuras instead... I don't quite know the grammatical difference there, or if it's just neural network quirkiness.)

On Saturday, I got into the con around midday - as seemed to end up the rule - only to spring a flat tire just as I got in. So that wasn't ideal. Nevertheless, I scooted over to the panel on immersive experiences - which had a pretty varied lineup from a Nordic LARPer to a Baldur's Gate 3 voice actor. It was an interesting overview of the space, definitely reminds me I should give immersive theatre a shot some time. But...

I ducked out early since a friend of a friend had a talk on Scottish herring-gutting women and the songs they used to sing. This was a fantastic talk, rich with historical detail and nuance. The speaker was an academic who had been researching and interviewing surviving herring girls - a major occupation in Scotland prior to the introduction of machines that did their job in the early 20th C. - and she discussed both the harsh conditions they worked under, the various complications of religion and culture that affected them, and the sense of camaraderie that informed the songs, as well as various other things that herring women used to get up to like holding dance parties.

Unfortunately she tried to pack so much into the half-hour slot that she ended up having to rush through the last few slides to get to the actual example of a song, sung a capella in Gaelic, which was fascinating to hear, and I could absolutely feel her enthusiasm for the subject when I talked to her after the presentation.

Definitely I think the general convention-going lesson is to go to talks/panels about things I don't already know about lol.

I don't have any pictures of this panel but Gary Lloyd, composer of the opera, gave me these fliers for previous productions by him and Bettina Carpi.

Next up I went to a panel by the creators of the opera Morrow's Island which I saw on Thursday - consisting of composer Gary Lloyd, writer Ken MacLeod, and choreographer Bettina Carpi. I am pretty certain I was the youngest person in the audience, which is a shame, because it was a great panel, full of fascinating anecdotes about the (it turns out) incredibly chaotic production of the opera.

I did not realise because the performance went off pretty much without a hitch, but because it is so expensive to rehearse with pro musicians, the performance on Thursday was actually the first full run-through of the show, and the earlier partial rehearsals of the dances were interrupted by the riots outside.

Moreover, because of the nuances of contemporary dance, the dance was initially choreographed without the music, just from the libretto and general vibes, and refined to the pre-recorded piano versions rather than the full orchestration, which is nuts to me - but apparently contemporary dance is not driven by the beat in the same way that other types of dance are, and is more adaptable to the music. The more you know! What they did def looked good on the stage, but I can't pretend to know the theory of it.

Ken MacLeod, invited to write the libretto (opera-speak for 'script'), came into the project quite unfamiliar with modern opera (same lol), and made a very familiar mistake of a prose fiction writer trying to write a song - in that he apparently made it way too long at first and had to be steered right by Gary. Working flat out (at the same time as two other productions), Gary figured out the musical ideas he'd use, and ended up encouraging Ken to add more elements relating to the history of sciene and occultism in Scotland - something that imo added hugely to the texture of the opera.

Even though he wrote the libretto, Ken didn't know entirely how it was going to go on stage - so he was as surprised as me to see the story start with the sopranos walking out and declaring "there is no incompatibility between dialectical materialism and extrasensory perception". (Which was the precise moment I knew that this musical was going to be absolute fire, for my part). The performance on the night was absolute chaos behind the scenes, with complications over cueing and communication all over - for example the flautist had to be instructed to improvise over a certain scene (iirc the rabbit scene) at the absolute last minute. Despite everything, the opera mostly went as intended. Certainly the seams weren't obvious to me.

All in all, it's kind of impressive and a little alarming. Pro musicians really are something else.

After the panel I ended up sitting down to chat with Gary a lot more, and we hit it off really well! Gary was absolutely full of fascinating anecdotes, first about various minimalist composers he has known or drawn inspiration from (notably the time he met Steve Reich)i , and then later he got into stories his long friendship Alan Moore and the late Iain M Banks. The opening line of the opera, it turns out, is a recording by Banks of a line from the radical psychiatrist RD Laing's book Knots, consisting of the anonymised thoughts of patients. Indeed, Banks phoned Gary Lloyd up near his death, offering to record something before he died.

It was very, very clear how much admiration Gary had for Iain Banks, and it was fascinating hearing about how much him and Alan Moore looked up to each other. One of Gary's stories involved Banks bringing Moore to tears by telling him that Voice of the Fire was straight up the best book in the English language; another was how Lloyd turned down involvement in The Highbury Working in order to give its composer (I can't remember whether he said David J or Tim Perkins there) a chance to really hit his stride. He also talked a bit about music, such as some of the theory of polyrhythms. All in all one of the most utterly enthralling conversations I've had at worldcon and I'm very happy that he seemed to like me too ^^

I also went to a talk on homelessness in SFF. It was a good discussion by people who had lived it, diving into some nuances of the subject like the indignity of many of the kind of desultory forms of support for homeless people. As with many matters of 'how do you represent x', the message for SFF writers is along the lines of like give a shit about what you're writing and write characters as people with all the complexity that entails, rather than defining them entirely by a single trait like homelessness - e.g. give them their own desires and preferences rather than just drilling into the one thing - but I picked up some recs along the way. Definitely a big step up from the panels I went to on Thursday.

Next up: the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre!

I met up with the CUSFS gang for this, and it ended up being an absolutely charming performance involving one actor (Kev F Sutherland) staging a rapidfire, pun-dense dialogue between two sock puppets. For something so deliberately silly, the amount of skill involved would be easy to underestimate - Sutherland's back-and-forth flow is incredible, and he could make the technical jank of a one-man show, like switching costumes, fit very smoothly into the overal comedy. The show took a subject that could easily have been a bit naff (superheroes) and turning into something both sweet and funny that perfectly walked the line of self-referential/fourth-wall breaking, complete with a bunch of pop song parodies and a whole sock puppet emotional arc. I never knew how hard you can act with sock puppets.

Next up was the monsterfuckers panel, titled 'We Do The Monster Smash', the only 18+ panel I ended up making it to.

Despite the dire warnings, nobody checked my ID. It was a decent enough discussion but could definitely have gone much deeper (;p), though def it must be tricky to figure out the right level to pitch a panel like this. Despite the panellists' stated loathing for 'transforms back into human at the end' type stories, I can't help but feel an idea of 'cosy monsters' is sorta doing the same thing, sanding off the sharp edge of transgression. I cooked up a big question to ask about the contradiction between the monster as symbolic of what is Other and transgressive vs. the contemporary sexual culture of taxonomising everything into precisely defined kinks, but nobody asked me lmao. Shoutout to the one panellist who brought a thorough knowledge of hentai and ero-guro stuff, which she didn't really get to address that much.

I spoke briefly with the panellists after the con. There's gonna be a one-day monsterfucker convention in Bristol. I have no idea what the vibes of that kind of event would be like!

Afterwards I wandered into the Masquerade room. The Masquerade, for those (like me) unfamiliar, is essentially a costume competition. Each contestant comes out and does a little show in cosplay, then the judges go off to deliberate while a music act played. Unfortunately, I completely missed all the actual performances, but I did get to see Sassafrass (not to be confused with another unrelated band called Sassafras), the a capella band who sing mainly about Norse mythology, led by SFF author Ada Palmer...

You could hardly have picked a more perfectly 'worldcon' act, this is truly the musical embodiment of the fan culture and a long fixture of the scene, and I feel like I actually get that having experienced it in person. I had heard of Sassafrass before, and listened to some of their songs online, but I didn't quite vibe with them - it was another story hearing them live, with explanations of the mythology they were singing about.

Sassafrass's main technique is complex, multi-part vocal harmony, with different overlapping parts coming in and out of 'focus' as the song evolves, sorta like that one song The Confrontation in Les Mis but way more so. Here's an example of their thing, a song about the conflict between Odin and Loki, as a duet...

but the most complex has to be the one about the Norse creation myth sung as a three-part song between Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda, and the mythological giant Seeress from the Völuspá in the Poetic Edda, with the disagreements between the sources rendered as conversational disagreements in the song. Palmer herself takes on the role of the environment, providing underlying harmony to the two parts. It is frankly the most ASNAC* song I've ever heard.

*editor's note: Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, a degree you can take at Cambridge, perhaps unsurprisingly well-represented among the ranks of the Science Fiction Society

And honestly, while I still regard the filk song Somebody Will (my intro to Sassafrass) as a bit of a cope, I kinda love all this viking stuff. And knowing a little more about singing now, I am very impressed by how much harmonic texture they are able to get from just three singers and no other instruments. Definitely Sassafrass deserved a spot on that article on narrative in music, because they're doing some crazy complex shit here.

Although I didn't get to see the actual stage shows, I did at least get to see the costumes afterwards. Here's a little photo gallery - though there will surely be much nicer photos and a recording of the show on the Worldcon website...

Sadly I did not get to shoot the overall winner who did an elaborate routine as Moist von Lipwig in which they transformed from prisoner to postmaster. It sounded very impressive. I also missed photographing 'cookpunk', which involved an elaborate hob backpack.

All in all, next time I Worldcon (hopefully sooner than ten years this time), I will at the very least watch the Masquerade and maybe just maybe even show up in costume.

That evening I went to the dance party and had a great time actually moving to music, something I don't do nearly often enough. It had the things you'd expect at a nerd event - 80s songs, Rocky Horror stuff, Rammstein, even Taking the Hobbits to Eisengard which really took me back. I was glad to see that the dancers made space for a friend who uses a wheelchair to join in too, and it was a lot of fun as the dancing got more energetic later on. Unfortunately this is probably a great candidate for 'event that gave me covid', because that's a lot of energetic movement and heavy breathing in a confined space...

I also ended up running into @threefolddefencespeech, who actually recognised me off here and remembered my old URL! we had a great rest of the evening chatting away and running into various people, and I ended up pushing my bike home around 4am.

[very-grownup]

"Don't even think about it," he said. "Um … Where this all gets political is that it didn't take long for us to realize that the ultimate engine of spam is capitalism. Endless expansion is the great capitalist wet dream, and it's totally incompatible with the way the universe really is. It's certainly incompatible with what the overwhelming dominant form of intelligent life in the universe is willing to accept. Quite frankly, I'm no Party hack myself but the fact of the matter is that the Party's aim of a steady-state society with a bit of sustainable, careful, non-invasive space exploration is the only kind of society that the aliens are likely to be happy with." He made an ironically sad face at Camila. "The dream you guys have of treating the Solar System as raw material for orbital mobile homes, guns, and beer cans is right out."

- Cosmonaut Keep, Ken MacLeod

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Moral Hazard

Today on my podcast, I read my short story "Moral Hazard," a madcap tale of fintech, inequality, finance bros, Wyoming, homelessness and bailouts. It's from "Communications Breakdown," a new anthology from MIT Press, edited by Jonathan Strahan, with stories from Elizabeth Bear, S.B. Divya, Chris Gilliard, Lavanya Lakshminarayan, Ken Macleod, Tim Maughan, Ian McDonald, Anil Menon, Premee Mohamed, and Shiv Ramdas.

Episode:

https://craphound.com/stories/2023/11/12/moral-hazard-from-communications-breakdown/

MP3:

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_455/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_455_-_Moral_Hazard.mp3

Anthology:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546461/communications-breakdown/

I know exactly where I was the day I decided to give every homeless person in America their own LLC. I was in the southeast corner of the sprawling homeless camp that had once been Seattle’s Discovery Park on a rare, dry February afternoon. The sun was weak but so welcome. After weeks of sheltering in our tents and squelching through the mud and getting drenched waiting for the portas, we were finally able to break out the folding chairs and enjoy each other’s company. Mike the Bike had coffee. He always did. Mike knew more ways to make coffee than any fancy barista. He had a master’s in chemical engineering and a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and when he was high he spent every second of the buzz thinking of new ways to combine heat and water and solids to produce a perfect brew. I brought trail mix, which I mixed up myself with food-bank supplies and spices I bought from the bulk place for pennies. My secret is cardamom and a little chili powder. I learned that from my Mom. “Trish,” Mike the Bike said, “I wish I was a corporation.”

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Night Sessions | Author: Ken MacLeod | Publisher: Orbit (2008)

[writtenbyplato]

think these might all be from one fellur, but gonna respond individually anyhow and then work on all the support in tha inbox. confetti top to bottom left to right

1. no problem at all dude, absolute respect to you for respecting what doesn't click with you specifically. i adore neutral people that have hit me up with comfort like this, it does genuinely help me shake off the freak riding my straw page. wishing for people to treat you with the same good energy. heart ALSO HELL YES i love ponyphonic oh my god

2. that fucking bird i hate (love. damn they look stupid)

3. thank yew what the shit uhhhh. can copy paste a lil list for you, but i also have like 80 playlists on spot if anyone ever wants to dig into that. user is fuxfluff there.

list: Ponyphonic, S3RL, GLAZE, Limp Bizkit, Rob Zombie, Ken Ashcorp, Kokayna, Kevin MacLeod, Your Favorite Martian. SMiLEdk, Korn, IAMX, The Birthday Massacre, Slipknot, Babymetal, SOAD, Drowning Pool, Nirvana, Pitbull, Hozier, Fall Out Boy, Doddodo, Lemon Demon, Will Wood, The Haunting, Rio Romeo, Haley Heynderickx, Big Thief, Kevin & The Bikes, David Kushner, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Sporty-O, many others.

(really like those official sega sonic racing songs too. then some very popular ones like lady gaga / kesha / britney spears, etc etc.)

4. meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee :3