Ken MacLeod


Kenneth Macrae MacLeod is a Scottish science fiction writer. His novels The Sky Road and The Night Sessions won the BSFA Award. MacLeod's novels have been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Campbell Memorial awards for best novel on multiple occasions. In 2024 MacLeod was one of the Guests of Honour at the 82nd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow.
A techno-utopianist, MacLeod makes frequent use of libertarian socialist themes in his work; he is a three-time winner of the libertarian Prometheus Award. He sits on the advisory board of the Edinburgh Science Festival.
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Biography

MacLeod was born in Stornoway, Scotland, in 1954. He graduated from University of Glasgow with a degree in zoology in 1976, and he worked as a computer programmer and wrote a master's thesis on biomechanics. He was a Trotskyist activist during the 1970s and early 1980s. MacLeod is opposed to Scottish independence.

Personal life

Married with two children, MacLeod lived in South Queensferry near Edinburgh, before moving to Gourock in June 2017. His wife died in August 2024.

Writing

MacLeod belongs to a group of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Neal Asher, Stephen Baxter, Iain M. Banks, Peter F. Hamilton, Paul J. McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross, Richard K. Morgan, and Liz Williams.
MacLeod's science fiction novels often explore socialist, communist, and anarchist political ideas, especially Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism. 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 the desirability of strong AI.
MacLeod is known for frequent in-jokes and puns 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 meanings. A fictional future programmers union is called "Information Workers of the World Wide Web", or the Webblies, a reference to the real Industrial Workers of the World union, who are nicknamed the Wobblies. The Webblies concept 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 novel The Stone Canal, the title of the book and many of its described places 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 titled The True Knowledge Of Ken MacLeod, edited by Andrew M. Butler and Farah Mendlesohn. In addition to critical essays, it contains material by MacLeod himself, including his introduction to the German edition of Iain M. Banks' novel Consider Phlebas.

Series

Fall Revolution series

Other work

Newton's Wake: A Space Opera – BSFA nominee, 2004; Campbell Award nominee, 2005Learning the World: A Novel of First Contact Prometheus Award winner 2006; Hugo, Locus SF, Campbell and Clarke Awards nominee, 2006; BSFA nominee, 2005
  • "The Highway Men" The Execution Channel – BSFA Award nominee, 2007; Campbell, and Clarke Awards nominee, 2008The Night Sessions – Winner Best Novel 2008 BSFAThe Restoration Game. According to the author, "In The Restoration Game I revisited the fall of the Soviet Union, with a narrator who is at first a piece in a game played by others, and works her way up to becoming to some extent a player, but – as we see when we pull back at the end – is still part of a larger game."Intrusion : "an Orwellian surveillance society installs sensors on pregnant women to prevent smoking or drinking; and these women also have to take a eugenic 'fix' to eliminate genetic anomalies."Descent : "My genre model for Descent was bloke-lit – that's basically first-person, self-serving, rueful confessional by a youngish man looking back on youthful stupidities...... Descent is about flying saucers, hidden races, and Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, all set in a tale of Scottish middle class family life in and after the Great Depression of the 21st Century. Almost mainstream fiction, really."

Short fiction

Collections

Poems & Polemics Chapbook of non-fiction and poetry.Giant Lizards From Another Star Collected fiction and nonfiction.A Jura for Julia Collected fiction.

Interviews