Now that EasterCon is over (report to follow) and we’re in the run-up to this year’s WorldCon in Glasgow, I’m planning a number of posts on Scottish SFF, including some of my favourite writers such as Naomi Mitchison, Iain Banks, James Leslie Mitchell (AKA Lewis Grassic Gibbon) and, of course, Guest of Honour Ken MacLeod. (I’m aiming for 1000-1500 words to keep them relatively on point. These posts are going to include some spoilers, so, if you’re adverse to that, be warned).
To get this series underway I’m beginning with a post on MacLeod’s Newton’s Wake, which was first published 20 years ago. I’ve picked this because Ken was talking about it a bit at EasterCon in the session on the opera, Morrow’s Isle, for which he has written the libretto (music and choreography by Gary Lloyd and Bettina Carpi of Company Carpi) and which will be performed in Glasgow on the Thursday of the WorldCon. Newton’s Wake is, of course, subtitled A Space Opera and contains an opera within it, as well as the wonderful Shakespearean pastiche, The Tragedy of Leonid Brezhnev, Prince of Muscovy. In retrospect, it is also perhaps the novel that most clearly links some of the themes of The Fall Revolution quartet (1995-9) and the Engines of Light trilogy (2000-2) with his current Lightspeed trilogy (2021-4).
It’s 2367. There’s a whole galaxy, a whole new world out there. Wormholes and starships and endless youth and resurrection…
Re-reading Newton’s Wake over the last few days has been a complete joy. I think I enjoyed it more than when it came out; partly because it serendipitously ties in with themes I’ve been thinking about recently. It’s barely a week ago on the Friday of EasterCon that I was talking about Hao Jingfang’s Jumpnauts (first published in English in March 2024) and saying that it was a novel that could only be written in a country that still believed in the future because of experiencing unprecedented social, economic and technical progress over the last half century. Reading Jumpnauts – with its vision of humanity (potentially at least) ascending to the next level of civilisation by learning to share information telepathically as a means of interacting with the intelligent substrate of the universe – was, I said, the nearest we could come today to the experience of reading Wells in the early twentieth century. Then, I read Newton’s Wake in which we are told towards the end that:
There are good and bad things, but no good or evil will. There’s only intelligence, and stupidity. Stupidity is what we had as humans, and intelligence is what we and everyone else now has, however they began.
In other words, the dream of the (transhuman) future is still alive in twenty-first century Scotland. Admittedly, the twenty-first century in the novel doesn’t go that smoothly with total nuclear war breaking out after an American military AI becomes self-aware triggering a pre-emptive first strike on the USA by the combined forces of Russia, France and Britain, and then the subsequent retaliatory strike (which is replayed in virtual reality about three paragraphs after the passage I have just quoted). However, various human factions survive off planet and it is these who animate the novel’s twenty-fourth-century present. These factions include America Offline, the (mainly Japanese) Knights of Enlightenment, the communist DK (‘we think it stands for Demokratische Kommunistbund or maybe Democratic Korea or Kampuchea for all I know’) and, of course, a Scottish ‘family business’, the Carlyles, who control a skein of wormholes and their gates. The novel begins with the main protagonist (of an ensemble cast), Lucinda Carlyle, running into trouble on a new planet, Eurydice, when she discovers a lost human colony, who in the intervening years have developed a technologically advanced (although unlike the other factions, they don’t have FTL spaceships) post-scarcity society.
In case it isn’t clear, I should point out that the novel is a social satire which plays out at some speed, pausing only for the dramatic and musical interludes as mentioned above. In this respect, the reading experience is not so much akin to early Wells as to the somewhat more worldly-wise social comedies of later years, such as The Autocracy of Mr Parham (1930). Certainly, the ageing author of genius would enjoy the party scenes MacLeod wittily stages in the delightfully hedonistic capital of Eurydice, New Start. A wide variety of issues – such as whether New Start’s cornucopian capitalism and reputational economy is a utopia – are covered with a sure light touch. Eurydice is a colony of ‘runners’ in that is founded by those who chose to run away from the solar system rather than fight back against the accelerating AI and posthuman intelligences that are undergoing the ‘Hard Rapture’, but it has its own ‘returner’ minority, who are inclined to cut deals with the Carlyle’s in pursuance of their aim of ‘getting them all back’ – that it is recovering all the human lives digitally uploaded by the AIs on Earth shortly before everyone was incinerated.
The playwright and impresario, Benjamin Ben-Ami, resurrects the returner singing act of Winter and Calder (they were ‘big in the Asteroid Belt’) for a new opera designed to cash in (reputationally) on the tensions created by the arrival of the Carlyles (shortly followed by the Knights, the DK and AO) on Eurydice. We learn that that Winter and Calder were not downloaded from a direct upload but resurrected (by the ‘Black Sickle girls’) with a neural parser which matches neural structures with known inputs. In other words, their synthetic memories were reverse engineered from their songs, videos, sleeve notes and press releases, much to Lucinda’s disgust: ‘They had prosthetic personalities. They had false memories. Without reliable memory there could be no identity, no continuity, no humanity.’ It’s an interesting concept which made me think about the origin of the companion app, Replika, in founder Eugenia Kuyda’s creation of an AI chatbot from the texts of a dead friend in order to talk to him again. Maybe one day we will get them all back, at least those with a sufficient textual record. Anyway, Lucinda gets over her prejudices, in part due to undergoing her own death during a closed-room heist and having to be resurrected. Cyrus Lamont’s predilection for sex with his own ship avatar is also endorsed by the text in the happy ending he finds with the transhuman, and entirely metal, Morag Higgins. There’s a nod to Blade Runner, in Higgin’s desire ‘to feel solar wind in my hair. See the stars with my own naked eyes, in vacuum. See what an FTL jump really looks like. I’d hold my mouth open and catch quantum angels like midges.’ In short, Newton’s Wake is a triumphant distillation of Macleod’s body of work, encompassing, what the New Scientist described as, his wit, intelligence and political challenge.
Indeed, rereading the novel reminds me of what an interesting choice he is as a WorldCon GOH in 2024. For anyone sitting in the UK or the US looking at the world around us, we see the prospect of a dystopian future fought over by tech billionaires and out-of-control populism, while around us the Pax Americana goes horribly, horribly wrong. MacLeod’s whole body of work, in which the political arguments of the 1970s (including those of Marxism and revolutionary socialism) still continue to play out across the universe, offers us a completely alternative (Scottish) paradigm in which everything from AI to transhuman sexuality is still available to further the cause of social needs. If we can only find our way to the post-scarcity future, there won’t ever be any need to look back again.
Prospective Cultures 