Road to Glasgow 2024: Newton’s Wake by Ken Macleod (Orbit, 2004)

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.

BSFA Awards Best Novel Shortlist

Here is my review of the shortlist for the BSFA Award for Best Novel published in 2023 to be awarded at Eastercon 2024. My review from last year, when I was going for complete scientific analysis, was spread over three posts: Part One, Part Two, Postscript. This year I’m keeping it simple with just the one post consisting of 3-400 word reviews of each novel and a short discussion at the end

Geoff Ryman, Him (Angry Robot, 366pp.)

I’m here drawing on a review yet to appear in the BSFA Review: What I particularly love about Angry Robot is that every novel has a backcover blurb feature (‘File Under: …) listing topics under which it can be filed. In the case of Him these are ‘The Greatest Story Never Told / Child of the Faith / Apocrypha / Herstory’. This is funny as Him is a novelisation of the life of Jesus but with the twist that Jesus, or Yeshu, is a trans man. ‘Herstory’ is still appropriate as a description because the novel is narrated from the perspective of Yeshu’s mother, Maryam. Indeed, one of the key points of the novel is that it is Maryam who records what will become the message of the Gospels by writing down what Yeshu says.

I went to Sunday School as a child and my mum was a Sunday School teacher, so I know these stories fairly well even though I’ve spent forty years outside the church. Over the years, however, the stories have become mixed in with popular-culture retellings from Jesus Christ Superstar to The Life of Brian. I suspect I’m not the only one for whom the sermon on the mount immediately conjures thoughts of blessed cheesemakers. Likewise, I’m pretty sure that henceforth I’ll forever imagine the Virgin Mary stuttering while explaining to her uncle, the Kohen Gadol, how ‘the … the pregnancy came about in an unusual way’. Discussing it with his wife afterwards, he says, ‘She’s mad. I don’t suppose you know of any man mad enough to marry her?’. ‘There’s Yosef,’ his wife replies. This is Yosef the Levite, who goes around claiming that Adam and Hawa were not a man and a woman but ‘neither or both’. Subsequently, Maryam’s parthenogenetically born (and therefore identical to her) daughter, Avigayil, grows up only to declare that she is a boy. When, following a ten-page gap, the text shifts to using male pronouns, it feels like a significant realignment of reality, as though the relationship between God and the world has changed.

This change is further demonstrated when Elazar (Lazarus) is brought back from the dead. Like Buffy, he comes out of the tomb complaining that he has been dragged against his will from heaven. The point of this demonstration, as ‘the Son’ explains, is that God has indeed changed and ‘now allows your spirit to live after death as you yourself’. By treating this old and, by now, well-worn story as genre, Ryman gives it renewed meaning as twenty-first century SFF. Only science fiction can save us now.

Gareth Powell, Descendant Machine (Titan Books, Kindle ebook edition, pp.)

This is another instalment in the Continuance series that began with Stars and Bones, which was of course on last year’s shortlist. The novels in this series can be read in any order so it is fine to start with Descendant Machine, which is a fast-paced space opera. A brief introduction frames the novel as being narrated by the V[anguard] S[cout] S[hip] Frontier Chic. The main protagonists are Nicola Mafalda, the navigator of the Chic, and Orlando Walden, a young physicist being taken by Mafalda and the Chic from the Thousand Arks of the Continuance (on which the homeless remnants of humanity are slowly traversing the universe) to Jzat in order to study the Grand Mechanism. Things start to go wrong once Mafalda begins the return journey after dropping off Walden. The Frontier Chic is attacked by a Jzatian gunboat and is only able to keep Mafalda alive and escape by taking very drastic action indeed.

Although Mafalda survives and lives to ultimately sort out, after many adventures, the resultant rapidly escalating situation, her relationship with the ship, as indeed with just about everyone else, does become a bit prickly. She’s an engaging character, whom I had no hesitation in making the object of my readerly identification, but I did wonder if more mileage could have been gained by keeping her gender ambiguous for most or all of the novel (Nicola, of course, being a masculine name in Italy). Aside from the introduction which refers to her as Ms Mafalda (although I only noticed this when I went back to look at it again), there are a good 50 pages at least before a pronoun is used at all and I was enjoying the uncertainty until the feminine pronouns started appearing. Having said that, she’s still a pretty cool, gender-nonconforming character, as one might expect in the SF future. Of course, Powell is caught here in the dilemma of trying to write the future while also providing relatable content. Hence, we see Mafalda struggling against a very recognisable family upbringing (there is a great one-liner describing her mother which I won’t spoil for those who haven’t read it yet).

While, despite a complex plot, the politics of the novel are fairly straightforward, e.g. the Jzatian baddies are satisfyingly Brexity and Trumpian, Powell always demonstrates a strong sense of what is at stake. With the Arks offering fully automated space communism, you’d think humanity would be satisfied with feeling the utopian love, right? Of course not! Half of them are too preoccupied with trying to replicate the outdated economic and religious systems of long-gone Earth. Some have even left the Arks to become ‘rich’, as one cheerfully informs Mafalda. ‘But we live in a post scarcity society,’ she replies, only to be told that there are some things only money can buy. Power, authority, the right to control other people’s lives; all the usual things that sociopathic arseholes want. As Powell understands, these people do actually have to be stopped.

Wole Talabi, Shigidi And The Brass Head Of Obalufon (Gollancz, pp.)

This noirish thriller, jam packed with sex and magic, is a welcome shot to the system. Following a London-set cold open, clearly happening in the immediate aftermath of some kind of action that has gone badly wrong, the novel reverts three days, in the first of many time hops and flash backs, to a Thai resort. Retired Yoruba nightmare god, Shigidi, and succubus, Nneoma, are bickering on the beach as to whether they should invite the tall, toned and tattooed woman sitting on a pink teach towel nearby back to their chalet so that they can find out what her spirit tastes like, when they realise that her place has been taken while they weren’t looking by Olorun, elder god and chairman of the board of the Orisha Spirit Company, who offers them a special, urgent job, which will clear their debt with him and earn them an additional big bonus.

Indeed, the gods are on hard times, caught in the same web of neoliberalism as everyone else. The Orisha Spirt Company Board has not long voted to cut down the evil forest to make way for a shrine to cinema. As Shigidi reflects, ‘that was the way the spirit business was going. Evil forests are out, Nollywood is in’. Talabi gets the satire pitch perfect in the passages exploring the internal dynamics and workings of the Spirit Board, including a very entertaining depiction of a boardroom coup at the annual meeting. I particularly enjoyed the early sequence revealing the distinctly unglamourous nature of Shigidi’s job while still employed by the company, as he struggles to collect two spirits during the course of a single night. This becomes complicated when he encounters Nneoma, for the first time, in bed with the woman, whose spirit he needs to complete his quota. Once they have got over their initial reactions to this situation, they strike up a partnership and go into business on their own. Part of the pleasure of these sequences is, as Gary Wolfe noted in his review of Shigidi for Locus, the way that the language of corporate culture is deployed to comic effect: ‘a scheme that goes awry, for example, is an ‘‘unforeseen process deviation’’’.

There’s a lot more – including Aleister Crowley at large in twenty-first-century London – going on in this novel, all of it enjoyable. Shigidi is a memorable protagonist and Olorun is also great fun, but it’s Nneoma who leaves the greatest impression: ‘If you gaze long enough into the eyes of a succubus, the succubus gazes back into you’. Indeed!

Juliet McKenna, The Green Man’s Quarry (Wizard Tower Press, Kindle ebook edition: 355 pp.)

Daniel Mackmain, the son of a dryad and human agent of the Green Man, is charged with solving the mystery surrounding the deadly appearances of a mysterious giant black panther. Early on, there is a comment about such sightings always being attributed to the ‘Beast’ of whichever nearby location begins with ‘B’, such as ‘Beast of Bodmin’. Of course, living in Aberystwyth, I immediately thought of the ‘Beast of Borth’ but alas this particular Green Man novel doesn’t venture into Wales. It does go to plenty of other places, though, and brings in a number of topical themes for more rural areas, including ‘county lines’ drug dealing and the difficult economic climate for tourist destinations and guest houses. The combination of a very English pragmatic, matter-of-fact style – the practically minded Mackmain has zero tolerance for fools – with an ancillary cast of dryads, hammadryads, naiads, mermaids, sylphs, wise women, cunning men and others creates a very distinctive effect. At times, the novel reads like a functionalist anthropologist account of the weirdly symbiotic relationship between humans and non-humans in the ‘matter of Britain’. 

I’m a fan of this series, of which this is the sixth instalment: once you have adjusted to the realist style I’ve described, they work nicely as quirky no-nonsense supernatural mystery-thriller stories. Don’t worry if you haven’t read any of the others. It’s fine to start here. McKenna takes care to provide you with the information you need to know and the relevant details about the recurring characters (but without providing spoilers for the other novels). This is not to say that there is no progression: the books are getting longer, and we are gradually being introduced to a wider map of Britain, with The Green Man’s Quarry including extended excursions into Cornwall and Scotland. I get the sense that the scaffolding is being put in place for even more wide-ranging plotlines with higher stakes. So read this and then be sure to catch up on the other novels before the next one comes out.

Christopher Priest, Airside (Gollancz, 297pp.)

This is an abridged version of a review which first appeared in ParSec #8 (Autumn 2023), pp.67-8:Priest’s latest novel is according to its press release ‘a gripping speculative historical novel, grounded in the golden age of film. Perfect for fans of true crime, conspiracy theories and SF that is chillingly close to reality.’ Apart from the last part, this has the effect of making Airside sound like a James Ellroy novel. It led me to consider whether Airside, which is beautifully packaged with a stylish retro cover design, is perhaps what an Ellroy novel would be like if written by Priest from a more oblique British perspective. The protagonist, film critic Justin Farmer, who is given an age and background similar to Priest’s own, finds himself compelled to cherchez la femme, Hollywood star Jeanette Marchand, with the twist that she disappeared in 1949, never being seen again after disembarking from a cross-Atlantic flight at London Airport. While the plot unfolds in classic cinematic manner – I was reminded at several points of Hitchcockian camera angles – there is also ample opportunity for the reader to indulge themselves in an enticing mix of film history, gossip and speculation.

However, Airside is just as much concerned with air travel and airports as it is with film. In particular, the liminal experience of being airside – beyond the security and passport controls – is explored fully through Farmer’s increasingly unsettling experiences attempting to travel between a seemingly unending series of international film conferences. It is possibly not a good idea for anyone prone to anxiety at the thought of not making it to the departure gate in time to read thisnovelimmediately before travelling.

Airside is a superb achievement, in which Priest distils his accumulated writerly craft to produce a novel that charts the uncanny qualities shared by airports and cinema, which are both portals to other realities. Airside or screenside, we don’t always come out as we went in. By capturing such uncertainty before we can blink it away as a trick of the imagination, Priest holds open possibilities that are disturbing but also potentially transformative for those prepared to risk losing themselves amidst the fleeting joys of the world.

(You can read the full version of this review as part of the post I wrote in response to Priest’s passing earlier this year.)  

Discussion: This shortlist provides a nice mix of different styles and types of novel. That said, it would have been good to see at least one other book by a woman writer in contention given that 2023 saw a wide range of excellent novels from across the genre, such as Nina Allan’s Conquest, Lauren Beukes’s Bridge, Ann Leckie’s Translation State and Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory. However, there is no question that the shortlist forms an entertaining set of books to read. I’ve no idea who is going to win though. For the first time in five years – during three of which he has won – Adrian Tchaikovsky is not on the shortlist. Gareth Powell is also a very popular writer, and a former winner, but all of these novels will have their supporters. As is often the case, we’re comparing very different works with each other. I don’t feel I can predict the winner and, as is my normal practice, I’m not going to rank these books in order; they are all very special to some readers. I was tempted to give my first vote to Airside because, aside from the fact that I have always been a fan of Priest’s work, it provides an ingenious and satisfying blend of text and found-text (newspaper articles, book chapters, film reviews etc within the world of the novel but crossing directly over with our contemporary world). It is also the sad truth that this is the last opportunity that we’ll get to vote for a novel by Priest and no doubt some people will take that opportunity. However, it might also be the once and only opportunity that we’ll get to vote for the amazing non-patriarchal trans version of the biblical story that is Him. I don’t know if it will win but I gave it my first vote. Let’s see what happens at the Awards ceremony.