Yatterings

Many thanks for your time.

You’re welcome, and thank you for having me on your blog.

You contributed a short story to the GlorifyingTerrorism anthology but you are not really known as a short story writer. What made you contribute?

What made me contribute was political agreement with an appeal from the editor, Farah Mendlesohn! This law is so cluelessly drafted that it does on the face of it criminalise the stories in this collection, and - far more importantly - certain areas of political speech that should be legal, however disturbing they may be. I remember during the Glasgow Worldcon standing looking at a Sky News headline about ‘deporting seditious clerics’ and being rather struck with the seventeenth-century sound of it. Now, in general I’m a big fan of the seventeenth century, but one of the gains of the seventeenth-century Revolution - in the long run - was that deporting or silencing seditious clerics became a thing of the past.

To take up your first point: quite a few of the other contributors - Jo Walton, for instance - are also much better known for their novels than for their short stories. But if having two short stories and two novellas in various ‘Year’s Best’ anthologies is being ‘not really known’ it’s an obscurity I can live with. However, over the past couple of years I have been writing more short stories: I had one in the collection Nova Scotia, one in the new collection from Pyr, Fast Forward, I have stories in a couple of forthcoming anthologies.

The Execution Channel is a departure for you in terms of being a relatively straightforward thriller. Is there something that you’ve been holding out on for us sf fans or is this an attempt at mainstream fiction?

I hope it reaches a wider readership than my previous books, for sure. It isn’t an attempt at mainstream fiction - I have other plans for that - but I did quite consciously write it as if writing a thriller set in the future, rather than SF. Of course, it is SF.

“The war on terror is over…terror won” is a bold statement for the jacket. Given your involvement in the Glorifying Terrorism anthology, does this sum up your position or is it a statement to make the reader think?

It’s what editors call a strapline. It’s to draw attention to the book. That’s all. It sums up the situation depicted in the book, not the situation at present. The ‘War on Terror’ is a cloak for an open-ended imperialist war that uses all the well-known methods of imperialism, including sponsoring terrorism in enemy states. The latest on that is a report by ABC News, which they have stood by, of covert US backing for an Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist organization in Baluchistan, inside Iran. Recently Seymour Hersh had a New Yorker article about several similar operations. One problem his sources were concerned with is that you have no guarantee that groups you shove into one situation won’t pop up somewhere else - as happened with the US-backed anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan, some of whom became Al-Qaeda. In my book, some of the characters refer to this sort of thing as ‘the muj pipeline’.

You say on page 148 “This isn’t about ideas anymore”. Is this a statement on the way that the Travis family become unwilling pawns in the machinations of various powers, leading to their eventual subsuming into the events? Have we ultimately fallen back into the Cold War politics?

To answer the first question - not exactly. It’s more about Roisin’s recognition of herself as an individual with her own interests, and that she has stopped walking around in an ideological trance. On the second question: yes and no. The Cold War was a confrontation between social systems. The emerging confrontation today with Russia and/or China presents itself as one between states with similar social systems, rather like the build-up to the First World War: in other words, classical inter-imperialist rivalry. Now it may be that this appearance is deceptive, and that the social system in Russia and the PRC is not, in some fundamental sense, the same as in the West. That’s a matter for better and subtler thinkers than me to figure out! But in the novel, I take that possibility seriously, so in that respect the politics shown in the novel is Cold War politics.

What is there next for Ken Macleod?

Well, I’m committed to two more novels of the near-future political thriller type. The first, which I’m working on at the moment, is provisionally titled The Night Sessions, and is about a new kind of religious terrorism in future, militantly secularist, world. It’s in the form of a crime novel. It has no talking squids but it does have robots and spaceships, so it’s definitely SF.

Ken Macleod was also interviewed for the second Grummelings podcast