Ken Macleod, Science Fiction and politics

I was very pleased to hear today that Resistance MP3s has posted new files from Marxism 2006. I've already listened to Ken MacLeod's talk on science fiction which is very interesting, though unfortunately his wrap up is missing, and I hope I haven't said anything unfair as a result.

I always enjoy talks like this, partly because looking back I've realized that a lot of what got me started thinking about politics and was reading Scifi, both good and bad. Ken's written some of each; his Fall Revolution series is absolutely fantastic on a lot of different levels, but his other books are mainly good for in-jokes (for example who naming a starship after a book by Tony Cliff), although still better than some. I think my favorite book of his is The Cassini Division, which deals with a the common problem in political Scifi -- that utopia is boring -- by contrasting two "utopias": the socialist society on earth and a sort of cyberpunk-libertarian "utopia" on the other side of the wormhole. It's one of my favorite depictions of a possible socialist society that I've seen anywhere.

For me the most interesting point in his talk the was about the prominence of the idea of a "singularity" and post-humanism in recent Scifi which I think he's quite right to see the as reflecting how much difficulty people have nowadays of envisioning an attractive human future and a sense of powerlessness. He puts this mainly down to the reaction to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and so forth. I'm sure this is significant; there were no shortage of science fiction writers who had the same kinds of attitudes about "really existing socialism" as other left and soft-left intellectuals (it always struck me how much Isaac Asimov's more pleasant future societies reminded me of an idealized version of the Soviet Union). However I think you can already see that demoralization in Cyberpunk and a lot of the dystopian turn in the eighties. As with the the shifts in the academic "left", I bet it has a lot more to do with disappointment in the outcome social movements and upheavals of the sixties and seventies. The shift from that towards posthumanism I think reflects a shift from a sense that things are more or less just decaying to more prominent feeling (presumably down to a sense of the effects of globalization and all that) that something overpowering is happening, and many people can't sort out whether or not they are frightened of it.

All this, and some of the comments in the discussion, also got me wondering about why people think so highly of Iain M. Banks -- although he's a very skilled rider in a lot of ways I don't find any of his work all that interesting, I think because he's so wrapped up in post-humanism that he just doesn't have that much to say to me. His culture series also has the Star Trek problem of having a supposedly classless etc. society which has to "defend" itself in a way that sneaks in a lot of bits from defenses of contemporary imperialism.

A lot of the discussions didn't touch that much on what Ken was saying but it did bring up some good points about what China Miéville usually covers in these sorts of talks, the role of fantasy and imagination in politics. I was happy to hear a few people stick up for the politics of Firefly, although I think the comments actually didn't give it credit for being as subversive as it actually is. One intervention described the Alliance (the central government in Firefly) as totalitarian, but in fact it's a version of our contemporary government, admittedly viewed through a conspiratorial lens: a nominal democracy, actually dominated by big corporations, and perfectly willing to resort to all sorts of sinister means to maintain its power -- and the tremendous gap between the wealthy "core worlds" and the mostly impoverished periphery. It's a very good example of what I think another one of the participants was trying to get at, which is that Scifi can have a Brechtian effect (if you'll pardon me for being pretentious about it), of making a familiar thing more comprehensible by presenting it in an unfamiliar way.

This discussion took place in the summer, so there are two incredible examples to add since then. The first few episodes of the new season of Battlestar Galactica were one of the most incredible commentaries on the Iraq war I've seen anywhere near the mainstream media, and Children of Men (the film; I haven't had a chance to read the book yet) had more going on than I can hope to cover.