Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
My Thoughts on Two Ken MacLeod Works
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2015 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Crooked Timber invited me and other writers to discuss the work of science fiction author Ken MacLeod. Thus, I have a new post up at CT: "Games, simulation, difference and insignificance in The Restoration Game & The Human Front". Henry Farrell, Farah Mendlesohn, Cosma Shalizi and Jo Walton have joined me in writing about various aspects of MacLeod's work, and after their posts go live, CT will also be publishing a response by MacLeod.
My post includes a joke about Trotsky's death and a note about what the year 1947 means to me (not Roswell), and starts:
I had, frankly, been afraid of trying to read Ken MacLeod, because I wasn't sure I had the prerequisite domain knowledge. I studied Russian and majored in Political Science at UC Berkeley, and wasn't sure that this had given me enough expertise on the history of Communism to jump into his work. Now that I've overcome this fear, I should check whether there's a market for a MOOC, "Remedial Ken MacLeod Prerequisites," in which I discuss leftism in the twentieth century, MacLeod's crony and former Big Pharma dispenser Charles Stross, and the landscape of rural Scotland, or, "Reds, meds, and sheds."
Check it out! Comments are live over on Crooked Timber.
