Ken MacLeod

MacLeod was born in Stornoway, Scotland in 1954.^[1] He graduated from University of Glasgow with a degree in zoology in 1976 and worked as a computer programmer and wrote a masters thesis on biomechanics.^[2] He was a Trotskyist activist in the 1970s and early 1980s^[3] MacLeod is opposed to Scottish independence.^[4]

Married with two children,^[1] he lived in South Queensferry near Edinburgh before moving to Gourock, on the Firth of Clyde, in June 2017.^[5]

He is part of a group of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Neal Asher, Stephen Baxter, Iain M. Banks, Paul J. McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross, Richard K. Morgan, and Liz Williams.

His science fiction novels often explore socialist, communist, and anarchist political ideas, especially Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism (or extreme economic libertarianism).^[6] Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution, and post-human cyborg-resurrection. MacLeod's general outlook can be best described as techno-utopian socialist,^[7][8] though unlike a majority of techno-utopians, he has expressed great scepticism over the possibility and especially over the desirability of strong AI.^[7]

He is known for his constant in-joking and punning on the intersection between socialist ideologies and computer programming, as well as other fields. For example, his chapter titles such as "Trusted Third Parties" or "Revolutionary Platform" usually have double (or multiple) meanings. A future programmers union is called "Information Workers of the World Wide Web", or the Webblies, a reference to the Industrial Workers of the World, who are nicknamed the Wobblies. The Webblies idea formed a central part of the novel For the Win by Cory Doctorow and MacLeod is acknowledged as coining the term.^[9] Doctorow and Charles Stross also used one of MacLeod's references to the singularity as "the rapture for nerds" as the title for their collaborative novel Rapture of the Nerds (although MacLeod denies coining the phrase^[10]). There are also many references to, or puns on, zoology and palaeontology. For example, in The Stone Canal the title of the book, and many places described in it, are named after anatomical features of marine invertebrates such as starfish.

The Science Fiction Foundation have published an analysis of MacLeod's work titled The True Knowledge Of Ken MacLeod Archived 8 October 2018 at the Wayback Machine (2003; ISBN 0-903007-02-9), edited by Andrew M. Butler and Farah Mendlesohn. As well as critical essays it contains material by MacLeod himself, including his introduction to the German edition of Banks' Consider Phlebas.