Interview: Ken MacLeod, author of Intrusion

As he pauses to consider his answer to a question, the novelist Ken MacLeod takes a slightly surreptitious drag on a cigarette. He’s the only person smoking in the Abbotsford bar, but the staff aren’t manhandling him onto the street, nor are officers from the Health and Safety Executive storming the Edinburgh howff. It’s a cyber-cigarette, a technological nicotine delivery system, and is completely legal since the wisp of smoke is actually steam. There’s something delightfully appropriate about one of Scotland’s leading science fiction writers flouting convention with the aid of a robotic fag, especially since the smoking ban was one of the inspirations behind his new novel, Intrusion. “I’ve tried to write a science fiction book which is accessible to people who don’t think of themselves as science fiction readers,” he says. “My working model for the book – what I called it when I was writing it – was a genomic Aga Saga”. He twinkles at the paradox and returns the fly electronic “smart smoker” into one of his many pockets.

MacLeod, the author of 13 novels, was the writer in residence at the ESRC Genomics Forum at Edinburgh University, where some of the central ideas for Intrusion developed. Set, like his previous three novels, in a not-too-distant future, Intrusion involves a woman, significantly named Hope, worrying about whether or not to take “the fix”, a therapy for pregnant women which pre-emptively repairs congenital genetic problems. Exclusions are allowed for those with religious convictions, but the government has made moves towards making the fix mandatory rather than optional, and Hope finds the element of compulsion terrifying. Her husband, a carpenter who works with genetically engineered “New Wood”, is prepared to hide with her on the island of Lewis, where he grew up, and where he had certain experiences that science does not seem to be able to explain.

“Synthetic biology”, MacLeod says “is a truly amazing proposition. It’s doing genetic engineering as real engineering: in other words you know exactly what a given molecule can do and you have an actual parts catalogue for molecules, the idea being you put them together, like a kit. This is already being done through IGEM, an annual genetic engineering competition. Students literally design organisms to glow in the dark, to give a trivial example, or respond more usefully to certain chemicals or form interesting shapes”. The excitement at this new science intersected with MacLeod’s sharp sense of political implications – he describes his move away from space-opera to near future speculation as the result of “ten years of pent up anger about what was happening in the real world”. Scientific advances imply ethical choices, or, more frighteningly, sleepwalking away from choice. “What I wanted to do was write a kind of democratic dystopia”, he explains: “in the classic form, dystopian features are those that arise out of some kind of new totalitarian ideology that’s swept the board. Here, it comes from presumptions and premises that are already current in politics. If there’s a problem, then a law is the answer to it. If there’s a risk, it should be minimised, and if something is unhealthy you should be prevented from doing it. All of these are, I think, very real tendencies in the present”. The futuristic cigarette is tucked away with a gleeful grin – in one of the book’s provocative and sly asides, the government is worried about “fourth hand smoke” that can leech out of walls and infect people at the subatomic level.

MacLeod was born in Stornoway in 1954, and his father was the Free Presbyterian minister for the parish of Uig, where the latter sections of Intrusion are set. Although his previous novels have had Scottish settings or Scottish characters, this is the first time he’s written about Lewis, an experience he describes as “very weird. I haven’t been back to the island since 1976, and even then it was after ten years away”. He became an atheist, but, as he explains it, “originally through science fiction, not science. Science fiction made me aware of how big and strange the universe was, leaving aside the whole question of aliens. Just the scale of the universe. Science fiction makes at least some aspects of Christianity seem parochial. In the long run it was science, but I was brought up in what you might call traditionalist ‘young earth’ creationism. As I learned more about biology and zoology I realised, to put it as kindly as possible, that they were very much mistaken”.

Leaving religion wasn’t a wrench for MacLeod, but he admits to being “agonised” as a teenager, and particularly by the implications of Calvinism. “The idea of determinism combined with complete human responsibility struck me as very hard to reconcile with an idea of justice, let alone mercy”, he says, and goes on to describe a story of his, “A Tulip for Lucretius”, about a young man brought up in a Calvinist household, who is “shocked and exhilarated” by a sermon that explains that the Fall, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and Final Judgements “were not God’s Plan B. It was always supposed to happen. Then he stumbles on the work of HP Lovecraft, whose books are full of ancient terrifying monsters from the spaces between the stars, who want to eat your brains, and it’s just such a relief for him.” It is, he insists, not autobiographical.

MacLeod’s previous books have been so astute in taking the temperature of our hyperactive culture that they seem almost prophetic. The Execution Channel imagined a trade in images of capital punishment before the execution of Saddam Hussein was swapped on mobiles. The Night Sessions invented a state that was intransigently secular, long before atheists took councils to the High Court claiming their human rights were infringed by prayers. While he was writing The Restoration Game, about a former Soviet republic with a secret so horrific even Stalin couldn’t look at it, the fictional breakaway state was countered by the war between Russia, Georgia, Ossetia and Abkhazia. What, I wonder, will come true from Intrusion? “There is a thing that is not generally appreciated: very, very soon, within the next ten or 20 years we will be able to know whether there is life in other solar systems. Amazing thing to say, but it’s actually becoming technically possible. We’ll be able to resolve the atmospheres of alien planets and that’s going to affect us one way or another”. In Intrusion, it’s not little green men, but big green forests that are detected in space, a problem he analyses acutely.

“It’s the Fermi Paradox. Where are they? If they are out there we ought to know about it. It’s one of the most profound questions we face – there are only two possibilities: either we’re alone or we’re not, and either of them is awesome. One way or another we’ll be faced with the idea that life might exist quite independently of earth, or not. I don’t know if we’ll find other minds out there, at least not within an easy range of communication. I’ve no doubt at all that we can create synthetic life; in fact we know how to make a genome, a bacterium. Craig Venter’s already done it. But understanding consciousness is a huge, long term question”.

MacLeod says, almost bashfully, that he has “lost the chip on his shoulder” over sci-fi’s standing in the literary hierarchy. “In a way science fiction can never really – it sounds awful to say this – intrinsically it can’t reach as wide an audience as crime fiction. Crime fiction by its very nature has an almost universal appeal, which is the disruption and restoration of order and the fear of violence. It almost always has a fairly predictable moral arc. Wrongs are righted and if not righted punished, and in science fiction there isn’t that”. It’s that very sense of uncertainty that makes sci-fi like MacLeod’s so rewarding for the reader. There are very few writers who would gleefully say that the characters end the novel “quite nihilistically”.

And as for if we’re going to end up living in the world of Intrusion, with the government determining what choices we would have made if we’d known all the factors; on this MacLeod is clear. “I’m a long-term optimist, and I don’t think the problems with our society are from being overly optimistic.” But – and this is a writer who puts a but into every what if – the state of reality is already worrisome. “Technological solutions are being imagined and even implemented right now – biofuels is a particularly ghastly example. One of the main effects of biofuels was to drive up food prices globally. This happened and was carried out despite very specific warnings being given beforehand, including one by Fidel Castro, who as far as I know was the only politician to warn about the impact of biofuels. And it was exactly what happened.

“The real world is far too complex and unpredictable to make something like the idea of humanity controlling its own evolution or engineering itself – well, I wouldn’t say impossible but it should be approached with a degree of caution”. A cautious optimism from a canny man.

• Intrusion by Ken MacLeod is published by Orbit this week, priced £18.99.