Literary Birthday – 2 August – Ken MacLeod

Happy Birthday, Ken MacLeod, born on 2 August 1954.

Ken MacLeod Quotes

1. The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write and keep on writing. (A-Z Quotes)
2. Science fiction made me aware of how big and strange the universe was, leaving aside the whole question of aliens. (A-Z Quotes)
3. All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars? (Learning The World)
4. We’re seeing the truth of the slogan from Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Who controls the past controls the future’. Every possibility of making a better world through conscious collective action is seen as utterly discredited in practice. The past is trashed, the future is vacant, and dystopia is the default. Changing this will depend on a real revival of consciousness that the world can be changed. (Big Echo)
5. I showed a draft of the second chapter of my second novel to Andrew Greig, a poet and novelist I’d met when he was Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University. He went through a couple of pages with a sharp pencil and taught me line editing. He called it ‘picking the fluff off the needle’. I’m convinced this is something you have to be shown by someone else, and once you’ve seen it done you can do it for yourself – a favour I’ve paid forward more than once. As time has gone on the style I’ve striven for is that of good commercial fiction, a more difficult standard than some might suppose. (Big Echo)
6. You can’t have story without character, decision, agency, and consequence. (Big Echo)

Ken MacLeod is the Scottish author of 17 science fiction novels, four novellas, more than 30 short stories, and several poems. His work combines hard science fiction and space opera, drawing on his knowledge of biological science, information technology, and political activism. MacLeod is part of a generation of British science fiction writers that includes Stephen Baxter, Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross, Richard K. Morgan, and others. He has taught creative writing and science fiction at Edinburgh Napier University, Moniack Mhor in Scotland, Arvon in England, and Clarion West in the United States. His recent work includes the Lightspeed Trilogy. Born on the Isle of Skye, MacLeod now lives in Edinburgh. Follow his blog, The Early Days Of A Better Nation.

Source for photograph: Scottish Book Trust

by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: The Complete Author Birthday Calendar