We can relax with a near-future décor and ambiance. Henceforth, if the thirty-second century initially seems like a daunting prospect, its unimaginability turns out to be not so rarefied. It is not the end of history so much as that history is now a channel which exclusively shows repeats. The story is set in the thirty-second century, mostly in a lo-fi simulation with characters whose neural data has been digitally preserved since the late twenty-first century. The CWs: Dissidence is a tale about time travel without any actual time travel in it. The cast has a pleasing Star Wars diversity and it includes “robots, AIs, avatars, p-zombies and… ghosts.” Meanwhile, the world has been busy, and the flamboyance of our future history, observed on a suitably insect scale, features “nuclear exchanges, nanotech and biotech plagues, rogue AIs running amok, space stations and factories brought flaming down on cities…” The CWs: Dissidence has ably compartmentalised its readership: its postmodern detachment will gratify postmodern pointy-heads whilst its accounts of artificial intelligence, drone combat, terraforming, and simulated reality will enthrall the more plebian or juvenile ranks. This is little more than wrapping, however, for beneath the chatty irony is the same boyish enthusiasm about robots which surely fuels sci-fi at its least self-conscious. You are meant to admire MacLeod as an ironist and chuckle at this fiendish interpretative game which he has devised, with all of its gossipy art college in-jokes and its hipsterish knowingness. By this, I mean that there is only so much to the novel’s appearance, or to how it greets you and conducts itself. There is a sort of virgin innocence at the heart of this book. In this review, therefore, it might appear sometimes that a random sample of sci-fi is being compared favourably to the rest of literature. Yet his novels always leave me suddenly, sharply aware of what is absent from the literary mainstream: the ambition to write originally about new, exhilarating ideas. Once the electricity is connected, everything is obscured for me, and I am unable to judge whether MacLeod’s writing is typical of today’s sci-fi or a radical contribution. I have only half the mind which is needed to review these books, since the sci-fi which I am the most up-to-date with is probably Gulliver’s Travels. It is the first novel in a trilogy, with the second, Insurgence, due in November. It was published in May and it is called The Corporation Wars: Dissidence. Amongst these is a new book from the Scottish science-fiction author Ken MacLeod.

Now the hurly-burly’s done, or at least now that we are on the sunny side of Brexit, let us catch up on some stories from the last few months which this website has uncharacteristically overlooked.

Dissidence by Ken MacLeod