10 Membranes

5 Writers

Following the 5 Things I’m Thinking about meme has been fun and instructive. It’s a clever, intriguing and accessible format. Rather than jumping on the bandwagon, already buckling under the weight of so many brilliant ideas, I thought I would try something else and mention five writers that I have been thinking about recently. And I mean recently, in the sense of the past couple of weeks, and I mean thinking not as in read, but as in deeply hanging around. 

Ian McDonald - Author of sf novels set in the near future of the developing world, e.g. in the developed world, recently India, Brazil and Turkey. Ian McDonald quite simply has the most interesting and most appreciably foreseeable view on the future of anyone I have read. Forget futurology, this is it. He also creates ensemble castes and multiple plotlines with a skill that defies belief and opens the narrow world of Anglo-American sf writing to vistas and cultures it has never before explored. McDonald is a prophet of the 21st century. 

Neal Stephenson - The Baroque Cycle are probably my favourite novels of the past decade. Vast, omniscient, gargantuan caricatures, these books combine synapse overloading intellectual prowess with all action, adventure, edge of the seat read-on-ness you could hope. It is unprecedented on almost every level. And now he will probably redefine the novel, and the idea of a writer, with the online storytelling project The Mongoliad. We may look back on Stephenson as the person who pushed the novel to the edge, and the went beyond it. 

Roy Bhaskar - My uncle, admittedly, but recently introduced to my life, which has prompted me to read and reread many of his books. He is the founder of critical realism, a philosophical school that attempts to re-vindicate ontology in the philosophy of science and social science - in essence to argue that science and social science can say meaningful things about the world and contribute to a genuine understanding of it. Critical realism is the antidote to the post-structuralist/post-modern theoretical hegemony we have all been wanting to do away with. 

Marshall McLuhan vs. Raymond Williams - Cultural thinkers who argued about technological determinism. McLuhan being the determinist, a writer whose ideas can be flawed and stupid yet still so inventive and new and intriguing as to be entirely valuable. Williams brings out the best of leftist thinking, bringing a critiquing, analytically, pleasingly flexible Marxism to bear on technology. Technology is not a determiner as such, but is itself determined in complex arrays of human relations. These two still pretty much define the debates about culture and technology fifty years on. 

Shakespeare - This may seem cheesy and pretentious but the other week I went to the Globe for the first time. We were standing, in the endlessly pouring rain, soaked and chilled, watching Henry IV Part One. It was awe inspiringly good, the best Shakespeare I have seen. It reminded me of the importance of context, of performance, of why Shakespeare is still the don, of the uniqueness of Britain and British art at its best. It set me alight on so many levels and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.