 This is my interview with science fiction writer Ken McLeod, who is particularly popular in left libertarian circles, although you don't have to have those political sympathies to find this works. Interesting. I think I've read all his books except the two most recent ones. So I've read everything up through the corporation wars. I actually intended to ask him in this interview more questions about his science fiction. I got distracted about asking questions about politics, but hopefully we could never rematch and talk about some more things. One interesting feature of his science fiction is that there are illusions and references and in-jokes throughout, particularly in his first series, the fall revolution. Virtually every page has some kind of in-joke or illusion or reference or something, which he just throws in there knowing that not everyone's going to get all of them because some of them will be more likely to get if you come from a British Trotskist background and some of them will be more likely to get if you come from a free market libertarian background and some of them are scientific concepts and some of them are philosophical concepts and so forth and some of them are just literary illusions. But I've occasionally fantasized about coming up with some guide to that series in particular, just tracking all the illusions of the pages, but had I whirled enough in time I might do that. Anyway, when I recorded this video, and not unlike an idiot, I recorded it to the cloud rather than to my computer. So when I downloaded it from the cloud one result of that was for some reason it recorded in speaker view rather than the usual side-by-side view. So you're not going to see a side-by-side, you're going to see whoever's talking at the moment, which is not the ideal way to do this, but let there be a lesson to me moving more careful about how I'm recording. Anyway, here comes the interview. Welcome back to the Agora Cafe for more coffee and philosophy. Today I'm pleased to have with me Ken McLeod, a science fiction writer. I have, he's a, there's some info on him. He's a two-time BSFA award winner, a three-time Prometheus award winner, a former writer in residence at the University of Edinburgh's Genomics Forum, a former writer-in-residence at Edinburgh Napier University's Creative Writing and May program. He's taught science fiction writing workshops at Moniac Moor in Scotland, Arvon in England, and Clarion West in the US. He's published, the books he's published include the Fall Revolution series in four volumes, the Engines of Light series in three volumes, the Corporation Wars series in three volumes, the Web of Sidonia, Newton's Wake, Learning the World, The Highwaymen, The Execution Channel, Inclusion, The Human Front, Descent, Selkie Summer, and a book of poems with Ian Banks and many short stories as well as non-fiction articles. His short story, The Surface of Last Scattering, was the basis for the short film Scattered and I'll provide a link to that and to all these things in the description and he blogs at kenmacloud.blogspot.com. Here I am again later and somehow I left out a couple of novels of the night sessions and the restoration game because I'm apparently unable to read a list of things I have written for myself and I'm recording these things but anyway it is now included so welcome and don't start by asking about your background about growing up and how you got interested in science fiction and radical politics and the various things that occupy your mind. Yeah thanks for having me Rodrik. I think we've kind of been in touch remotely for a number of years now. I'm not quite sure in what forms other than your blog but anyway we vaguely know each other and so my background I was born in on the Isle of Lewis which is off the northwest coast of Scotland and when I was 10 my family moved to Greenock which is very near where I am now. Greenock was at that time an industrial town on the first of Clyde, a large estuary on the west coast of Scotland and the main outlet from Glasgow to the sea and the move from a very, very distinctively highland what we used to call them I think we didn't even call the places we lived in villages that were called settlements which is basically a scatter of houses over a hillside. Sometimes you get houses within a few hundred meters of each other you know they were it was quite quite a rural place and my father was a minister of religion he was a preacher and he got a call from the congregation he had on the Isle of Lewis to the congregation in Greenock and we and his my then I think six brothers and sisters moved from from Lewis to Greenock when I was at the age of about 10 and I kind of dramatized this experience in my novella the human front by turning everything upside down so they'd the father a doctor rather than a minister and so on but the he went from this not not backward I would say but certainly rather strange society of the Isle of Lewis to what was then a very, very heavy industrial town which had one of the biggest IBM factories in Europe it had its own it had a huge sugar refinery it had a huge metal box factory it had a play text factory it had you know it was it was a signing industrial town heavily with quite a lot of air pollution because people burned coal in their fireplaces and and so on so it was a drastic change and that's how I grew up where I grew up and after going to university at Glasgow University I went to London to do further study and eventually went lived in a worked in IT after failing to become a scientist for reasons I'll explain in a moment and I am then with my family by that point we moved to Edinburgh in about 1990 and it was round about then that I started making a very serious effort to write my first novel to recap on how I got interested in science fiction and as you said on radical politics I suppose like many people who go on to become science fiction readers let alone writers you it happens round about your early teens and I know that as a younger child I had read what I would in retrospect identify as science fiction but I didn't think of it as anything different from other kinds of boys adventure stories I read I was at one of these kids's of Horatio's reader actually I simply read everything we you can imagine my mother had been a teacher before she got married and my father was a preacher and he was one of those people who acquired a library by buying and he'd find one book in a lot of an auction that was interesting to him he'd buy the lot and take them all home so we had a you know backrooms and attics piles complete and junk of literature you know all sorts of things and I read all kinds of stuff when I was when I was a kid and but when I when I when I was I guess 10 or 11 or 12 or so I read a book out of the junior library called rocket to limbo by alan e nurse who's a quite well it's at that time quite a famous writer and he was particularly well known for writing what are now called well they're not what is now called why they were then called juveniles like Heinlein juveniles um he wrote sf for young people and I know I can't recall if I've read anything by him but I didn't know the name yeah yeah the point about sorry to ramble a bit the point about rocket to limbo was it introduced me to the entire range of virtually the entire range of golden age cambillian sf probes generationships faster than light travel telepathy side power and all of that and I was completely you know I thought wow I want more of this so I so I then started reading more extensively and I read all of his books and lots of Heinlein juveniles and then I go onto the adult library and found yet more sf and by my mid teens and I was doing what every certainly every um british sf writer of my age which is my i'm in my 60s probably a bit younger my age and younger we'll talk about looking for the gaunt sf hardbacks in the library these had a yellow dust jacket a yellow spine and had sf on the spine so we worked our way through you know asthma, bubbris, blish, brunner, clark all the way through to zelazny you know we got we got them all and so I read them and like a lot of people I I tried to write science fiction or tried to write stories but the main effect of reading all this science fiction I think was that you I got the idea that what I really wanted to be was a scientist and this was a very bad move on my part because I was uh as you can imagine from being a science fiction reading child I was a uh or teenager I was one of those um kids who does really well at subjects like English and history and all that sort of thing but um really struggles with mathematics and and physics and so on but nevertheless I persisted and so I I ended up doing a zoology degree however I mean it stood me in good stead um although um my I I think I learned a lot out of it but I think it's probably a mistake to if you're if you're a science fiction reader to think that means you're necessarily going to be particularly good at science the other question about radical politics I guess in a way I mean we can talk about what was going on socially at the time this is the the late 60s early 70s and there were a great a great deal of people sort of going on in Britain and in Europe and as you recall in the United States and naturally you are sort of influenced by that kind of ferment and I would have read for instance I read Malcolm X's autobiography when I was still at high high school I probably read Solid and Brother about that time too by George Jackson books like that and I think it got interesting I was you know I guess in my early teens I was a fairly conservative teenager and I I think I was joked about that partly by things that were going on and partly by um I think the first story I ever read that gave me the idea that things that you know different ways of having society ordered and what possible or conceivable was a short story by Paul Anderson called The Last of the Deliverers which is just about a I mean it's a set in a future America where it's basically a market anarchist future America it yeah he had I'm not sure whether he was a full-fledged one but he was he had sympathies to market anarchism I know yeah I guess so so it's what a a very cheap source of power has enabled people to be dispersed and self-sufficient but still technologically advanced enough to have um federations that launch expeditions to Venus and all that and the last Republican in town who's going on and on an old man eccentric old man who bangs on about the wonders of the division of labor and mass production factories he encounters the last Soviet type communist who wonders in detail and the two old men have a have a fight and end up killing each other and both of their ideologies have been rendered irrelevant and I am I thought that was a you know it really started me thinking and then you know as as one does and you encounter some forms of Marxism and start looking into that I got into dreadful fights with my parents over over that when I was a student and we eventually came to a kind of agreement that I wouldn't get politically active while I was before it got my degree which I rather reluctantly agreed to um but at Glossy University in the 70s there was a quite thriving and active left that did a lot of on-campus activity and educational stuff and you could go and listen to lectures by people who became quite well known and distinguished but who already were um if you in my novel I think it's yeah in the stone canal and another one in the sky road there are allusions to that period and which I mean basically I think gives us some of the atmosphere so when I went when I was became a postgraduate and was down at Brunel University the west of London the outer fringe of London I did become politically active and I was a member of a small far left group for a number of years and got involved in various campaigns and you know in Brunel University at that time was had a lot of overseas students including Iranians and Iraqis and Jordanians and Palestinians and so on so and Turks so you got a lot of people who were very serious political people from pretty repressive regimes you know um one of my enduring memories from Brunel is when the Iranian revolution started in 1978 we had the organization I was in had a section in in Iran and certainly among Iranian exiles and we had literature in Persian and one day two of them came to the campus with a stack of this literature and people that we'd never thought of as political or had ever encountered before were you know coming up and you know grabbing it we shifted stacks of this stuff just an analysis of what was going on in Iran and the prospects of the revolution and all of that so it was lived through in pretty intense you know you might think Brunel University has a little campus on the west west of London but it was you know quite a there were a lot of cross currents internationally there so in the end yeah I got this illusion was that for reasons we needn't go into and leave it at that but I I got into writing seriously I think after I had finally finished my thesis and I which was an MFIL thesis it's not a doctorate so it didn't open many more doors it gave me the satisfaction of having completed this bit of research and paid my debt to society and I found much to my surprise actually that I was actually pretty good at programming I was amazed when I breezed through an aptitude test and got got on you know got a position as a trainee at a London electricity which was the main well it self-explanatory what it was it was at that time the monopoly supplier of electricity in London the London electricity board and I was there in the late in the 80s and the 80s were a wonderful time for programmers because Margaret Thatcher had unleashed the market in the city of London she essentially deregulated the city the financial sector and the British economy with what was called the big bang and this created a sort of tornado an area of low pressure into which every programmer kept they kept pulling in programmers and anybody with IT experience got drawn off to the city which meant that the companies that and organizations that needed programmers were very willing to recruit and train new people and there was quite an upward pressure if you like on programmer pay and conditions and so on so we're you know we're pretty well off and at the end of the 80s we moved my wife and I and decided we wanted to move back to Scotland a bit and moved to Edinburgh and around about 1987 I started writing my first novel and I think I completed it in about 1994 the Star Fraction but I sort of went through all my trying to address all the things that I had that I had been trying to think about about the fall the socialist bloc and so on so does that answer your question? In those your books and you know I don't think about like the the the original series the fall revolution you've got characters and societies that are Trotskist and free market anarchist and communist anarchist it's interesting that unlike a lot of political novels it's not the case that some of them presented you know utopia and some of the presenters you know awful and bad but you know you've got this this mixture uh how did you end up coming to uh coming to find sort of you know interesting positive and negative aspects of so many different flavours of radical politics? Well excuse me that that came I think after I'd stopped being properly politically active and in the 1980s I encountered first of all I encountered the libertarian alliance quite by accident the libertarian alliance which in some form still exists was a group of minimal statists and anarcho-capitalists with some kind of the usual kind of mysterious financial backing that are the bookshop and Covent Garden called the alternative bookshop which is the most gobsmacking place I've ever wandered into I had I had been a mem I had joined um our oldest secular humanist organisation a national secular society because I again had happened to come across the bookshop which is quite near where we lived and the their their venerable journal The Freethinker they they the guy who worked in the shop asked me my own mind dropping off a bundle at this shop in Covent Garden where it was near where I worked so I did and I walked into this shop that had you know works by von Mises by Ein Rand who I'd encountered before and um things like a badge with a poppy on it and the slogan legalized heroine which at the time I found just inconceivably outrageous because the funny thing is that although I I had the usual and at the time kind of counter-cultural attitude about drugs that soft drugs that you know cannabis and so forth had been unfairly demonised and were pretty harmless you could it was only common sense that they should be legal but that of course heroine should be illegal give grief allowing people to poison themselves how can you do that so it was you know absolutely fascinated by you know shocked and fascinated and I started talking to the guys who worked there um the late Chris T. who was an extremely dynamic character I um I I know I I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of organised libertarian factional beefs and so on and I know he didn't oh there is bad yes yes yes just as bad and and so I you know at a quite frank discussion with them I said look I'm a Marxist but I I do kind of understand the idea that you could denationalise the state as it were needed oh yes anarcho-capitalism yes that's what we call it um and we had a very long conversation just but he expanded what the ideas were and um I realised that they weren't they weren't the kind of people that had hitherto come across defending capitalism I mean when you're when you're growing up certainly in the societally Britain was in the 60s and 70s there are there is roughly a left which is you know goes from the near to the far left if you like and there are the Tories who are these you know very diagonal probably a bit racist etc etc and um reactionary in every social respect and so on and even at the university the the conservatives tended to be you know braying Tory boys with um I think the hang Mandela t-shirts came a bit later but you get you get the idea pretty pretty obnoxious character uh and too much to me you know to my mind at the time anyway I wouldn't have had the time of the day for them but you know these guys were interesting and obviously had thought thought things out and I was I became quite intrigued by the economic calculation argument which is made by ironically enough was made by popularised and the version that I saw it was written by a guy called David Ramsey Steele who came from Scotland and who um was in the 60s a member of the a very purest organisation called the Socialist Party of Great Britain which is a very which was founded in 1903 and still exists with its principles unchanged although it's um and they have always argued that you could move straight from where we are now to um a completely moneyless uh classless stateless etc society as long as you convinced enough people with the feasibility of it which you you know saves you a lot of thought about tactics and strategy and what demo to go to and what cost support which I don't support any of them the they're like pure propagandists and I guess Steele had he he became intrigued he he can't say he became intrigued by the economic calculation arguments he saw it as a decisive objection to this kind of socialism and he elaborated it um first in a thesis and then in a a book which came out in in 1990 or 91 called From Marx to Mises which I have and I've read more than once and so I was intrigued by this and at the same time of course in the 80s you got market reforms in the socialist countries so you had and then the rapid disintegration of the communist regimes so it all gave me a lot to think about and the and I put all not all that but quite a lot of that into the star fraction so what are you working on now hey and at the moment I'm in the editing stage of a the first volume of a trilogy a space opera trilogy and after I wrote my last space opera trilogy I swore it never right another in fact after my first space opera trilogy I swore it never right another and now I'm on to my third and this one it's the provisional unfortunately I keep rethinking the provisional title but the the basic idea of it is that um faster than light travel has becomes available in the relatively near future and like in this century it was just something that struck me as something that might be a crazy cool idea and I know that in a sense faster than light travel is almost certainly impossible but I also thought that perhaps and came I up with a yet another bogus rationalization for faster than light travel which I don't think it's one that I don't think has been done before and of having it with fairly recognizable extensions of the main power blocks of the world we live in suddenly all getting that and going out into out among the stars had lots of intriguing possibilities so that's what I'm doing and when you have uh when you have a set of political sympathies that finds a lot of aspects of traditional radical socialism attractive and also finds aspects of pre-market libertarianism attractive so it's sort of broadly in the same space that I in a lot of my gang are in um the question is what does that translate into in terms of of practical politics in the present which is something that people with that set of interests have a lot of disagreements about um well you know I would hate to be here under false pretenses I I am you know in a way neither of these in terms of practical politics um I remember it was a labor party you know it's just the I have no I have no um objection to um having you know certain utilities and monopolies and land and so on nationalized and having other things privatized it's a bit like Deng Xiaoping whatever catches mice and I mean I have a time it's been tempted to define myself for maximum annoyance as a right wing communist which is not really very helpful um so yeah on on how that kind of I mean I actually did kind of try many years ago trying to figure it out and would you not not my present political position it was a lot more moderated this sort of what somebody described uh yeah I know it was actually Gwyneth Jones the English um I guess of anyway British uh critic and author she described um one of my novels as hard left libertarian just was quite nice um the the opposite of right wing communist but it's still yes yes exactly yes yeah um I you know I've always been you know when I say I wasn't politically active for many years actually I mean active as a sort of food soldier and all sorts of things notably you know you know the anti-war movement from the invasion of Afghanistan through the invasion through Yugoslavia, Iraq etc etc and I followed the American website anti-war.com in fact I still do um I used to take great delight in reading Justin Rimondos and editorials however um wrong-headed some of these positions might have been he was certainly a very forceful writer and I feel a sucker were forceful writers and an engaging character and certainly very hard working and I honestly thought that it was a kind of area in which you know left-wing anti-imperialism and um American isolationism could be tactically at least on the same page and I'm afraid I've come to regard that as a bit naive. I mean individually, tactically maybe yes but I think I've come to see come to be quite dubious about the market free market libertarianism because it always and I'm sure you could say mutates, mutand is the same thing back at me but I tend to find it as too much of an outrider of the more conventional right which um I've come to substantially mistrust obviously. One of the things you know one of the things that happens when you're on I was online from oh I don't know and I think it was in the 19 early 90s mid 90s that I first went online and discovered the wonderful crazy world of Usenet which for any younger viewers was the original social media well not quite the original but one of the early forms of social media and some of the some of the libertarians that I used to fence with on there and sometimes I agree with on there went on to um what is now called the upright and neo-reactionaries and this experience actually went into um my last the corporation wars yeah yeah because when I encountered Nick Lanz on Scott I think it's Scott Alexander wrote the anti-reactionary FA FAQ that's an online thing and the other one was Nick Lanz reactionary FAQ um the dark enlightenment and when I read the dark enlightenment I could see exactly where these guys were coming from um you know people who had started out in his case he didn't but he was an atomizing people who had who had started out with a libertarian position and then found themselves going more and more over to the dark side and you can see the you can see the roots of it in um in some some versions at least of anarcho-capitalism like Hans Hermann Hopp who has this very aristocratic idea of what a free society would be like um yeah I've got a I've got a piece on him coming out that's called what's it called something like I forget the title but it's uh the um the the nationalist tribalism of Hans Hermann Hopper or something like that um uh you know so I mean for a while I was allied with some of those folks but there was for a long time there was a um you know I think for a long time there was a and this is a way of phrasing it I think that comes from this guy named Adam Bates online um that for a long time there were two different kinds of people or two different kinds of reasons people got involved in libertarianism they didn't initially obviously uh the differences between them weren't obvious and then they became obvious which is people who are in it because they wanted liberation for everybody and people were in it because they wanted liberation for them and themselves and people like them obviously initially you could see a lot of commonalities you could see that they would have a lot of common fights and so forth but over time it became more and more clear that things were going on different trajectories and the people who were primarily interested in in liberation for themselves and people you know who are like them in some sort of tribal way uh we're moving off in directions of of nationalism and social conservatism and various um various weaker and stronger versions of you know ultimately fascism really whereas people for whom it was always about liberation for everybody were going off in a different direction so I think we you know the libertarian movement is I think much more polarized than it was um say 20 years ago yeah the way I think it's a good thing you know because we're we're we're we're recognizing we're not all on the same page and we are heading in different you know and of course within though each of those factions within each of those camps there's lots of disagreements too but um but the uh you know the people who are in it uh you know primarily because they you know resented government control of their you know because they you know they wanted to have their own ethnic enclaves or whatever bullshit they wanted uh it just comes to just it's not the same set of motivations uh so as far as I'm concerned you know you know did them a happy farewell uh as uh you know as um uh Greta Garbo says in the notchka about the the Stalinist mass trials that are going to be fewer but better russians uh on this case yeah I think uh you know if I'm happy to speed these people out of libertarian movement let's go off into the crazy alt right get out of our get out of our spaces uh you know it's I think it's a you know someone who gets interested in in libertarian ideas and then as a result gets you know gets hooked you know it's important and you know what the next thing is that they associate that with and uh get hooked on to so um so a lot of those people started more started moving more openly right at the same time that I and some of my friends were moving more to sort of the left end of libertarianism so we uh you know so there's you know there's been sort of a broadening uh gap there yeah now that that's really interesting because I have um tried to understand some of these intellectual genealogies and they're if you take classical people talk about classical liberalism and you know lots of quite um people that you know you and I would probably unite in scoffing at would call themselves classical liberals um but the only classical liberal living I wouldn't say even superficially familiar with was John Stuart Mill and I think you know John Stuart Mill's text on liberty remains a permanent acquisition of human thought um likewise you know many of the other uh some of the the great liberal works and some of the libertarians um um for example um is it George H Smith the guy who wrote atheists in the case against God and atheists in mind Rand and other heresies he was a kind of more free thinking randian but he certainly um was very much aware of the full range of the liberal tradition and radical liberal tradition and um the late chris team was fantastically interested in that I mean he was probably at the time in britain he was had more classical liberalism in his head and in his library than um entire university departments like he compiled I think a bibliography of classical liberal thought which you can probably I think you can find online I think Sean Gabb made it available and it is a phenomenal piece of research and he also did specialized works in the land on the land question on georgianism and I oh the other one the other great classical liberal like somewhat cantankerous character but still fascinating herbert spencer one of the most maligned philosophers that i can think of and he did didn't have some you know some some cantankerous views but he certainly didn't you know he certainly wasn't the you know he certainly didn't have the sort of the stereotypical view that everyone attributes to him that uh you know we should just let the poor and weak die off in order to improve the the species and so forth I mean he said over and over again that that wasn't what he meant but but everyone just sort of rolls on yes yes yes if you take it conservative in his later years um but even in his later years he was still saying you know that the wage system is a vestige of slavery and that uh you know something like workers cooperatives has been to be an improvement which of course is along the same lines that child sort of mill was moving towards as well um oh and his of course he's although people think of him as being sort of more at the right wing end of libertarianism obviously his views on land were uh you know were um similar to georgianism though not similar enough that did be a prevented george from writing an attack on him um yes um and of course uh you know then there's sort of the 19th century individualist anarchists you know one of one of the main characters in the fall revolution uh is a fan of benjamin tucker uh and you know the works of those guys who combined uh free markets with labor radicalism and land reform and feminism and various things um and they saw these all as interconnected uh different kinds of they saw these different forms of oppression sort of mutually uh reinforcing um and that's sort of a big inspiration for uh folks in in my circles yes i fight with each other too of course yeah um the question that does come back is how does that relate to actual politics is one of the things i'm very very conscious of is that there's a big difference between finding intellectually fascinating um lines of thought and tradition and i'm very um very well very much alive to that but also very much um in a way i know that i'm kind of easily over fascinated by that that there's a big difference between that and relating to practical politics and unfortunately we do seem to be in a situation where there is still pretty much a class polarization of society and where what you might call state monopoly capitalism is the only kind and that i i do think that the only way to deal with these huge concentrations of interlocking um state and private and corporate power and their and their ideological and propaganda apparatuses and so on is to do what you can to build up a counter power from below that albeit but that one that at some point does have to try whether by election or in in some possibly conceivable circumstances not but you know to become the government and i think that the kind of anarchist libertarian type reluctance to go into politics leads either to any effectuality on the one hand or opportunism on the other um now i'm i'm not necessarily excluding myself from this criticism but i do you understand what i mean i mean they had those debates too i mean they debated every possible strategy from you know focus on purely education to grassroots organizing to violent revolution to electoral politics and if so what kind of electoral politics and and what to do and how um uh you know they debated all those things and Tucker himself shifted a bit over the course of his career he became more pessimistic about the about the ability of markets to break up corporate power without some kind of uh government intervention by contrast with his earlier views but you know as often happens you know when uh when a thing you know when a influential thinker shifts their views they don't bring all their followers with them as you end up fight between fights between sort of the you know the you know the proponent of the followers of the early guy and the followers of the later guy just says you know you have this conflict with the followers of the you know the early Rothbard when he was more lefty and the followers of the later Rothbard and so forth um yeah within you know within my own circles there's a there's a division of opinion on on whether to be involved in in uh sort of electoral politics uh or not there are you know there's something that it's that it's uh it's counterproductive and the best thing to do is to try and build alternative institutions there as you think now you know it's a form of you know it's a form of uh self-defense that the elections are what you do while you're building the revolution you have to you have to be doing something else to bend things off though in my circles pretty much I want to agree is that that the the libertarians who who thought supporting Trump was a good idea were crazy uh yeah so that in my circle well it depends how you define my circles if we define my circles as sort of people I still have some friendship or association with and some of them are pro-trump libertarians I'm sad to say but um if you know you know people sort of that I'm that I'm associated with in some stronger sense of uh working with uh politically uh you pretty much all see Trump as a and a mitigated disaster um well I guess he's a mitigated disaster because everything's almost everything is except you know the end of the universe would be or even that probably would have its positive side but um but yeah it's it really is these last few days really does seem like we're living in a science fiction novel this uh you know I mean you know we all had our fantasies of people seeing you know seeing uh you know the storming of congress but this wasn't the context we had imagined it's um yes it's my my first thought seeing it was that it looked very like a what you tend to see in post post-soviet countries or tended to see in post-soviet countries it was like lived by the color revolution died by the color revolution and um the and you know I I don't know if I'm while I said where while we've been talking some other astonishing development hasn't taken place things are obviously in a in a pretty um it is a pretty scary situation at you know even right now even though that our a coup attempt or whatever you want to call it has evidently failed but there's a heck of a lot of um surface of instability at the moment and can all go away once the you know once the once trump is definitively out yeah and then we'll all we're left with the pandemic and the economic crisis great um yeah I was gonna say one strange intellectual and artistic debt that I have to the libertarians was that I think it's some online piece that David Friedman wrote against Hans Herrmann Hoppe and Hans Herrmann Hoppe had come up with an argument that would I think he called the argument from argument yes I've written about that too and and um Friedman said you know to summarize the argument very very briefly as I understand what Hoppe was saying was that in order to argue you have to accept some right of property in yourself and then whatever you're arguing on whether it's a space to speak your table to write on and all that and Friedman managed to demolish that pretty well I mean for one thing he pointed out that you could be a monk who owns absolutely nothing and still be writing thomas philosophy in your cell or indeed in your university without owning the rags on your back let alone the pen on the paper um but what Friedman said was in almost in passing in this essay was imagine a world where people have no rights at all but most people are able to pretty effectively defend defend their positions and their positions as it were so it's it's a kind of war of all against all where no rights are recognized but nevertheless they're kind of enforced and then he says something like how how different is this from the world we live in and that really got me thinking and I think that was the root of my novel the Cassini division where people actually try and turn that into an actual philosophy of sort of the egoistic communist anarchism of yes of uh earth at that point in history yeah can you excuse me a moment first but I'm going to try and weave to my friend but oh it's a nice view just show you the view that's lovely yeah um I happened to see uh my brother-in-law and his wife walking past but anyway you've got you but you know what the now know what the first of client looks like ah yeah I knew you were near the first of client but I didn't know that you were real that you were right you know right on it uh you can see it out the window yeah it's it's inspired when you look before sort of the other the other side of Scotland um you are really by the first of fourth men right yes and could you see it that out the window too not not so we weren't so close to the water we were higher up the hill and there was a there were a lot of trees in the way but in the winter you could certainly see the first of fourth and the the ship's going down it and we were in between the two famous well actually we're between we're very close to the fourth road bridge a mile or so from the rail bridge and just before we moved away from there they had completed the third bridge the Queensferry crossing which is um the third one yeah yeah so it's that may not have been there when I was there no when were you in Edinburgh um um early 2000s all right pity I missed you maybe 2000 and or their bouts I'm not forget which right my family originally came from that area uh uh or from crocotte at least I had ancestors from crocotte all right we went over visited the uh crocotte homestead which my mother's reaction was you know why would they live here where I can they could just cross the birth and live in Edinburgh she wasn't that impressed by crocotte uh birthplace of adam smith and gordon brown and gordon brown yes I had I had the great delight a couple of years ago in standing beside david brinn for a selfie at the statue of adam smith and the royal mile in edinburgh um the yeah and there's also a statue that I'm very uh I feel a great affection for on on the royal mound to statue of david hume when I was there someone had taken one of those traffic cones and put it on his head I don't know whether to symbolize a wizard's hat or a dunce cap what was up we also looked up the uh the graves of hume and smith and doodle steward I think uh um we wanted around for a while before figuring out that there are two different colton burial grounds uh well three if you count colton hill um and we hadn't originally realized those were all different but we uh I mean that was that was a very pleasant trip we also took a uh a bus trip up through the through the highlands uh we never got to Glasgow but we uh we took a one-day bus trip through the highlands and we spent a week in Edinburgh another monument on colton hill is the only statue of abram the first statue of abram lincoln outside of the western hemisphere or outside of the america said forget which but there is a statue of lincoln um yeah Edinburgh is a fascinating and wonderful city and it's got so many associations with the Scottish Enlightenment you can see um because you know we saw the walter scott and the robert burns and yeah and hudton james hudton they discovered deep time and taught there that is probably you can I don't know if anyone has ever identified it but I've often thought that somebody should find the actual place in Edinburgh University where Charles Darwin after his first uh dissection lesson was violently ill and decided decided that medicine was not for him it's it's where the the course of the world changed because I guess Darwin could have been a country doctor if he hadn't found the smell of formaldehyde too also now our hotel is right next to the um right near the uh Arthur Conan Doyle monument right so it's just actually was a Sherlock Holmes monument yes oh yes yes I know the very place it's um it's just on a on a corner yeah yeah so uh you know so my you know my family had uh you know we'd never been there but my family had um you know sort of various histories and traditions about uh and stories about the Firth of Forth and Edinburgh and so forth so it was kind of a homecoming for us and especially for my mother who remembered the stories more than I do there's a wonderful play or well the conceit of the play is wonderful I can't I don't I've never seen the play or read it I can't speak for it but it's about going to America and about some people in the slums of Edinburgh who are also you know who have decided to emigrate to America and what they think is America is what they can see you think America's just on the other bank of the Forth they don't know that they're in for a weeks long sea voyage you think they're just going to cross the Forth to Cercotti ah there's a um you know there are several there are several versions of the Statue of Liberty in Paris and there's one of them where you can see it and then the um the Eiffel Tower a little bit behind it and so uh uh you know one time I posted that that photo with the caption something like like uh you know don't uh you know don't let the airlines charge you a thousand dollars to uh they would travel from New York to Paris you can just walk walk Edinburgh is a bit like that because it's built on two levels so you certainly around the centre of Edinburgh you can find shortcuts from one place to another or you can go into a building and go down five stories and come out in a different part of town entirely it's it is yeah I mean I I like Edinburgh in the middle uh down where the trains are yes yes yes and Stephen Baxter wrote uh the science fiction writer Stephen Baxter wrote a very good book about James Hutton with a very clear description of um I think it's called Revolutions in the Earth or the American Edition is called Revolutions in the Earth and it it has a very clear description of how Edinburgh came to be the shape it is because a glacier ground over it ground over the stump of a of volcanic plug I think it was so that great long trail great long slope of the high street from the castle down to the talus Hollywood talus is in fact the um rubble that was left by the glacier as it ground off the top of the rock leaving this great trail down and the rock there's still a lot of rock I don't I don't think no no I got that slightly wrong but there's basically it's a very and almost tear shaped rock that's being left by the glacier and it it also means that in Edinburgh and in medieval Edinburgh and early modern Edinburgh you couldn't dig uh you had to you know more or less tunnel and mine so there's nothing it was a long time before they got any kind of suede suede or sewerage in so Edinburgh was notorious as as the place where people simply tipped their chamber pots out of upper story windows with a cry of Gardiloo and I you know we read this and we learned this in childhood history and I I thought this was just a a feature of and backward early modern times but it was distinctive to Edinburgh everybody else people behaved in a somewhat more civilized fashion it was geologically driven um I remember when we we we walked down uh and when we got to the parliament building there was a woman who'd set up a a booth in front of there and she was protesting something around there I don't remember what her political orientation was but she was anyway she talked to us her uh and she said you know I used to think that the Scottish government was the most corrupt government in the world which maybe chuckle and then but every time everyone from different countries comes by here and they when I tell them that they start telling me about the corruption the government from wherever country they come from I'm beginning to think that there are lots of corrupt governments all over the world yeah Scotland might not be the worst in the world oh by by no means yeah I don't know anyone could even think that actually I mean she seemed to have let a sheltered existence and I say I don't remember what political perspective or I don't even sure if it was clear what political perspective she was uh yeah she was coming from but uh new things that the Scottish parliament was doing which she thought were were corrupt but she didn't have a very clear sense of what the international scene looked like yeah you know you've written a bit about some uh um some other current political issues in in Britain everything from Brexit to Scottish independence to the you know anti-vaping laws and so forth you want to say anything about any of those topics in particular things like like uh Brexit and Scottish independence are sort of difficult uh for sort of libertarian radicals because especially sort of lefty libertarian radicals because on the one hand you know we like decentralization but we don't like nationalism like internationalism we don't like centralization so both options tend to are ones we tend to feel uncomfortable about hey yeah there is also the fact that um the European Union is um was designed to separate markets from political control set eternally in the banks and financial markets and um in many ways it is quite a neoliberal institution the I haven't written much about Brexit I way back in 2014 2013 2014 I I did write quite a bit on my blog about Scottish independence and on Twitter and so on because I was I was quite uh I was quite opposed to it and the the reason being not for any particular animus against Scotland or any idea that it it couldn't happen um in fact I guess I was at when my teens and twenties there was something of a left-wing nationalist myself to to a degree but I I did think one that it was a hugely unnecessary upheaval and secondly that I didn't think the Scottish left or the left in Scotland earned working class or working people in Scotland would gain much out of it because of the upheaval and expense of the whole thing but it was I have to say the movement for Scottish independence was in around the Scottish referendum was the biggest politicizing event um of recent history in Scotland for sure and it galvanized thousands upon thousands of people probably many more than that actually to take start taking an active part and an active interest in politics and it completely cut off with the knees the Labour Party in Scotland it's very easy now to forget that until about 2010 or so the Labour Party was absolutely dominant in Scotland and they were very surprised to lose the Scottish parliamentary elections and in 2015 the map of Scotland the electoral map of Scotland which is distorted by the first pass the post system and all that excuse me it went from Labour red to SNP yellow literally overnight and it's probably the biggest eviction of incumbent politicians that certainly Scotland has ever seen all in one clean sweep and this was after the national that's lost the referendum let's not forget so heck you know I am as I said a food soldier in the Labour Party and I've knocked on many many doors in this town and the neighbouring towns in the past couple of years and a lot of the base voter base for the Labour Party are simply decamped en masse to the SNP there is no question about that and it's I think it is just something that we have to come to terms with what you know whoever we are we have to come to terms with that there has been a big a big big shift in Scottish social political consciousness in the past few years and the interesting thing is that it has very little apart from on the fringe it has very little to do with what we usually think of as nationalism there's a certain amount of you know blue face blue and white face paint and glorification of brave heart and all that kind of thing and charting but that very accurate movie yes yes yes there's there's very little national cultural obsession culturally Scotland is not that different from England but and in many ways to the social and political attitudes and as you as you know I don't think for outsiders who are very easy to tell apart and or as I heard one tourist say on the phone I'm calling from Scotland Scotland England yes yes you know we often hear Americans doing that and you know it doesn't it doesn't bother us I mean I like I sometimes one of the things that was quite a that suddenly made a lot of things quite clear to me was re-realising something that I already perhaps knew which was that a large part of Scotland is is English in the sense that the kingdom what became the kingdom the the lowlands of Scotland the central lowlands the Lothians the east or the area around Edinburgh was part of Northumbria until Northumbria was split by the Norse invasions so there was a kind of a big chunk of essentially English speaking people who thought of themselves English in there and the the Highlanders certainly regard the lowlanders as a different nation you know a different nation the sassan sassanish began at birth you know and as far as the for a long time right up until the 18th century and for many people most people in central Scotland barbarism civilization ended at Perse beyond Perse it was just the Highlands which were a a kind of tribal wasteland here there be Picts yes except the Picts all that I don't know either the exterminated or absorbed I'm not sure which and so my late my late friend Neil Davidson I was a Scottish Marxist wrote several books about Scottish history one called the origins of Scottish nationhood but he makes the argument that the Scotland only became a united nation after the defeat of the 45 rebellion and the Highlands were only integrated into became and began to feel themselves part of the same nation after that and I think that's a strong point so the there's a lot of like I suppose like all nations there's a lot of myth and half half understood popular history and so on but Scotland's not an oppressed nation by any means so for all of these reasons to recap slightly I wasn't particularly keen on the idea of Scottish independence and I didn't think it was much to be gained for it but I may have been I mean I was certainly well out of step with a great many people in on the Scottish left and in the in the labour movement though not all and we as for brexit I voted remain not out of any great love for the EU but because leaving the EU on the terms set by the Tories and UKIP and people like Nigel Farage and the Tory headbanger was unlikely to be of any great benefit to the people of the UK and you know at the moment fortunately or otherwise at least it has not been a disaster in that they did get a deal a trade agreement lots of people are suddenly discovering all the inconveniences of having to fill in customs forms so to have been able to happily ignore for all of their lives until that point and so it's created new barriers to trade for sure between Britain and continental Europe and even between the mainland of the UK and northern Ireland which is supposedly part of the UK state which is part of the UK state although contestably so so brexit is a well a rolling snowball unintended consequences and I it's possible that it certainly has increased the level of support for Scottish independence which has consistently now for at least I think six six months of opinion polls have shown a steadily increasing support for independence it's gone up from about from less than around 48 to around about 58 which is a pretty drastic shift but do most supporters of independence want to rejoin the EU or not and that's certainly the official SNP pitch our first minister Nicola Sturgeon has that position and as long as Britain hand actually left they could always have this idea that you know Britain could leave but Scotland could somehow stay but Scotland is now out and would have to rejoin they might get a fast track to rejoin but on the other hand a substantial minority of people who support the SNP also voted to leave so it's I think it's what's quite possible is that if you know barring any further upheavals or whatever if they did get independence they might go for the European economic area or the European free trade area both of which are sort of loosely associated with the European Union but aren't in it so you can be in the single market and customs union without being in the EU and whether as for example Northern Ireland is now bizarrely enough so we'd have a very strange sugary set of relationships sugary being a Scottish word which I'm sure is is self-explanatory a very shaky and wobbly set of relationships with both England Ireland and the European continent and we really don't know how that's going to pan out by the way whenever I hear Nicola Sturgeon's name it's funny because one of my my main professors in grad school was Nicola Sturgeon and so whenever I hear her name I think oh my professor has changed his gender and got involved in Scottish politics because they sound you know when you say the names fast they sound yeah she yes um there are so many they might even might very well even be related in some distant way because it is an unusual name and who knows it might have a it might have a recent common ancestor yeah he also found a new or he or someone had found a newspaper clipping the headline was lake monster turns out to be a giant sturgeon and he had put that on his door um the other the other um political issue I mentioned that is you know probably less divisive for uh you know for libertarians um is you've been involved a lot in uh talking about anti-vaping legislation and more broadly about paternalistic legislation in general because your book intrusion is a lot about that um if you want to say anything about both about you know the the anti-vaping issue and you know also on some of the um the themes of intrusion all right well intrusion came from it came I think it came out of a conversation with my then editor Darren Nash after I had been on a panel in London at an event called battle of ideas uh on um things like IVF and so on I think it was called frankenstein frankenstein's doctor's question mark something like that about um it's the word neonatal and prenatal technologies or genetic engineering all that kind of thing and in the course of a an evening of brainstorming over belgian beers I said to my editor what if what if it was possible to make sure that every child was genetically perfect but that not doing so kind of this child neglect and he said you've got to write this and that was a bit dismayed because it sounded a bit like a kind of anti-vaccination type premise and you know it went through several iterations and before I came on the idea of which my agent a lady called Nick Cheaton emphasized and that was to focus on the mother and the child and build it all around them and one day I saw a I saw by chance I saw a woman who worked in the same office as I was working at the time uh waiting to get in through the door and something about her hair and the way she dressed and so on reminded me absolutely of a certain type of young mum uh from the area of London where I had been when I was in London and I said to my agent I've seen the mum I know what she looks like I know who it is I know who this person is so that's one of these things that um sort of chancey things that ideas and not for novels can come out of and intrusion is all about the idea of people being compelled to do things ostensibly further on good and I had quite a lot of fun exploring that premise including a labour MP who explains to hope the character that what they have the system they have is the free and social market and it's free because you make your choice but where the social side comes in is that the government helps you to make the choice that you would have made if you had been fully informed so whether if that's the choice you you actually made or not and nudging idea yes yes and so yeah it's it's about that now on the on vaping which actually I only took up I think I took up round about about some time after I'd written that novel I was a long-term smoker I smoked cigarettes for a very long time and by chance came across vaping and a student at Napier showed me what a what a proper easing was like and I went across the hill to the nearest vape shop and got a starter kick that very day and to my amazement I went from smoking a pack a day to of cigarettes a day to smoking a pack a month without any effort and after a few after I think over a year of occasionally bombing cigarettes of people I bummed my last cigarette on New Year's Day 2015 or 16 I forget and haven't smoked a cigarette since so I was you know very pleased at being able to quit smoking without all the unpleasantness of other previous efforts of willpower and all that and it's I get a decent nicotine kick and keeps me happy and keeps me concentrate and it isn't offensive to to anyone else so I was disappointed but not surprised to find that vaping had become become a bit of a cultured war issue and at least in the US not here fortunately and also had lots of people who were in the anti-smoking camp vehemently against it for reasons that have never been entirely clearly explained but the big disaster for vaping in America happened with the lung injuries that were associated with vaping and turned out very quickly to be due to contaminated THC cannabis vapes and nothing to do with the kind of stuff that people vape nicotine vaping but as you probably know the public health authorities in America were very very slow to make that distinction clear and there's been a bit of a moral panic about the device is called Jules J-U-U-L which are very easy to use very easy to conceal practically undetectable under the kind of things that appeal to teenagers doing things that that they probably shouldn't now I think it's probably better as they vape than as they smoke I mean when I was a teenager lots and lots of teenagers smoked illegally but they did so yeah I mean I really think that vaping has the possibility of letting lots of people who are maybe addicted to nicotine move on to a much much safer form of using it and it would be a tragedy if this got stopped or even really slowed down by very illiberal legislation and moral panics of one kind or another there's a lovely science fiction story that I can't find anyone else who seems to have read it by Robert Chase it's called The Shrieking of the Nightingale which is a number works have used that title so when I searched for it I usually find something else but it appeared in the early 90s and analog and it's about a future in which I mean the main character is deaf and they're trying to forcibly cure her deafness and also genetically ensure that her children are deaf and there's so there's so the child abuse arguments that if you don't correct the genetic deficient disease that are going to make your kids deaf then that's child abuse or is it also raises questions about whether deafness should be considered a defect or just a difference the main character says look I don't you know I you don't feel that you're defective because you can't hear the songs of bats or see the neutrino flux shining through the earth but you know the government comes back and says yeah but if you're living in a world where there are you know where there are you know where there are you know car horns and train horns and so forth it's just dangerous for you and and dangerous to pass this on to your kids and so forth so it's a beautifully written story about this kind of medical paternalism and sort of philosophically complex raises a bunch of different issues I sometimes assign it to my students but I don't think it's ever been collected in anything else even though it you know it would be a natural thing to collect anyway so if you haven't read that story I recommend you because you might enjoy it given that you know it's on the issues that you don't like but no one seems to be aware of it well I I certainly wasn't so thanks for the recommendation I was I can't help noticing that the son has long since sat in this latitude so I can either interrupt for a moment and put the lights on or when would you like to kind of wind up we should probably start to wind up because an hour and a half is about as long as a video uh I you know it was about a long video as I mean my system is very slow for uploading videos so if it's too much longer than an hour and a half then it just takes forever so it's probably best to start you're winding up now and we can always have a you know have a part two sometime if uh if you're willing um but anyways thanks a lot for coming on this is um this has been fun um any last thoughts no not really thank you thank you for having me and I've certainly been having having fun as as well it's been really pleasant and relaxing talking with you maybe another time we could talk more we might find something to talk about about Scotland and you know there's not just the end you know Scotland has so much really interesting history from the point of view your interests like the how did um Scotland go from being a place of intense religious fanaticism to being the place of where the Enlightenment one part of the Enlightenment at any rate began what Voltaire called the source of all our ideas of civilization etc it's a it's a really interesting story and you know we can maybe talk about that but I've really enjoyed this Roderick and I'd love to talk about Scottish history Scottish literature Scottish geography uh the the trip to the Highlands was just incredibly beautiful uh really enjoyed that uh and we took a boat trip on Loch Ness and whenever I say I've been on Loch Ness people always ask me did you see the monster as though I wouldn't have led with that but what I was saying is it's either oh yeah I forgot yeah I saw it or else is Loch Ness monster supposed to have two heads and if they say no then I say oh well I didn't see it then yeah it's a yes I I probably know know know too much about the Loch Ness monster for my own for my own good mainly that it doesn't exist but it's it's a very interesting story so another time for the Loch Ness monster right now I'll swing you around and cast some light on the thing and show you another Scottish or Scottish landscape again if you can see uh I haven't got my thumb in the way or anything you know anyway that's it another guruk sunset yeah because as I mentioned my family originally came from there I've got Mackay's and Lockerbie's and various people on my my ancestry most of whom came through uh uh Eastern Canada but anyway uh hoping we can talk about it maybe another time yeah thanks a lot thank you cheers bye yeah well