Nova Scotia Vol 2 anthology, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson, is now available for pre-order! It celebrates the depth and breadth of Scotland's dazzling science fiction and fantasy landscape from its haunted islands to its transformed cities and everything in between. Jenni Coutts created the gorgeous cover art.
You can order the book on its own, or buy the bundle anthology deal - both from the Luna store.
Today we'd like to introduce you to Ken MacLeod and the story "Weak Gods Of Mars".
About the author:
Ken MacLeod was born on the Isle of Lewis and now lives in Gourock on the Firth of Clyde. After gaining graduate and postgraduate degrees in biological sciences he worked in IT, and has been a full-time writer since 1997. He is the author of twenty novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to Beyond the Light Horizon (May 2024) and many articles and short stories. His work has won three BSFA awards and three Prometheus Awards, and been short-listed for the Clarke and Hugo Awards. He has taught science fiction writing at Arvon, Moniack Mhor, and Clarion West, and is a Guest of Honour at the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon.
Ken on the story:
Sometimes a novel implies more ideas than it contains. My novel Newton’s Wake is subtitled A Space Opera because (a) it happens in space and (b) there’s an opera in it. Two of its minor characters are Winter and Calder, a pair of disreputable folk singers summoned back from the dead for the second time. (They’re needed for the opera, and not only as singers.) Their previous resurrections had been in a Mars colony, a refuge of humanity after a quite uncalled-for runaway AI Singularity had rudely interrupted a nuclear war. Winter and Calder had crashed their car into a peat bog just before the war kicked off, and what was left of their accidentally preserved brain patterns had been harvested by an emergency medical service for the dead – last responders, as it were – known as the Black Sickle, and transmitted to some orbital cache, and onwards. So I knew how they’d got to Mars, but not what they had got up to there and how they had ended up dead again and uploaded to a starship. Whenever I asked, they’d look at each other awkwardly and mutter about musical differences. Eventually I got the story out of them, but I can’t vouch for its accuracy. Think of it as material for a space rockumentary. If anyone wants to make it for the screen, give me a shout. And if you want to know more about the two folk singers and their roles in the smash-hit opera ‘Rebels and Returners’, and some of the other characters in this story (including the ghosts) read Newton’s Wake. ‘Weak Gods of Mars’ was originally written for a proposed anthology of stories about off-world settlement. The anthology fell through in 2020, for reasons (the date is a clue) beyond the control of its editor, the accomplished writer and anthologist Scott Harrison. The story was therefore released into the wild, and it now finds its way to you. This is its first publication. I hope you enjoy it.
