Lightspeed

With the third volume of his Lightspeed trilogy due to be released this month, here’s what Ken Macleod had to say about the trilogy:

“Various ideas went into the Lightspeed series: one of them was what I called ‘socialism with European characteristics,’ a play off, obviously, Chinese socialism, and how that might tie into anticipatory algorithms. I was at the point of frantically trying to think of ideas for my next book to pitch to my agent and editor, and I looked through some old notebooks that I had written when I was a student – probably when I was in my teens and early twenties – and this was the idea: a very near future with faster-than-light travel, which is: ‘What if FTL was discovered last year? What if FTL travel was discovered, like, now? Or in 2018, along with Trump, Putin, all the rest of it?’
“I had all these ideas from my past notes about near-future FTL and near-future politics, so I threw them into the mix, and the way the AI thing came into it was that, eventually, you end up with three superpowers: the Union, the Co­ordinated States, and the Alliance. Each of them has its own AI descendant of Alexa, essentially. The Union is, roughly, the present European Union plus Scotland, and minus England. Both Scotland and Ireland are in it, but England isn’t. England is in the Alliance, which is the Anglo­sphere, including India. The Coordinated States are something like a development of present-day China, with Russia sort of tagged on. The Union is this very self-righteous, supposedly democratic socialist society that has emerged at what is called the Rising, two decades in the past; I guess it’s the 2030s in the timeline. They’re attempting a very slow transformation away from capitalism, in a gradual transition which they call the Cold Revo­lution. They have their own friendly AI, called Iskander. The Coordinated States have WeThink, and the Alliance have Smart-Alec. These AI sort of follow in the background. I don’t think the books necessarily take the serious conversation of artificial intelligence very far forward.
from Ken MacLeod: So Many Shocks, Locus magazine