Doctor Ure - President of Anderson College
From a vision to reality…
One hundred and seventy-five years ago, on the 20th December, 1825, in the hall of Anderson’s College, the principal citizens of Glasgow heard the President of the College, Doctor Ure, conclude his address with the confident prophecy that “the time is not far distant when chariots winged with fire shall be seen flying over metallic pavements through all the populous districts of the empire, transporting travellers and merchandise with amazing smoothness and velocity.”
The audience responded with enthusiastic applause. The words of Doctor Ure sound like a science fiction vision, and must have struck some of his less scientifically minded hearers as having the quality of fantasy. Yet it was all sober fact dressed in the colourful rhetoric of the public speaker. What Doctor Ure was doing in that technological institution that was the precursor of the University of Strathclyde where we are now meeting was, as the Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine reported, delivering a ‘Lecture on the Steam Engine in aid of the Funds for erecting a Monument to James Watt’. Within a decade or two, Doctor Ure’s words had been proved. true and the age of the railways had begun.
Source: Alan MacGillivray, ASLS Conference in 2000.
Mairiuna, I just realized that I missed the 2009 Worldcons, the World Science Fiction Convention that took place in the city of Montreal, gathering people from all over the world! And next year, for its 68th edition, the hosting city will be Melbourne, Australia. A great destination, don’t you think ? 😉
Even though we are not “raving” fans of science fiction, our interest to attend an event of this kind is more to meet Scottish science fiction authors such as Iain Banks, who’s “Culture” novel Matter, written in 2008 under his pen name, Iain M. Banks , was shortlisted for the 2009 Promotheus Award, a prize awarded during that specific event.
Both Iain M. Banks for Matter and Charles Stross for Saturn’s Children, as well as Cory Doctorow for Little Brother, to name just these few science fiction authors, are great representatives of the libertarian science fiction, as they all cherish the value of freedom in the building up of the future.
A very special angle indeed to the science fiction genre…
Alan MacGillivray - Photo by clurross on Flickr
What about Science Fiction genre in Scottish writing?
A great resource for the subject is, with no doubt, the ASLS conference given by Alan MacGillivray at the beginning of the millennium at the University of Strathclyde.
Here’s another extract:
“It cannot be said that there has been any discernible continuous tradition of science fiction writing in Scotland through the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.
(…)
Yet, over the years since the Second World War, there have been a number of significant initiatives. In the 1950s, Scotland had its own dedicated science fiction magazine: from 1952 to 1959, Nebula ran for 41 issues, published by Crownpoint Publications in Glasgow until 1955, and then by Peter Hamilton. It regularly published science fiction novels and, of course, short stories.
Scottish Science Fiction Magazine 1952-1959
In more recent years, the efforts of Duncan Lunan here in Glasgow in the 1980s produced a number of Science Fiction Conferences sponsored by the Glasgow Herald, and accompanying short story competitions. Out of these came the anthology, Starfield: Science Fiction by Scottish Writers (1989), with all its limitations still the only specific Scottish collection of SF to be published. It has not been a rich imaginative harvest.
And yet, in spite of this, somehow, we are now in the fortunate position of having two of the foremost writers of science fiction on the contemporary scene living and writing here in Scotland.
Iain Banks
Ken McLeod
Mention the names of Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod anywhere in the SF fraternity worldwide, and the recognition of the names will be instant.
The two men are closely linked, indeed they may be said to have come out of the same writing stable, in this case the classrooms of Greenock High School, where they were at school together in the late 60s and early 70s. Iain Banks is the senior in terms of writing and publishing achievement and success. Ken MacLeod has been to some extent his protégé and has come more recently on to the writing scene. Yet the quality of his work so far bids fair to ultimately rival, if not surpass, that of Banks.
Alan MacGillivray is also the author of a study guide in the Scotnotes series : Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road And Whit:
Before I conclude this post, just a few words to mention Iain M. Bank’s Culture novels series, in which plots are evolving in the midst of a very detailed huge pan-galactic civilisation.
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Alan McGallivray’s advice to beginning writers:
“Write what you know”, has always been inedequate: “Write what you can imagine” is the only possible advice to those who have inspirations beyond writing examination answers.
Read all about it => The World of Iain Banks
Let’s fly away into far away galaxies….
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