Learning the World
Learning the World: A Novel of First Contact.
Prometheus Award 2006. Hugo Award nominee 2006, Locus Award nominee 2006, Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee 2006, and John W. Campbell Award nominee 2005.
A four hundred year journey through space is about to end for the teeming inhabitants of a large ship-world. The air is thick with expectation as they enter the system that is to become their new home, the probes reporting nothing more advanced than bacteria and algae among the clustered planets. But the original data was wrong, and direct scans of the planet reveal a whole alien civilisation. Maybe the aliens have just arrived. Maybe evolution has been incredibly rapid during their long journey... Neither of these explanations seem plausible. It seems likely that the probe data has been falsified from the beginning. Advice is years distant, help is decades away. They're on their own and they'll have to decide a plan of action fast as the rest of humanity is just as vulnerable and not much further away.
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Ken MacLeod
Ken MacLeod (born 1954), an award-winning Scottish science fiction writer, lives in South Queensferry near Edinburgh. He graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and written a masters thesis on biomechanics.
MacLeod's novels often explore socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas, most particularly the variants of Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism or extreme economic libertarianism. Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution and post-human cyborg-resurrection. MacLeod's general outlook can be best described as techno-utopian socialist.
He is part of a new generation of British science fiction writers, who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross and Liz Williams.
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