About the event

Ever since his debut novel Four Hundred Billion Stars won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988, biologist Paul McAuley has produced some of the finest hard science fiction out there. In conversation with fellow writer Ken MacLeod, he will be introducing his new novel War of the Maps.

About the speakers

Paul McAuley is the author of more than twenty books, including science-fiction, thriller, and crime novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella, and an anthology of stories about popular music, which he co-edited with Kim Newman. Before he went over to the dark side and became a full-time writer, Paul worked as a research biologist in various universities, including Oxford and UCLA, and for six years was a lecturer in botany at St Andrews University. Paul is still a huge fan of all things to do with science, and spend too much time tweeting about weird and wonderful stuff as UnlikelyWorlds. Paul lives in North London and hasn't yet walked down every street in the A-Z. But is trying.

Ken MacLeod was born on the Isle of Lewis and lives in Gourock, where his office window affords a view of seals, sea-birds, and submarines. He is the author of seventeen novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to The Corporation Wars (2018), and many articles and short stories. He has won three BSFA awards and three Prometheus Awards, and been short-listed for the Clarke and Hugo Awards. Recently he worked on a forthcoming selection of Iain M. Banks’s drawings and notes on the Culture. He is currently writing a space opera trilogy. He was a Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University, and Writer in Residence for the MA Creative Writing course at Edinburgh Napier University.