What if Jesus Christ in flesh, bones and blue jeans came back to Earth? How would he be welcomed by the authorities and the world's population? Would be taken for an impostor, an alien or even the Antichrist?
In this three stories collection, Ken MacLeod ranges from political and religious satire in Jesus Christ, Reanimator to techno-philosophical speculation in iThink, therefore I am, to end up with a fascinating architectural hypothesis in The Entire Immense Superstructure, which takes the form of mysterious self-assembling modules and realizes the concept of anti-capitalist dynamic housing settlement (called The New Babylon) designed by the famous Dutch situationist architect Constant Nieuwenhuys.
Ken MacLeod is part of the British group of writers specialized in Hard SF and New Space Opera. His contemporaries include Iain M. Banks, Paul J. McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, Richard Morgan and Liz Williams. Often his novels deal with political issues, in particular certain currents of Trotskyism, anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism. From a Sci-Fi point of view his stories revolve around the concept of technological singularity and post-human resurrection in cyborgs.
The Author: Ken MacLeod was born in Stornoway, Scotland on 2 August 1954. He graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and has written a thesis on biomechanics. He won many Science Fiction Awards (3 Prometheus, 2 BSFA, 1 Sidewise, 1 Seiun) and has been nominated several times for the Hugo, Locus and Clarke’s Award. He’s married and has two children. He lives in South Queensferry near Edinburgh.
He spread his big hands, with their carpenter’s calluses and their old scars. “Look, I really expected to return very soon, and that everyone on Earth would see me when I did. I didn’t even know the world was a sphere—sure, I could have picked that up from the Greeks, if I’d asked around in the Decapolis, but I had other fish to fry.”