The Battle Within and the Battle Without: The Posthuman Worldview of Ken MacLeod’s The Corporation Wars Trilogy

Abstract

The present essay seeks to analyze Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod’s The Corporation Wars trilogy (2016-2017) as an amalgam of politico-philosophical ideas set against the background of posthumanism. MacLeod’s far-future posthuman world-building relies on the conventional tropes of science fiction (man-machine hybrids, brain uploading, digital resurrection, and the agency of sentient machines) to engage with pressing ideologies (the master-slave dialectics, the historical perpetuation of age-old conflict between progressive and reactionary forces, the ethics of machinic consciousness). MacLeod’s novels project a postbinarist worldview where outmoded binary oppositions between life and death, the real and the virtual, the human and the machinic are constantly abolished, but which still preserves persistent ideological divisions.

Keywords

• contemporary scottish science fiction
• posthumanism
• simulation
• machinic awareness
• ideology
• political science fiction