Ken MacLeod (kenmacleod.blogspot.com) lives in West Lothian, Scotland. He became prominent in the late 1990s with his early novels, the four politically engaged books in the Fall Revolution series, that began in the UK in 1995 with The Star Fraction, and in the U.S. in 1999 with the reprinting of The Cassini Division. His next three novels are The Engines of Light trilogy, and his latest novels are Newton’s Wake (subtitled A Space Opera in the UK in 2004) and Learning the World (2005, subtitled or, The New Intelligence: A Scientific Romance). He wrote an essay on “The New Space Opera” for Locus in 2004, and is generally regarded as central to British space opera in this generation. He has published very little short fiction.
“A Case of Consilience” was published in Nova Scotia. It is in dialogue with James Blish’s classic, “A Case of Conscience.” The first twist is that MacLeod’s Christian, Donald MacIntyre, is a Scots Presbyterian, not a Catholic priest. The second is that the intelligent alien is a vast subterranean mycoid—a fungus. MacIntyre’s belief motivates him to bring the gospel to the alien. But then there is the alien point of view.