He is part of a group of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Stephen Baxter, Iain M. Banks, Paul J. McAuley, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross, Richard Morgan, and Liz Williams. His science fiction novels often explore socialist, communist, and anarchist political ideas, especially Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism. 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, though unlike a majority of techno-utopians, he has expressed great scepticism over the possibility and especially over the desirability of strong AI. He is known for his constant in-joking and punning on the intersection between socialist ideologies and computer programming, as well as other fields. For example, his chapter titles such as "Trusted Third Parties" or "Revolutionary Platform" usually have double meanings. A future programmers union is called "Information Workers of the World Wide Web", or the Webblies, a reference to the Industrial Workers of the World, who are nicknamed the Wobblies. The Webblies idea formed a central part of the novelFor the Win by Cory Doctorow and MacLeod is acknowledged as coining the term. Doctorow and Charles Stross also used one of MacLeod's references to the singularity as "the rapture for nerds" as the title for their collaborative novel Rapture of the Nerds. There are also many references to, or puns on, zoology and palaeontology. For example, in The Stone Canal the title of the book, and many places described in it, are named after anatomical features of marine invertebrates such as starfish.
Books about MacLeod
The Science Fiction Foundation have published an analysis of MacLeod's work titled , edited by Andrew M. Butler and Farah Mendlesohn. As well as critical essays it contains material by MacLeod himself, including his introduction to the German edition of Banks' Consider Phlebas.
Series
Fall Revolution series
# The Star Fraction – Prometheus Award winner, 1996; Clarke Award nominee, 1996
# The Stone Canal – Prometheus Award winner, 1998; BSFA nominee, 1996
# The Cassini Division – BSFA nominee, 1998; Clarke, and Nebula Awards nominee, 1999
# The Sky Road BSFA Award winner, 1999; Hugo Award nominee, 2001 – represents an 'alternate future' to the second two books, as its events diverge sharply due to a choice made differently by one of the protagonists in the middle of The Stone Canal
*This series is also available in two volumes:
*# Fractions: The First Half of the Fall Revolution
*# Divisions: The Second Half of the Fall Revolution
Engines of Light Trilogy
# Cosmonaut Keep – Clarke Award nominee, 2001; Hugo Award nominee, 2002 Begins the series with a first contact story in a speculative mid-21st century where a resurgently socialist USSR is once again in opposition with the capitalist United States, then diverges into a story told on the other side of the galaxy of Earth-descended colonists trying to establish trade and relations within an interstellar empire of several species who travel from world to world at the speed of light.
# Dark Light – Campbell Award nominee, 2002
# Engine City
The Corporation Wars
# Dissidence
# Insurgence
# Emergence
Other work
– BSFA nominee, 2004; Campbell Award nominee, 2005
Learning the World: A Novel of First Contact Prometheus Award winner 2006; Hugo, Locus SF, Campbell and Clarke Awards nominee, 2006; BSFA nominee, 2005
"The Highway Men"
The Execution Channel – BSFA Award nominee, 2007; Campbell, and Clarke Awards nominee, 2008
The Restoration Game. According to the author, "In The Restoration Game I revisited the fall of the Soviet Union, with a narrator who is at first a piece in a game played by others, and works her way up to becoming to some extent a player, but – as we see when we pull back at the end – is still part of a larger game."
Intrusion : "an Orwellian surveillance society installs sensors on pregnant women to prevent smoking or drinking; and these women also have to take a eugenic 'fix' to eliminate genetic anomalies.
Descent : "My genre model for Descent was bloke-lit – that's basically first-person, self-serving, rueful confessional by a youngish man looking back on youthful stupidities...... Descent is about flying saucers, hidden races, and Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, all set in a tale of Scottish middle class family life in and after the Great Depression of the 21st Century. Almost mainstream fiction, really."
