My new favorite author is Ken MacLeod, a Scottish science fiction writer whose political space operas always have three crucial ingredients: fully-realized characters, lots of interesting speculative politics, and super-cool aliens (or cyborgs). Plus, spaceships. Did I mention the spaceships?

I fell in love with MacLeod while reading a manuscript version of Newton?s Wake that had been sent to me gawd knows how long ago when I was a book review editor. It languished in my ?to read? pile for over a year before I read the first paragraph, noticed that the main character was an ass-kicking female ?combat archeologist,? and dug in. Combining witty pop culture references (separatist, Christian farming communities on terraformed planets call themselves ?America Offline") with a tale of gray market interplanetary trade routes ruled by a group of off-the-hook capitalist Scots, the novel manages to explore both the future of social democracy and the sexuality of synthetic humans.

I promptly went out and bought MacLeod?s ?Engines of Light? trilogy from Borderlands, and I?m about half-way through the second book, Dark Light. There?s more political intrigue ? communists vs. anarchists vs. capitalists vs. tribalists ? and a lot of terrific commentary on gender roles. Two of the main characters in the novel are more or less cross-gendered: one is a male-to-female transsexual from a tribal culture which views gender as a function of social role, and therefore people can switch genders if they want; the other is a female machinist from a proto-social democracy where her interest in a male-dominated profession makes her something of an oddity. Plus there are polyamorous aliens, computer geeks, and a mysterious alien plot to relocate humans from all eras in earth?s history to a bunch of remote planets in a ?second sphere? of the universe.

Even better, I found MacLeod?s blog, where I discovered to my great pleasure that he is a terrifically thoughtful Marxist and all-around leftist curmugeon. I highly recommend the novels and the blog ? but mostly the novels. Smart, politically-astute science fiction with a leftist, queerish, feminist bent is hard to find. I?m glad I found MacLeod.