Scottish creator Irvine Welsh on Friday described the brand new sequel to his cult novel “Trainspotting” as an antidote to a world stuffed with “hate and poison”, as he took goal at social media, the web and AI.
“Men in Love”, the most recent in a sequence of sequels, follows the identical characters — Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie — as they expertise the heyday of rave tradition within the late Nineteen Eighties and early Nineties.
Welsh’s novel was became the wildly profitable 1996 hit movie of the identical identify directed by Danny Boyle and starring Ewan McGregor.
The black comedy drama featured a gaggle of heroin addicts dwelling in an economically-depressed a part of Edinburgh.
“We’re living in a world that seems to be so full of hate and poison. Now it’s time I kind of focus more on love as a kind of antidote to all that,” Welsh stated.
Although his novel was revealed over 30 years in the past, there have been many parallels with the world immediately, he added.
The Nineteen Eighties demise of a lot heavy business reminiscent of shipbuilding within the Leith space of Edinburgh heralded a brand new world for some “without paid work”.
“Now we’re all in that position. We don’t know how long we’ll have paid work, if we do have it, because our economy, our society, is in just a long form revolutionary transformation,” he instructed BBC radio.
“It’s a big, contentious, messy revolution. There’s lots to play for, but there’s some very dystopian tendencies within it,” he added.
Despite the issues confronted by earlier generations, Welsh stated he detected much less optimism now.
“I think we’re just a bit more scared… I think we’ve got this existential threat on the horizon, basically, of species extinction… through kind of wars and diseases and famines and climate change and no economic means for younger people to make their way in the world as we had,” he stated.
Welsh additionally took goal at synthetic intelligence (AI), an web appropriated by massive firms and a social media tradition marred by “vitriolic pile-ons”.
He stated the web had stopped individuals from considering and had created a “controlling environment” during which “we just take instruction”.
“We’ve got artificial intelligence on one side, and we’ve got a kind of natural stupidity on another side. We just become these dumbed down machines that are taking instruction. And when you get machines thinking for you, your brain just atrophies.”
He stated he hoped that individuals’s present habit to cell phones could be a part that runs its course.
“You look down the street and you see people with a phone stuck to their face. Hopefully, if we survive the next 50 years, that’s going to look as strange on film as… people chain smoking cigarettes did back in the 80s,” he added.
“Men in Love” is because of be revealed by Penguin on July 24.
© 2025 AFP