The Execution Channel
I finished reading The Execution Channel by Ken Macleod the other day so here’s my usual half baked review.
Overall I enjoyed this book set in a slightly alternative near future on the brink of World War III. In this version of recent history, there have been several terrorist attacks on the scale of 9/11 which have changed the world creating a paranoid surveillance state in the UK (the book is set in the UK BTW)
The two protagonists are caught up in a series of events that various government groups are trying to ‘handle’ but even they are not sure who is doing what to whom and why. By the end of the book I think I understand what happened.
Some good things about this book: The state paranoia and disinformation poisoning of online discussion is scary because it’s so believable. The use of terrorists as scape-goats is scarily real (i.e. the terrorists do bad things but then the government is able to blame everything on them). The execution channel itself is sinister and does a good job of scaring the willies out of the reader as well as the characters in the book. I also liked how the action is not over the top. At no point do the protagonists whip out semi-automatic weapons and start blasting the good but mis-guided cops and blowing up spooks in their black vans. There is action but it is done in such a way as to just create tension. In fact the overall characteristic of this book is the maintained sense of paranoia and near peril. One last good point was that the lessor characters such as the conspiracy theory blogger and disinformation cell were interesting and I wanted to follow them more (I hope they show up again in later books)
Some bad things: The conclusion of the overall plot was just too audacious to suit the rest of the book for me. I knew it would be something big but when the reveal came I almost laughed at the silliness of it. If the book had been kind of silly the whole way along I would be saying that it was totally awesome but in this case it fell flat. But thinking about it now I can see suddenly why it had to be that ending but I don’t want to say more in case I spoil it for people who have read Ken’s other futuristic books. My advice to Ken is that when he does the re-release of this book he should have at least one character on the other side so that we get a better idea of the magnitude of what is going to happen before it happens.
But overall, a rocking book that marks a change of direction for Mr Macleod of whom I remain a great fan. Next cab off the rank in my semester break book binge is The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross.
[tags]book review, ken macleod, science fiction, the execution channel[/tags]
“Creating a paranoid surveillance state in the UK”? I thought the U.K. was already the most surveilled community on Earth.
It’s an interesting idea, though: not least because the U. K. response to, specifically, the Underground bombings has been represented in some outlets as more extreme, I think, than it was. I’ve read some commentary on Doctor Who, for example, that posits some of the episodes as coming out of a post-9/11 paranoia, and I can’t buy that argument. Without denigrating the horror of 9/11 at all, the U. K. has faced these violent attacks on civilians on home soil for decades: of course their response would differ from that of the previously (relatively) secure U. S.
I can’t say I’ve picked up much post 9/11 stuff in Doctor Who either. I suppose the third last episode (the one with Donna for most of it?) had some pretty apocalyptic stuff which I found to be the most confronting in series 4.
The level of surveillance in the Execution Channel is probably about what is at least possible with today’s technology except maybe where they are able to magically tap into any camera no matter who owns it. However, Mr Macleod doesn’t rely too heavily on gadgetry to make the story work so it feels very real and very now.
I don’t think there is much post 9/11 stuff in Doctor Who, frankly. But the episode you mention above, “Turn Left,” is terrifying in that evocation of what impact a localised apocalyptic event (let’s assume you can have a localised apocalyptic event, shall we?) might have on a society. That, I think, was the most depressing episode (if not the most distressing episode—that would be “Midnight”) of a fairly depressing season.