The Night Sessions
Let’s fast forward history by about twenty years. America and it’s allies have won1 what is now known as the Faith Wars and religion has been expunged from all matters of state by laws that prohibit recognition of any religion at all, it’s not illegal, just completely unsupported by government. The Israel / Palestine issue is kind-of solved by the fact that the territory is now uninhabitable due to radioactivity and global warming has been circumvented by the deployment of giant space mirrors in low orbit that block out a proportion of the sunlight. The space mirrors are serviced by two enormous space elevators.
This is the setting in which we find Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson and his sentient robot partner Skulk as they investigate the murder of a Catholic Priest and quickly find themselves submerged in a conspiracy that threatens to reignite tensions that were thought to have been laid to rest.
The book is The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod and is the second near future novel that he has written (the first being The Execution Channel which is really an alternative-earth-present-day but still counts as near future in the broader sense)
This is a pretty bleak and dry book by Macleod’s standards. The Execution Channel was also quite bleak. I think part of what contributes to this is that the characters are all very cerebral. When we get a look at what’s going on in their heads, it’s a lot of exposition and anxiety and not much to comfort us. The characters in The Night Sessions are not likely to inspire you or evoke feelings of admiration, the impression is of a society that grimly remembers recent war and atrocity.
Some of the main characters in this book are Christians and as a once fundamentalist leaning Christian myself, I think Macleod does a pretty good job of capturing the experience of being in a moral minority and feeling the conflict of mission and judgement. On his blog, Macleod doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to his atheism and feelings about creationists and fundamentalist Christians but this book shows a certain amount of sympathy for people of faith and must be the result of a lot of reflection on his part. He could have easily gone for the soft target and presented the Christians as mindless psycho lunatics (much as Nazi’s are often portrayed) and most of his readership would have gone along with it.
The main Christian character in the book is John Richard Campbell, a kiwi robotics engineer who works on animatronics for a creationist theme park. By making his character sympathetic, Macleod invites the atheist reader to take a walk in Christian shoes. Of course, knowing Macleod, we know that Campbell’s faith is going to take a shocking beating throughout the book and that actually makes for some great drama.
If I have one qualm about the treatment of Christianity in the book, it’s that most of the characters are pretty radical Christians in that their beliefs tend to dominate their lives. Many Christians today are not so engaged but tend to use their faith as a social vector and just subscribe to the beliefs by default without too much thought about them between Sundays (at least that is my understanding). On the other hand, Macleod points out that since the faiths have been systematically marginalised, it’s had the effect of radicalising the few remaining adherents.
Other interesting stuff in this book? Let’s talk gadgets. Apart from giant space elevators and low orbiting soletas, there’s the robots. The police robots are seven foot tall tripods (H. G. Wells style) but there are also military robots and quite a disturbing account of what it was like for these robots to accidentally become sentient on the battlefields of the faith wars. Like Halting State, there are contact lenses that project virtual overlays onto the world. It seems some corporation called ‘Ogle’ has managed to make everything in the world searchable through these lenses, e.g. OgleFace allows you to search for online information about a face you’re looking at and OgleEarth allows you to see realtime video of practically anywhere on the planet at the blink of an eye. There’s also some descriptions of a kind of virtual dance club that uses the lenses for transcendental effects.
I found the ending of this book just a little underwhelming but preferred it to the more extreme far-out endings that some books always end up in (like The Execution Channel for example). The wrap-up is pretty intellectual so you don’t feel terribly emotionally wrought by the ending but it hangs together quite well and resolves the story so I should just be happy with that.
Next cab off the rank: Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross.
1 Apart from the fact that their economies are crippled and several major cities are radioactive holes in the ground.
