Smithology

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.

Uncategorized books, ken macleod, scifi

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]

books books, ken macleod, scifi