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The Night Sessions

2008Ken MacLeod

4/5

Can you imagine a future where religious fundamentalists have caused so much damage that the world embraces a politics of 'radical secularism', marginalising all faiths and denominations by effectively failing to recognise their existence?Sounds like paradise on Earth, right? So speaks a confirmed atheist anyway. This is the society Ken MacLeod conjures up in The Night Sessions, a world partially ravaged by the Faith Wars - or Oil Wars, dependent on which side you were on - but still on its feet, still rich in technology if not in theology.Near future large-scale technology incudes a pair of space elevators and a sky full of soletas, huge disks used to combat global warming by covering the sun at scheduled times, causing eclipses.The domestic web tech may be crudely named from a satirical standpoint- iThink for iPad, Ogle for Google - but everything is convincingly extrapolated and well utilised within the plot; when Macleod casually drops in references to 'eyeball-video uploads' and 'surveillance-midge swarms' you instantly know what he's talking about.Then there's the robots. Some help the police, some work on the space elevators, others have gone into hiding, rejected by their human creators precisely because of their humanoid appearance. What would happen if they got religious?Not that all the people have given up on religion, or religious bigotry, especially in Scotland and America, where covenanters and creationists fail to give up the ghost. When a priest is killed in Glasgow they and other dissident groups turn up in the investigation headed up by DI Adam Ferguson, a veteran of the "God squads" - police task forces that were assigned to harass religious institutions during the Faith Wars.I read five or six of MacLeod's novels prior to when I started to review books on Goodreads and liked all of them to one degree or another. He's strictly workmanlike as a writer of prose, his characters are purely functional, defects he more than compensates for with his wealth of ideas, unconventionally leftist politics and occasional flickers of humour.I can't think of another sci-fi writer who would switch the accepted Western narrative to the extent that the Christians become the dangerous religious fanatics, the robots become the radicalised suicide bombers.This was the second time I had read The Night Sessions and I liked it a lot still. I will try and reread at least The Execution Channel and Newton's Wake again soon for reviews.Oh, and also for the sheer enjoyment of them.

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