a convenient truth

The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is probably Ken Macleod’s best book to date.



In previous novels, Macleod has tackled Trotskyism ( The Star Fraction), he has created a society that implements Nozick’s brand of Libertarianism outright ( The Stone Canal), and he has explored the war on terror ( The Execution Channel).



In this book he moves his sights to religion. The attacks of September 11th 2001 become the opening salvo in the Faith Wars, wars that the west did not win. The backlash against religion is severe, with the police pursuing a “Boots in Pews” policy throughout the UK as all religion is persecuted.



As usual for Macleod and the other new Scottish hard-SF authors, the novel is primarily set in Scotland. MacLeod’s use of the familiar (to him) always serves to give his work a sense of realism and grounding that provides good counterposition with the strong-SF elements of the story, in this case the development of global warming and AI.



Interestingly, the book also shares a view of the development of the internet with Charles Stross‘ Halting State - in fact the non-singularity near future authors view of the intertubes seems to be converging on convergence, so to speak.



The best fiction, no matter it’s setting, always speaks to the reader about their world as it is now. The very best can do this through millenia, because they deal with the generics of human nature. Science fiction is not like this - it ages rapidly and painfully. However, when it is fresh and appropriate, as this is, it’s relevance can be startling. Nobody can read this book without a sense of foreboding, as so much of it feels painfully possible.






View all my reviews.

Reports Science Daily. They challenge researchers to work out why Homo Sapiens survived when Homo Neanderthalis became extinct.

Given the history of Homo Sapiens, It seems likely that our evolutionary advantage was just being more murderous - we just killed them all for looking different.

How depressing.

Definitely track of the week here at winjer towers.

Bah.  It looks like Delicious is failing to post my new links to my blog, which is irritating since it was lots of my content!  So, some manual links:

• Dangerous Economic Fallacies - via the splendiforous Polymeme, some interesting economic “fallacies”.
• Red Light Cameras Don’t Work - something we don’t have in the UK (yet) to my knowledge (update: apparently there are loads in London), but that is very popular in the US.  The problem is that they don’t reduce accidents, they increase them - but hey, at least they increase revenue from fines, so that’s ok.
• Creative Climate Change Containment - this is the kind of solution that might actually save the planet, not the Daily Mail waging war on plastic bags.

Kind of old news by now I guess, but space.com has the story.  It is a seriously important discovery though - perhaps much more important than it seems.  First, of course, it means we can send a manned mission to mars - and then they can get home again.  Second, if there’s enough then we can set up a self-sustaining presence on Mars (as long as someone fancies shelling out the money of course).

Finally, though, it has to alter our estimates for the presence of life not just on Mars, but everywhere.  With only one data-point, Earth, it has been basically impossible to extrapolate the chances of there being life anywhere.  But the more we discover about the universe, the more likely it seems there is life all over the place.

Of course this just makes the Fermi Paradox even more terrifying!