Snag Your Copy The Night Sessions Scripted By Ken MacLeod File Format Electronic Format

saw a description on this book as sci/fi police procedural, which is pretty accurate.
Although I thought it had more depth than just a straight up whodunnit,

The story is set in a future world that has been forged by a great war.
I know, you've seen this before, but wait, there's more! It's not your typical nuclear destruction, although tactical nukes were used, but the world was not destroyed.
You see, these wars were called The Middle East Wars or Faith Wars, These wars were followed by The Second Enlightenment religion has been rejected, especially in the political realm, while religion

is not banned or believers persecuted, all faiths have been moved to the periphery of society.


I know some folks don't like to read anything that has religious undertones, but I would encourage you to try this book, I never found it "preachy" in any way.
It does paint a pretty stark picture of all types of fundamentalism,

We are introduced to DI Adam Ferguson, who is investigating the bombing of a small church.
This one event drives the narrative through the rest of the book, I'm not going to go into too many details in this review, I'm not sure I could without giving too much away.


We have robots with self aware AI, there are small groups of religious zealots and many assumptions made about who perpetrated the crime.
That's the strength of this book, I mean there are lots of cool sci/fi gadgets and neat twists on police procedures using robots, but the book asks good questions about how we treat fringe groups and minorities in our society.
A mysterythriller plot frames MacLeod's fascinating examination of religious and other forms off fanaticism and extremism, set in a familiar world of hightech, political realignments and artificial intelligences.
Quite a fascinating novel with more than a hint of redemption at its conclusion, Stay with it through the odd prologue, which you're not going to believe this has a New Zealand religious fundamentalist flying to Edinburgh to meet others of his ilk, and ending up in a bar being picked up by a transvestite.
Trust me, really, because in a few pages you're going to be dropped into a police procedural.


Oh look, I thought, an experienced Lothian Police officer with a bright female protegée.
Hello, Inspector Rebus. But no, Rebus's bacon roll has been replaced by an ostrich tikka, and he has a robot colleague.


The robot is bright and snarky, No wonder Neal Asher gave this book a good review: Skulk could have been one of his.


OK, here we have police robots, there we have two space elevators, on that side we can spray a cloud of midges under a door and relay out a picture.
But over there we have a classic murdered bishop, and there are the fundamentalists again, This looks like a good ride,

And it is, MacLeod tells a smooth story, and carries us right along at a good pace, There are some slower bits while a religious tension is explained, but we always get moving again in time.
Some things turn out not to be what they seemed, and away we go,

The religion part of the setting is interesting, It seems that the world finally decided to reject religion because it had caused so many wars.
The separation of church and state has become complete, But the book is not about that, it's just the setting and a chance for the author to do some social commentary or perhaps it's just a bit of itcouldgoTHISway to make his setting distinctive and give some points to build a plot on.


As it is in so many SF books, the ending seems a bit rushed and a bit forced but I will give it credit for not ending in what I thought to be the most likely result.


Recommended. Set in the near future, the book is part police procedural and part political thriller with an interesting premise.
The book starts out strong, The setup is really intriguing, A man who is preaching religion to selfaware robots in Australia, A supersecretive religious cult in Scotland, The murderbybombing of a Catholic priest, All set in a future in which "faith wars" called "oil wars" by some have resulted in a "fall of the great religious establishments.
. . as swift and sudden as that of communism, In a variety of forms, secularism had swept the board in all the advanced countries, the Great Rejection. " What an interesting world that might be!

Unfortunately, after this promising setup, the author doesn't explore this world.
We don't really see the way secularism has played out in everyday life, except from the point of view of police.
For this quickly turns into a police procedural/thriller, and the phrase "no official cognisance" is repeated ad nauseum.
Apparently, this means government officials such as the police are not allowed to recognize or take into consideration religion in the course of doing their jobs.
It sounds a bit like colorblind casting in theater, only with religion, How this impacts people who still are religious, or society as a whole, is barely examined.
It's as if the author wants the reader to have no official cognisance, either,

Possibly to avoid angering any readers with any religious leanings, the plot twists away from known religions and posits the appearance of a new fundamentalism so convoluted an entire character predictably, a university professor has to be introduced to explain it to us.
Hohum. That's where I started to lose interest,

Many police procedurals maintain reader interest by creating a compelling investigator, Here we get tantalizing tidbits of the backstory of Inspector Ferguson's past in the Faith Wars, but whatever happened then remains in the past and does not seem to motivate his current actions or thoughts.


It is telling that the most interesting characters are the robots, especially Ferguson's partner Skulk.
They have more personality than any of the humans and I don't think it's giving anything away to say that Skulk has a big part to play as the "thriller" aspect of the plot ramps up toward the end.


I have a book club friend who likes to ask whether or not the author succeeded in writing the book s/he wanted to write.
In this case, it seems like the author wanted to write a book about how sentient robots might embrace religion, but he made the mistake of writing it from the pointofview of humans.
I think this whole endeavor would have been much more successful if it had been written from the pov of the robots.
I liked the near future world of this book, and the exploration of what a society in the middle of a big backlash against religion would look like.
The physical layout of the book bugged methe scenes would change abruptly and completely with no visual indicator, so I had many "wait, what" moments.
The ending was also kind of unsatisfyingthe more I think about it, the less I understand how the AB of the book leads to the C of the conclusion.
In fact the conclusion is sort of like anot only jumping some steps, but on a different calculating system altogether.
I enjoyed reading The Night Sessions, but I was left wanting more, I wanted to know more about the world MacLeod had begun to reveal and about the characters that I felt I only barely knew.
I liked how MacLeod showed the many different kinds of peopleand robots!who are drawn to religious faith, but I wish there could have been more of an exploration of what ideas lead robots or people toward faith in the first place.
The central mystery was interesting enough, but I would have loved to see more attention devoted to the many intriguing ideas that were barely referred to throughout the story.
The world, its technology, and its issues were all very interesting, but I felt like the book was too short to explore any specific idea in great detail.


sitelinkFull TethyanBooks ! Although a world in which all religion was outlawed sounds like a great idea, this was not a great book.
It was basically a detective story dressed up in a science fiction costume, In other words, there was not enough of the science fiction, What was the purpose of the space elevators Why were there two More details about the Faith Wars were also needed.
Many characters were introduced and details about their lives were provided, but then their storylines went nowhere eg, Dave Warsaw, Cornelius Vermeulen.
Maybe this aspect is just because I am not from Scotland, but the writing and language just seemed too colloquially Scottish.
Perhaps this was just in my edition of the book, but there was no separation between paragraphs related to completely different parts of the story.
Even one extra line would have been helpful to know that we were skipping from one place to another! Very provocative and innovative story of a postoil world,minutes in the future.
This book is thoughtful and wellpaced, He has a good hand on various religious controversies in the world of Christianity and brings some surprising developments to the table.
Birgün bir yazarın aklına, çok güzel bir konu etrafında bir kitap yazmak gelmiş ilk yüzyüz elli sayfada getirdiği hikayeyi, son kırkelli sayfada içinde bir çırpıda harcamış.


Kitabın öne sürdüğü iki felsefi nokta vardı, çok hoşuma gitti, Yıldızlarımı : o yüzden verdim,

Herkese iyi okumalar, This is probably Ken Macleod's best book to date,

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


In this book he moves his sights to religion, The attacks of Septemberthbecome 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 hardSF 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 strongSF 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 sitelinkCharles Stross' sitelinkHalting State in fact the nonsingularity 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.


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