The Execution Channel

I've just finished reading Ken MacLeod's excellent thriller, The Execution Channel. It's set in the near future, in a world like and unlike our own where Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election, the 9/11 terrorists chose to strike at Boston rather than Manhattan, and where Britain and the US are at war in the Middle East.

The main narrative follows Roisin Travis and her father James, as they attempt to survive the aftermath of a nuclear explosion at RAF Leuchars. When the authorities learn that James, an undercover French spy, has vanished and the Roisin, who had been based at a peace camp outside Leuchars, has been seen close to the site of a terrorist bombing at the Grangemouth refinery, they quickly decide that they must be dealing with a family of spies and set off in hot pursuit. As Roisin tries to persuade MI5 that she's an innocent party, her father tries to find out who is really behind the campaign of terror in order to bargain for his own safety.

All of this plays out against a background of fevered speculation on the blogosphere as to the actual cause of the Leuchars explosion. Conspiracy theory web sites, lead by the blogger Mark Dark, strive to pick the wheat out of the chaff generated by a group of Homeland Security astroturfers, throwing out lines attributing the detonation to UFOs, to experimental aircraft powered by an offshoot of Heim Theory, to a new type of anti-missile weapon.

The plot allows MacLeod to demonstrate one of his great strengths: his facility with technology. His description of the blogosphere as a playground of post-modern relativism, where any idea is a valid as any other and where truth is, to the astroturfers at least, an absurdly out-dated concept seems to me to be worrying close to the truth. There's a particularly nice moment late on the novel where, after a particularly horrible event, both groups of bloggers consider how the event might have happened and solipsistically conclude that they mused have been the cause of it all.

But it's the description of the ubiquitous surveillance system used to track the Travises that is really disturbing: the lash-up of security cameras, facial recognition, ID cards, credit cards and databases that the security services use to track down the Travises. As in Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky, another seminal novel about the tyrannies of pervasive monitoring, MacLeod makes the point that not everyone is equal; that in any sufficiently complicated system there are going to be flaws and that a dedicated person in the right place at the right time — Pham Nuwen in Deepness, James Travis in Execution Channel — can suborn the system from within and bend it to their needs. Also on show is MacLeod's wonderful grasp of politics, something first showcased in his description of Leftist politics in his Fall Revolution series of novels. Both Roisin and James are clearly frustrated with mainstream politics — and the failure of enlightenment ideas in particular — but they're driven to act in different ways, Roisin becoming an anti-war activist and James becoming a spy for a foreign power. There's a particularly fine moment when James contemplates the difference between himself and his daughter, between their world views and their consequent actions, where he analyses why he has chosen to betray his country:

At some point England had simply failed itself. In his own mind he had connected it with the times when it had failed him: the incompetence and lack of preparation for the pandemic that had killed his wife and half a million others; the hollow justifications for the attack on Iran which he'd been so sure the Commons would see through. But they hadn't, and the war vote had been bounced through on a snap division. And the people who hadn't filled the streets in consequence.

But the failure went further back than that, and Travis had no idea, really, of when it had happened. There was no moment he could put a finger on. It was like that annoying cliché of Roisin's, about boiling a frog. There had been a time in his life when he had known, without thinking about it, without noticing, that he was living in daylight; there had been moments when that daylight had diminished almost imperceptibly, like when another thin slat is nailed across a window, moments he associated with the deaths of certain public men, from suicides or heart attacks; and after a dusk too gradual to alarm him he had found himself in the dark. In the dark. That was it. Being in the dark about what was going on; being kept in the dark — that was his grievance. It was what, ultimately, had been behind his decision to make his own use of the dark. You keep me in the dark? Very well. I will walk in darkness and strike in darkness.

In some ways, it reminds me of the murderer in Iain Banks' Complicity — a man, driven by a corrosive cynicism for a society that he perceives to be unjust, to take things into his own hands in a way that appears insane, but which is actually driven by reason, albeit of an extremely distorted variety.

In conclusion, I definitely recommend The Execution Channel. It's got a pacey plot, good minor characters, a dose of technological paranoia and, rather refreshingly, a decent amount of real politics. Plus, if you buy the Orbit paperback, you also get an interview with author and a short extract from Charlie Stross' Halting State. What could possibly be better?

The Unicorn and the Wasp

Being a day out of sync, I've only just got round to watching The Unicorn and the Wasp, which I reckon to be the best episode of the current series of Dr Who. But that might just be because it appealed to the Agatha Christie junkie in me — the nerdish part of my mind that rather enjoyed ticking off all the slightly lame references to her book titles. But it may simply be because the episode was funny, well written, well acted — some of Catherine Tate's moments were particularly wonderful — and suitably English.