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The Execution Channel
'Distinctive, politically challenging, both tantalizing and satisfying.' - Kirkus Reviews 'This man's going to be a major writer.' - Iain Banks Fighting has spread across the Middle East and Central Asia to the borders of China. In the US, refugees from climate-change disaster subsist in FEMA camps. Images of official executions circulate on the Internet like al Qaeda videos. State agencies sponsor conspiracy theories as cover-ups. As the troops of the last superpower stand astride the last of the oil, China and Russia aren't the only states considering their certain nations of Old Europe are quietly preparing for the worst. James Travis is a middle-aged middle manager in a software company. He has a son in the army, a daughter in a peace-protest camp outside a USAF base, and a compromising relationship with a foreign intelligence service. When his cover is blown hours before a nuclear explosion destroys the base, Travis, his son, and his daughter are all in serious trouble. And as the spooks and disinformation specialists focus their efforts on his capture, Travis knows that all it will take is one mistake and his only memorial will be another grainy video on . . . The Execution Channel. Ken MacLeod's most relevant and accessible novel to date. Books by Ken Fall RevolutionThe Star FractionThe Stone CanalThe Cassini DivisionThe Sky Road Engines of LightCosmonaut KeepDark LightEngine City Corporation Wars TrilogyDissidenceInsurgenceEmergence NovelsThe Human FrontNewton's WakeLearning the WorldThe Execution ChannelThe Restoration GameIntrusionDescent
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First published January 1, 2007
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About the author
Ken MacLeod
113 books758 followersKen MacLeod is an award-winning Scottish science fiction writer.
His novels have won the Prometheus Award and the BSFA award, and been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He lives near Edinburgh, Scotland.
MacLeod graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and written a masters thesis on biomechanics.
His novels often explore socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas, most particularly the variants of Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism or extreme economic libertarianism.
Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution and post-human cyborg-resurrection.
His novels have won the Prometheus Award and the BSFA award, and been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He lives near Edinburgh, Scotland.
MacLeod graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and written a masters thesis on biomechanics.
His novels often explore socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas, most particularly the variants of Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism or extreme economic libertarianism.
Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution and post-human cyborg-resurrection.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 100 reviews
January 2, 2023
now THIS is the sort of bleak, nihilistic story the alternate genre was made for
November 10, 2022
Updated-11/08/22 Adds Review To Rating
I'll acknowledge that Ken MacLeod is an imaginative author. I wish he wasn't such a grim and depressing one. Written after 9/11 and during the Iraq war, MacLeod presents a world where extreme terrorism and the 'War on Terror', never ends, although why that is, he doesn't exactly say. I must admit, after 4 years the details of this book are pretty fuzzy-never a good sign. I do recall I thought it was generally well written but ultimately unsatisfying as a novel. Suspension of disbelieve required = high.
I'll acknowledge that Ken MacLeod is an imaginative author. I wish he wasn't such a grim and depressing one. Written after 9/11 and during the Iraq war, MacLeod presents a world where extreme terrorism and the 'War on Terror', never ends, although why that is, he doesn't exactly say. I must admit, after 4 years the details of this book are pretty fuzzy-never a good sign. I do recall I thought it was generally well written but ultimately unsatisfying as a novel. Suspension of disbelieve required = high.
June 11, 2015
I'd like to have given this 4 (even 5) stars but The Execution Channel swindled the reader.
I know, I know, it's a book about the back-stabbing global three-letter chess game being run LIVE on 'your planet(tm)' but still ... one thing I hate more than anything is a broken pact with the reader.
Come out and tell him sraight, "I don't fucking like you, and this is gonna hurt," as all real novelists should. Or, suck up to him like you're giving the best head you've ever given.
Put out or shut mouth.
This novel, while it was genuinely well-written, funny and characterful in a way that most American or mainstream novels can only dream of, let down its own premise.
MacLeod shafted the reader at the end, much like a mystery thriller shafts the reader by revealing a murderer you'd never have guessed in a million years -- it was OVER INTELLECTUALISED. It was TOO crafty. And you can take this in the multiple rape-hole sense of the word. Over. Intellectualised.
All through the novel (and I loved the believable characters, the geography, the craft of MacLeod's writing ability, don't get me wrong) you're living the lives of these 'spies' both professional and amateur (and it's proper good).
But then the cynical foul of that throw-away ending... have you ever had someone say, "I love you," but the raised-at-the-end tone or their look away to someone across the room betrays their words? That's sorta how this excellent book ended, with a bollock punch, a rude stench and/or guffaw (at you) for sitting patiently all through the rivetting build-up to the crappy fucking punchline.
I know, I know, it's a book about the back-stabbing global three-letter chess game being run LIVE on 'your planet(tm)' but still ... one thing I hate more than anything is a broken pact with the reader.
Come out and tell him sraight, "I don't fucking like you, and this is gonna hurt," as all real novelists should. Or, suck up to him like you're giving the best head you've ever given.
Put out or shut mouth.
This novel, while it was genuinely well-written, funny and characterful in a way that most American or mainstream novels can only dream of, let down its own premise.
MacLeod shafted the reader at the end, much like a mystery thriller shafts the reader by revealing a murderer you'd never have guessed in a million years -- it was OVER INTELLECTUALISED. It was TOO crafty. And you can take this in the multiple rape-hole sense of the word. Over. Intellectualised.
All through the novel (and I loved the believable characters, the geography, the craft of MacLeod's writing ability, don't get me wrong) you're living the lives of these 'spies' both professional and amateur (and it's proper good).
But then the cynical foul of that throw-away ending... have you ever had someone say, "I love you," but the raised-at-the-end tone or their look away to someone across the room betrays their words? That's sorta how this excellent book ended, with a bollock punch, a rude stench and/or guffaw (at you) for sitting patiently all through the rivetting build-up to the crappy fucking punchline.
February 16, 2008
An unpleasant parlor game is to wonder what the world would be like if all the nasty trends of the day were to persist into the coming decades. If this sort of thing interests you, then Ken MacLeod has a book for you. The Execution Channel is set in a unpleasant future of frequent torture, limited civil rights, environmental degradation, refugee crises, terrorist attacks and the use of nuclear weapons. The book starts off with a nuclear detonation at a Scottish air base. That attack is quickly followed by more attacks and the security and intelligence apparatuses quickly go into action.
The main question of the novel is who did it? Is it Al Qaeda, the Sino-Russian Alliance, the French, who are also flirting with the Russians, or is it an inside job by the Americans and British? The plot is a tad complex, especially for such a short novel, and readers may get confused by the multiple agendas and tweaked geopolitical arena. The ex-Commies are now Commies again, more or less. This isn't surprising given the author. MacLeod's novels tend to involve debates over which form of socialism will end up triumphing in the future. What makes little sense is the apparent state of America. While we don't get the full details, the US is in a state of near economic collapse, but is even more engaged in overseas adventures. Conspiracy theorists might buy that the US could maintain a high GDP contribution to military action, but I can't see it.
Speaking of conspiracy theorists, MacLeod serves up some fresh ideas in the book. Blogs have become more powerful and intelligence agencies spend quite a bit of time involved in old school disinformation campaigns to manipulate them. He also makes an argument that the geopolitical mess of today is systemic rather than personality driven. In his world, Gore wins in 00, launches an pre-emptive attack on AQ in Afghanistan, which sets off wars in Iraq and Iran, as well as a different 9/11. The point is that the conditions for a West vs. Islamic world war were already in place and the actual President didn't matter. While I don't necessarily agree, I like seeing this sort of analysis in scifi books, which often take a personality centric approach.
I quite liked this bleak book, up until the ending at least. While it made its own sense and was certainly set up in the book, it felt like a bit of cheat to me. It didn't by any means ruin the experience for me, but it seemed like an ending to a different story, unless of course he is taking the systemic argument further and saying that the action of these people are unimportant, there are larger forces at work.
The main question of the novel is who did it? Is it Al Qaeda, the Sino-Russian Alliance, the French, who are also flirting with the Russians, or is it an inside job by the Americans and British? The plot is a tad complex, especially for such a short novel, and readers may get confused by the multiple agendas and tweaked geopolitical arena. The ex-Commies are now Commies again, more or less. This isn't surprising given the author. MacLeod's novels tend to involve debates over which form of socialism will end up triumphing in the future. What makes little sense is the apparent state of America. While we don't get the full details, the US is in a state of near economic collapse, but is even more engaged in overseas adventures. Conspiracy theorists might buy that the US could maintain a high GDP contribution to military action, but I can't see it.
Speaking of conspiracy theorists, MacLeod serves up some fresh ideas in the book. Blogs have become more powerful and intelligence agencies spend quite a bit of time involved in old school disinformation campaigns to manipulate them. He also makes an argument that the geopolitical mess of today is systemic rather than personality driven. In his world, Gore wins in 00, launches an pre-emptive attack on AQ in Afghanistan, which sets off wars in Iraq and Iran, as well as a different 9/11. The point is that the conditions for a West vs. Islamic world war were already in place and the actual President didn't matter. While I don't necessarily agree, I like seeing this sort of analysis in scifi books, which often take a personality centric approach.
I quite liked this bleak book, up until the ending at least. While it made its own sense and was certainly set up in the book, it felt like a bit of cheat to me. It didn't by any means ruin the experience for me, but it seemed like an ending to a different story, unless of course he is taking the systemic argument further and saying that the action of these people are unimportant, there are larger forces at work.
September 27, 2010
A brilliant novel: not just a good read (which it is), not just relevant (uncomfortably so), but also brilliantly written. MacLeod is a fine writer, and in this novel his prose really shines - especially starting about half-way through.
This novel explores how the world might react to a series of apparent terrorist attacks that begin with a mushroom cloud appearing over an American air base in Scotland… and things get worse from there. How does the United Kingdom – and the rest of the world – respond? You can imagine. Are these terrorist attacks? A series of horrible accidents? Efforts by various governments to move public sentiment toward war? To enable those governments to impose totalitarian regimes? Through the eyes of a number of related but very different characters, we experience the hysterical reactions of an easily manipulated and fearful public. Characters include a peace protestor who witnesses the explosion, and who gets pulled into the heart of events; her father, who seems to be at the center of a Machiavellian plot that includes a French spy and American CIA agents; a popular conspiracy-theorist blogger, who sifts through diverse and mostly untrustworthy tips from informants who hope to manipulate him in an effort to spread disinformation; and a series of other, deeply real characters integral to revealing the author’s themes.
This is a thriller centered on a chase that follows a countdown to world war. The book ends with a twist that is both surprising but which arises from information planted throughout. The title, by the way, comes from a particularly horrible science-fictional idea that I have no trouble imagining we could see very soon: A pirate channel dedicated to broadcasting executions. When this book was written, it was even more relevant than today... one hopes.
If you haven't read it yet, I heartily recommend that you do.
This novel explores how the world might react to a series of apparent terrorist attacks that begin with a mushroom cloud appearing over an American air base in Scotland… and things get worse from there. How does the United Kingdom – and the rest of the world – respond? You can imagine. Are these terrorist attacks? A series of horrible accidents? Efforts by various governments to move public sentiment toward war? To enable those governments to impose totalitarian regimes? Through the eyes of a number of related but very different characters, we experience the hysterical reactions of an easily manipulated and fearful public. Characters include a peace protestor who witnesses the explosion, and who gets pulled into the heart of events; her father, who seems to be at the center of a Machiavellian plot that includes a French spy and American CIA agents; a popular conspiracy-theorist blogger, who sifts through diverse and mostly untrustworthy tips from informants who hope to manipulate him in an effort to spread disinformation; and a series of other, deeply real characters integral to revealing the author’s themes.
This is a thriller centered on a chase that follows a countdown to world war. The book ends with a twist that is both surprising but which arises from information planted throughout. The title, by the way, comes from a particularly horrible science-fictional idea that I have no trouble imagining we could see very soon: A pirate channel dedicated to broadcasting executions. When this book was written, it was even more relevant than today... one hopes.
If you haven't read it yet, I heartily recommend that you do.
February 16, 2015
Only my stubbornness in finishing something I've started allowed me to complete this mess of a book.
November 8, 2024
I try to read this novel once and gave up after 50 pages. After watching some videos of Macleod I said, now is the time. and it was PAINFULL as you can imagine.
If you are leftist, communist, white-bashing then this is you wet dream. Read at your own peril... my review , well and the book.
So, basically this is alternate history book mix with dystopia and thriller elements. 9/11 still happened, a bit different, and terror won. Instead of Bush you have Al-Gore and the political stuff change with France being communist(kinda) and allying with Russia and China against the imperialist USA\UK.
First question, where are germany, japan, italy and all other UE? We don't know.
Just out of the bat this is Ken Macleod wet dream. He must have been "spank the monkey" as he wrote the novel. He is a staunch communist/anarchist/socialist - or Trotskyism lover and all of his novels at some degree focus on that
I am not a leftist but I am not also a far right guy so I can easily read both stances and love both things. The problem is when the author not only talk about this issues (which are valid and can enrich the tale) but continuously beat you saying if you don't agree with me you are a far right crappy person.
His personal beliefs are his own and he should and all others do write and try to include their topics on their books, sometimes you get interesting books where you can view them and thing who is wrong or right or you get this kind of books where the author is making a propaganda book with some veils of fiction. China, North Korea or Russia are not paradises my friend. Communism can be good thing in a small scale where you've got a small town with 100 people and they leave in communion where people exchange goods for others. People will bundle together. In cities of million people or even thousands this won't happen. We all want to be football players, medics or other nobel things but someone must clean up crap in the streets, do the hard work. A medic or a street cleaner are not the same. Both are vital but they are not the same. The knowledge\education differentiates them. They should not earn the same. But I am deviating and I would have plenty of things to talk.
Now in regard of the thriller and novel itself... the problem with this novel was the thriller part because there wasn't or it was so overshadow by his rants on politics. You have three pages of rant and some pages of spy-thriller thing.
I hate it. I have three of his sci-fi series and I will be reading them.. 15/100
If you are leftist, communist, white-bashing then this is you wet dream. Read at your own peril... my review , well and the book.
So, basically this is alternate history book mix with dystopia and thriller elements. 9/11 still happened, a bit different, and terror won. Instead of Bush you have Al-Gore and the political stuff change with France being communist(kinda) and allying with Russia and China against the imperialist USA\UK.
First question, where are germany, japan, italy and all other UE? We don't know.
Just out of the bat this is Ken Macleod wet dream. He must have been "spank the monkey" as he wrote the novel. He is a staunch communist/anarchist/socialist - or Trotskyism lover and all of his novels at some degree focus on that
I am not a leftist but I am not also a far right guy so I can easily read both stances and love both things. The problem is when the author not only talk about this issues (which are valid and can enrich the tale) but continuously beat you saying if you don't agree with me you are a far right crappy person.
His personal beliefs are his own and he should and all others do write and try to include their topics on their books, sometimes you get interesting books where you can view them and thing who is wrong or right or you get this kind of books where the author is making a propaganda book with some veils of fiction. China, North Korea or Russia are not paradises my friend. Communism can be good thing in a small scale where you've got a small town with 100 people and they leave in communion where people exchange goods for others. People will bundle together. In cities of million people or even thousands this won't happen. We all want to be football players, medics or other nobel things but someone must clean up crap in the streets, do the hard work. A medic or a street cleaner are not the same. Both are vital but they are not the same. The knowledge\education differentiates them. They should not earn the same. But I am deviating and I would have plenty of things to talk.
Now in regard of the thriller and novel itself... the problem with this novel was the thriller part because there wasn't or it was so overshadow by his rants on politics. You have three pages of rant and some pages of spy-thriller thing.
I hate it. I have three of his sci-fi series and I will be reading them.. 15/100
February 3, 2014
The friend who lent me this book in hardback has been telling me for years about this whole wave of leftist Scottish science fiction writers whose works he's been reading on Kindle. I don't have or want a Kindle, but I was intrigued, so I borrowed this copy. I hope the other works are better. The Execution Channel has great moments, but it left me bitterly dissatisfied.
Beyond the book-jacket summaries, this is a story of information, disinformation, and how in the modern age you cannot believe anything you read on the Internet or see in the mass media. It is about corporate totalitarianism hiding behind democracy, and the possibility that terrorism is not just blowback but intentional consequences of the Great Powers' actions. It is about how the corporate state will get what it wants from you and toss you aside like last week's fish & chips. It is also, perplexingly, about interstellar travel, but...[spoiler redacted].
On the plus side, Ken MacLeod has a way with characters. Despite her occasional simpering, I really enjoyed getting to know Roisin Travis, especially as she comes to realize that her progressive comrades aren't conducting their peace & justice campaign right, that they either don't recognize that they've been infiltrated or don't care. I like her father James, a spy who sees through his government's line of bullshit and actually cares about people. The dozen or so peripheral characters also have some serious flavor. An American CIA agent who's supposed to be the primary antagonist is not obviously evil, just doing his job because he believes he's doing the right thing even when he's conducting torture—a nuance that I like to see in fiction.
MacLeod's dialog also is relatively free of cringe-factors, except when he tries to write in American. His Yank characters sometimes lapse into British idioms for no reason. Nice try, Ken; keep working on this.
In this story of the power of information, the Internet savvy on display is impressive, as is the characters' knowledge of "trade-craft" in the spy game. I found myself laughing knowingly at how clever some of the research was.
Even though my politics are way left of center, I hold that it takes a certain maturity for a lefty author to criticize the methods and ignorance of so-called progressives. Garden-variety liberals get no mercy in this. Albert Gore wins the White House in 2000, and his reaction to 9/11/2001 is even more extreme than the real-life Bush-Cheney Administration's. Gore's successor Hillary Clinton fares no better in this book. The fact that MacLeod published this in 2007, before Barack Obama took office and outstripped Dubya Bush's national security state, is truly impressive.
Lastly, this is the first place I've seen the phrase "jilled off" in print. But then, I don't read much erotica.
Complaints:
We barely even meet the character who dies right in the middle of the story (or does he?), and we're supposed to care about him because some of the other characters do.
The characters spend a lot of time online, and the point-by-point descriptions of their information-gathering gets tedious.
The ending presents a twist of sorts, but it's a irritating twist. Yes, there are hints of it in the middle stages of the story, but that doesn't make it any less WTF.
In dozens of places, where a capital F is expected, there's a lowercase F, as if the Shift+F on MacLeod's keyboard was busted...but not consistently. How did the publisher not catch this?
And then there's that bit I mentioned above about American dialog. Dude, run that dialog past an actual American to get rid of the Britspeak.
Beyond the book-jacket summaries, this is a story of information, disinformation, and how in the modern age you cannot believe anything you read on the Internet or see in the mass media. It is about corporate totalitarianism hiding behind democracy, and the possibility that terrorism is not just blowback but intentional consequences of the Great Powers' actions. It is about how the corporate state will get what it wants from you and toss you aside like last week's fish & chips. It is also, perplexingly, about interstellar travel, but...[spoiler redacted].
On the plus side, Ken MacLeod has a way with characters. Despite her occasional simpering, I really enjoyed getting to know Roisin Travis, especially as she comes to realize that her progressive comrades aren't conducting their peace & justice campaign right, that they either don't recognize that they've been infiltrated or don't care. I like her father James, a spy who sees through his government's line of bullshit and actually cares about people. The dozen or so peripheral characters also have some serious flavor. An American CIA agent who's supposed to be the primary antagonist is not obviously evil, just doing his job because he believes he's doing the right thing even when he's conducting torture—a nuance that I like to see in fiction.
MacLeod's dialog also is relatively free of cringe-factors, except when he tries to write in American. His Yank characters sometimes lapse into British idioms for no reason. Nice try, Ken; keep working on this.
In this story of the power of information, the Internet savvy on display is impressive, as is the characters' knowledge of "trade-craft" in the spy game. I found myself laughing knowingly at how clever some of the research was.
Even though my politics are way left of center, I hold that it takes a certain maturity for a lefty author to criticize the methods and ignorance of so-called progressives. Garden-variety liberals get no mercy in this. Albert Gore wins the White House in 2000, and his reaction to 9/11/2001 is even more extreme than the real-life Bush-Cheney Administration's. Gore's successor Hillary Clinton fares no better in this book. The fact that MacLeod published this in 2007, before Barack Obama took office and outstripped Dubya Bush's national security state, is truly impressive.
Lastly, this is the first place I've seen the phrase "jilled off" in print. But then, I don't read much erotica.
Complaints:
We barely even meet the character who dies right in the middle of the story (or does he?), and we're supposed to care about him because some of the other characters do.
The characters spend a lot of time online, and the point-by-point descriptions of their information-gathering gets tedious.
The ending presents a twist of sorts, but it's a irritating twist. Yes, there are hints of it in the middle stages of the story, but that doesn't make it any less WTF.
In dozens of places, where a capital F is expected, there's a lowercase F, as if the Shift+F on MacLeod's keyboard was busted...but not consistently. How did the publisher not catch this?
And then there's that bit I mentioned above about American dialog. Dude, run that dialog past an actual American to get rid of the Britspeak.
August 13, 2023
The book promises to be about one thing, when in fact it makes up very little of the book and hardly bears mentioning. The big revelation at the end is so laughable and inexplicable that I feel a misdemeanor has been committed against me.
May 17, 2014
I borrowed this book after hearing Ken MacLeod speak on Galactic Chat. I think in general terms we share some political and social views so I was interested to see if this played out in his work. I have also been impressed with most of the Scottish writers I have read, regardless of genre.
So, for a man who is known for writing sci-fi ( a contemporary and friend of Iain Banks) he writes a damn fine techno-thriller.
It's after 9/11. After the bombing. After the Iraq war. After 7/7. After the Iran war. After the nukes. After the flu. After the Straits. After Rosyth. In a world just down the road from our own, on-line bloggers vie with old-line political operatives and new-style police to determine just where reality lies.
It’s always difficult to write a techno-thriller, they have a limited life span because technology and politics can change reasonably quickly – just cast your eye of Tom Clancy’s works, or the movies made from them. So what MacLeod has done is chosen a node in time and diverged from our history and presented us with a world that doesn’t look much different but that which, I think, gives the reader all the good stuff i.e. the action, the double dealing, the high stakes, without us feeling like we have read a book past its time. It’s got the sense of our time, of the now.
The Execution Channel came out in 2007 and pretty much holds up under the passage of another 7 years. In a tech and information heavy story, Twitter’s absence was noticeable but then Twitter had only just been founded around the time the novel was being written. In terms of online exchanges and information culture and general world political culture though, he got it spot on.
In an England he no longer feels is England, the protagonist James Travis is spying for the French. Travis hates Americans and feels the England of his childhood is gone, not the result of endless waves of immigration, but I think more from the cultural and political changes wrought to it’s institutions.
The detonation of a suspected nuclear device at a Scottish based American Air Force base acts as a catalyst for Travis to go on the run when his activities for the French are caught up in the net that widens to pin down the culprit of the attack. So we have your standard tale of trying to catch the enemy agent, overlaid the question of which, if any, of the co-operating agencies who are tracking him are wholly good, overlaid with the murky and confusing world of strategic disinformation warfare. Sprinkle this with advanced algorithms and networks based on the neural pathways of animals and we begin to question who the bad guys are, and if they are perhaps human.
It’s exceedingly well placed and it keeps you thinking and guessing right until the end. It’s one of the better techno-thrillers I have read in a long time and that is perhaps what might leave you feeling unsatisfied at the end. It is too convincing as one genre, when in reality its ending is pure sci-fi. Other reviewers have felt this breaks a contract with the reader and I can see where they are coming from, it’s like watching From Dusk till Dawn thinking it’s a crime movie.
I enjoyed it for the ride alone, and being a sci-fi fan was able to stretch my suspension of disbelief to incorporate the ending. So a brilliant espionage, techno-thriller with a sci-fi sting at the end.
So, for a man who is known for writing sci-fi ( a contemporary and friend of Iain Banks) he writes a damn fine techno-thriller.
It's after 9/11. After the bombing. After the Iraq war. After 7/7. After the Iran war. After the nukes. After the flu. After the Straits. After Rosyth. In a world just down the road from our own, on-line bloggers vie with old-line political operatives and new-style police to determine just where reality lies.
It’s always difficult to write a techno-thriller, they have a limited life span because technology and politics can change reasonably quickly – just cast your eye of Tom Clancy’s works, or the movies made from them. So what MacLeod has done is chosen a node in time and diverged from our history and presented us with a world that doesn’t look much different but that which, I think, gives the reader all the good stuff i.e. the action, the double dealing, the high stakes, without us feeling like we have read a book past its time. It’s got the sense of our time, of the now.
The Execution Channel came out in 2007 and pretty much holds up under the passage of another 7 years. In a tech and information heavy story, Twitter’s absence was noticeable but then Twitter had only just been founded around the time the novel was being written. In terms of online exchanges and information culture and general world political culture though, he got it spot on.
In an England he no longer feels is England, the protagonist James Travis is spying for the French. Travis hates Americans and feels the England of his childhood is gone, not the result of endless waves of immigration, but I think more from the cultural and political changes wrought to it’s institutions.
The detonation of a suspected nuclear device at a Scottish based American Air Force base acts as a catalyst for Travis to go on the run when his activities for the French are caught up in the net that widens to pin down the culprit of the attack. So we have your standard tale of trying to catch the enemy agent, overlaid the question of which, if any, of the co-operating agencies who are tracking him are wholly good, overlaid with the murky and confusing world of strategic disinformation warfare. Sprinkle this with advanced algorithms and networks based on the neural pathways of animals and we begin to question who the bad guys are, and if they are perhaps human.
It’s exceedingly well placed and it keeps you thinking and guessing right until the end. It’s one of the better techno-thrillers I have read in a long time and that is perhaps what might leave you feeling unsatisfied at the end. It is too convincing as one genre, when in reality its ending is pure sci-fi. Other reviewers have felt this breaks a contract with the reader and I can see where they are coming from, it’s like watching From Dusk till Dawn thinking it’s a crime movie.
I enjoyed it for the ride alone, and being a sci-fi fan was able to stretch my suspension of disbelief to incorporate the ending. So a brilliant espionage, techno-thriller with a sci-fi sting at the end.
October 13, 2014
For three-quarters of the book, it reads like a taut and politically cynical spy thriller that has the reader holding tightly onto the plot lines of key protagonists James Travis and his daughter Roisin, while spies, coubter-spies, counter-terrorists, conspiracy bloggers and disinformation experts obscure what it really going on. Then comes the foreshadowed but unexpected science-fictional ending that leaves all the other plots and theories in the dust.
The precipitating moment to all of this is an explosion at a U.S. Base in Scotland, witnessed and photographed by peace camp volunteer Roisin Travis. As Roisin flees the authorities, further incidents, initially assumed to be terrorist attacks, spark anti-moslem frenzy in the british populace and hyperactivity in the world's intelligence circles. As Paul Kincaid notes in a review for Strange Horizons (http://www.strangehorizons.com/review...
"But espionage is less about information than it is about disinformation, and deception lies at the heart of this novel. This is not just in the way that James and Roisin are constantly changing their appearance, or indeed the way that James regularly uses his computer skills to create new identities. We see the team of English, Scottish, and American agents chasing Roisin deceiving each other. We see the team of freelancers whose job it is to feed disinformation into the web. We see the differing ways that events are reported in the press. We see the American teenager who runs a top conspiracy website, and who slowly begins to see through the disinformation he is being fed. Yet even when anyone in this novel glimpses the truth it is only ever a glimpse, only ever partial. We live in a world, MacLeod tells us very convincingly, in which it is now impossible to know the whole truth, and in which partial truths are as deadly as outright lies."
This is the second novel I've read by MacLeod, and I've been delighted each time by both the storytelling and the incisive political critique embedded in it.
The precipitating moment to all of this is an explosion at a U.S. Base in Scotland, witnessed and photographed by peace camp volunteer Roisin Travis. As Roisin flees the authorities, further incidents, initially assumed to be terrorist attacks, spark anti-moslem frenzy in the british populace and hyperactivity in the world's intelligence circles. As Paul Kincaid notes in a review for Strange Horizons (http://www.strangehorizons.com/review...
"But espionage is less about information than it is about disinformation, and deception lies at the heart of this novel. This is not just in the way that James and Roisin are constantly changing their appearance, or indeed the way that James regularly uses his computer skills to create new identities. We see the team of English, Scottish, and American agents chasing Roisin deceiving each other. We see the team of freelancers whose job it is to feed disinformation into the web. We see the differing ways that events are reported in the press. We see the American teenager who runs a top conspiracy website, and who slowly begins to see through the disinformation he is being fed. Yet even when anyone in this novel glimpses the truth it is only ever a glimpse, only ever partial. We live in a world, MacLeod tells us very convincingly, in which it is now impossible to know the whole truth, and in which partial truths are as deadly as outright lies."
This is the second novel I've read by MacLeod, and I've been delighted each time by both the storytelling and the incisive political critique embedded in it.
December 10, 2018
An explosion devastates an American base on Scottish soil, and three members of the Travis family, though scattered, are suspected by the government. As they elude capture, they try to figure out what really happened through the Net. But it's not clear whether the explosion was an accident or an attack, and if an attack, by what country or dissident group. Some people even think that the Americans took out their own base. And other groups take advantage of the confusion to extend the chaos.
The book is flawed by the author's injection of his own political views into the mouths of too many of the characters -- a problem that will be familiar to readers of R. A. Heinlein. It was also a bit of a stretch to discover, quite a few chapters into the book, that the events are set not in our own near future, but that of an alternate time track in which Gore won the presidency in 2000. There doesn't seem to be any reason to hide this from the reader for so long, but it pulled the rug out from this reader's feet, requiring a realignment of what had already happened in the plot.
As to the Execution Channel, it is a clandestine news channel that shows executions live, nonstop through the day, and which some people seem addicted to. It rarely takes the stage in this novel, but is often on the wings.
The novel's pace is brisk and the uses of contemporary electronics are intriguing. More than anything, the book raises the question of what would happen today if no one plausibly claimed responsibility for an attack, or if an accident occurred that no one understood. The answers are not reassuring.
The book is flawed by the author's injection of his own political views into the mouths of too many of the characters -- a problem that will be familiar to readers of R. A. Heinlein. It was also a bit of a stretch to discover, quite a few chapters into the book, that the events are set not in our own near future, but that of an alternate time track in which Gore won the presidency in 2000. There doesn't seem to be any reason to hide this from the reader for so long, but it pulled the rug out from this reader's feet, requiring a realignment of what had already happened in the plot.
As to the Execution Channel, it is a clandestine news channel that shows executions live, nonstop through the day, and which some people seem addicted to. It rarely takes the stage in this novel, but is often on the wings.
The novel's pace is brisk and the uses of contemporary electronics are intriguing. More than anything, the book raises the question of what would happen today if no one plausibly claimed responsibility for an attack, or if an accident occurred that no one understood. The answers are not reassuring.
July 10, 2009
Interrupted The Backroom Boys to take The Execution Channel on a trip.
Surprisingly good. I'm often surprised by Ken MacLeod - he writes clearly, wittingly and sometimes irritatingly Scottish. His irritations also sometimes roll over into technology (like his erstwhile peer Charles Stross) in this book but he mostly keeps it in check.
An alternate "now/future" book, not pleasant to the Americans at all and very correctly and righteously frustrated at the injustices of the "current/real" world at large. A spy thriller in many ways, with many unsavoury detail it sucks you in completely to the CIA, MI5, DGSE. A little overly complicated and confusing in the end; bluff, double-bluff, insinuation, mis-information and blow-your-mind-scifi keeps it from 4 star. It's premise of disinformation worked against it a little in the end, or maybe that was the whole point. I'd read it again except for the fact the airport thriller nature of it is one of the pleasures it imbued.
Sometime in the last few years, Ken has become one of the current leading lights of contemporary Sci-fi.
Surprisingly good. I'm often surprised by Ken MacLeod - he writes clearly, wittingly and sometimes irritatingly Scottish. His irritations also sometimes roll over into technology (like his erstwhile peer Charles Stross) in this book but he mostly keeps it in check.
An alternate "now/future" book, not pleasant to the Americans at all and very correctly and righteously frustrated at the injustices of the "current/real" world at large. A spy thriller in many ways, with many unsavoury detail it sucks you in completely to the CIA, MI5, DGSE. A little overly complicated and confusing in the end; bluff, double-bluff, insinuation, mis-information and blow-your-mind-scifi keeps it from 4 star. It's premise of disinformation worked against it a little in the end, or maybe that was the whole point. I'd read it again except for the fact the airport thriller nature of it is one of the pleasures it imbued.
Sometime in the last few years, Ken has become one of the current leading lights of contemporary Sci-fi.
May 18, 2017
Estoy enojado con este libro. Acabo de terminar de leerlo, así que lo que tengo más fresco es el final. Y el final es una estafa. Te pasás todo el libro intentando determinar qué carajo es lo que está pasando y cuando al final aparece la gran revelación no podría ser más descolgada si fuera una invasión de dinosaurios mutantes extraterrestres. En tres páginas al final te cambia totalmente todo lo que estaba pasando.
El libro está bueno. Vale la pena. Es una historia de espías en un mundo que es ligeramente más mierda que el mundo en el que vivimos. Lo que parece ser una bomba nuclear explota en una base militar de Estados Unidos en Escocia, y casi inmediatamente hay una serie de aparentes atentados terroristas. En ese contexto tenés a James Travis, que es un espía al servicio de los franceses, y su hija Roisin, que es una activista anti-guerra que estaba cerca de la base militar atacada, intentando escapar lo que parece que se les viene encima. Personajes secundarios incluyen a un agente de la CIA, uno del DGSE, y una agente del MI5. Todo muy bien trabajado, y todo muy lindo y divertido de leer. Hasta que llegás a esas tres últimas páginas y la verdad que es una estafa.
Pero ta, ponele que igual lo recomendaría. Vale la pena leerlo — sólo tenés que estar al tanto que el final no tiene nada que ver con nada. Si ya sabés eso, y te lo bancás, leelo. Con otro final, creo que sería cinco estrellas. Capaz que en un mes si me preguntás de nuevo es cuatro estrellas. Pero ahora estoy ofendido.
El libro está bueno. Vale la pena. Es una historia de espías en un mundo que es ligeramente más mierda que el mundo en el que vivimos. Lo que parece ser una bomba nuclear explota en una base militar de Estados Unidos en Escocia, y casi inmediatamente hay una serie de aparentes atentados terroristas. En ese contexto tenés a James Travis, que es un espía al servicio de los franceses, y su hija Roisin, que es una activista anti-guerra que estaba cerca de la base militar atacada, intentando escapar lo que parece que se les viene encima. Personajes secundarios incluyen a un agente de la CIA, uno del DGSE, y una agente del MI5. Todo muy bien trabajado, y todo muy lindo y divertido de leer. Hasta que llegás a esas tres últimas páginas y la verdad que es una estafa.
Pero ta, ponele que igual lo recomendaría. Vale la pena leerlo — sólo tenés que estar al tanto que el final no tiene nada que ver con nada. Si ya sabés eso, y te lo bancás, leelo. Con otro final, creo que sería cinco estrellas. Capaz que en un mes si me preguntás de nuevo es cuatro estrellas. Pero ahora estoy ofendido.
June 12, 2012
Imagine, an entire TV channel dedicated to broadcasting executions from around the world to keep people in line. A future so bleak that online bloggers are the heroes. Right there you've got two cornerstones in any quality piece of dystopian fiction. I've never been one for spy/thriller fiction but I figured I'd give this a shot. I'm a sucker for dystopian fiction and with a title like 'The Execution Channel' it's gonna be awesome, right?
You know that old cliche about not judging a book by its cover? it's a cliche for a reason.
Eighty-seven pages in and still no real insight to the channel. Just little blurbs at the end of chapters featuring bad dialogue and conspiracy theories / possibly meant to be actual explanations that sound like they were written by hobos who have moved on from moonshine to shoe polish.
You lied, Ken Macleod. I was promised a story about a mysterious underground television channel featuring state sponsored executions. I got fringe fighters with complicated back stories and inflated egos. Shame on you, Ken. Should have named him 'Tin Hats and Lost Meds'
You know that old cliche about not judging a book by its cover? it's a cliche for a reason.
Eighty-seven pages in and still no real insight to the channel. Just little blurbs at the end of chapters featuring bad dialogue and conspiracy theories / possibly meant to be actual explanations that sound like they were written by hobos who have moved on from moonshine to shoe polish.
You lied, Ken Macleod. I was promised a story about a mysterious underground television channel featuring state sponsored executions. I got fringe fighters with complicated back stories and inflated egos. Shame on you, Ken. Should have named him 'Tin Hats and Lost Meds'
Read
April 8, 2009http://nhw.livejournal.com/1078028.html[return][return]A departure from MacLeod's previous space-opera stamping grounds, this is a thriller set in the present or near future of a slightly alternate earth - Gore was elected in 2000, 9/11 hit Boston, and the War on Terror resulted in military operations in Iran and Central Asia as well as Afghanistan and Iraq. Secret technologies, disinformation through blogging, and confused but lethal rivalry between intelligence services all play a part, but the emotional dynamic that drives the narrative is the father-daughter relationship between the two key characters, perhaps the most successful characterisation in any of MacLeod's novels. There is a very memorable climactic scene set in the main square in Oslo as well. Really good stuff.[return][return]Bechdel test: scrapes a pass. The daughter has numerous conversations with other women, of which almost but not quite all are about men.
October 10, 2014
An excellent voice for the confused nature of news and reality in the now and near future. However upon reflection the core storyline makes sense all the way up until the end.
At which point the novel's focus on the minutia of daily life is broken by the author's insistence on the "Same as it ever was" nature of human existence even amid world changing events.
In the end the story feels like it will amount to something, only to reverse this feeling in the closing pages.
The reader feels led along a path only to be returned to the beginning, and has only learned that which is no longer useful, resulting in that post-binge empty feeling one gets after reading too many blogs.
I fear MacLeod has too closely mirrored his inspiration and created a work that strips itself of meaning in an attempt to recreate its inspiration.
At which point the novel's focus on the minutia of daily life is broken by the author's insistence on the "Same as it ever was" nature of human existence even amid world changing events.
In the end the story feels like it will amount to something, only to reverse this feeling in the closing pages.
The reader feels led along a path only to be returned to the beginning, and has only learned that which is no longer useful, resulting in that post-binge empty feeling one gets after reading too many blogs.
I fear MacLeod has too closely mirrored his inspiration and created a work that strips itself of meaning in an attempt to recreate its inspiration.
June 17, 2017
The Execution Channel never really delivers on its promises. The plot is convoluted, the characters not particularly likeable and the narrative style makes it hard work to read. The final third picks up some pace, which will help you get to the end, however it is not a satisfying read. The actual plot elements should have produced an action thriller, however MacLeod shows his preference for politics and misses the mark. There is some good hints at sci-fi in there, however they are not a solid enough reason to recommend this book.
November 9, 2013
The greatest shaggy dog story ever told.
I am convinced that The Execution Channel is not so much a story, as it is a snapshot, of a world both bleaker and terribly promising compared to ours. Set in an alternate present of a War on Terror gone far worse than ours, we watch the war get even worse through the eyes of several disparate Anglo-Americans hopelessly entangled with the events. The key viewpoint characters include a pacifist British student involved with antiwar protesters who accidentally witness the key component in an apparent nuclear detonation that destroys an American air base in Scotland. Next is her father, an IT consultant who is actually a turncoat spying on behalf of France, and appears to have all of the abilities of Liam Neeson's character from Taken and Taken 2, except better suited for flight than fight. That his other child is a son in the Army is an ironic note. Best of is Mark Dark, the most geographically distant of the cast, a blogger of conspiracy theories and rumors of war, chasing the threads behind the action from fake web stories to crank letters. Minor characters include the spies that chase them, hilarious portrayals of determined, but quixotic, socialist antiwar agitators doomed to irrelevancy, and tantalizingly- Bob (oh hello, Laundry series) and Anne-Marie, consultants for a government contractor tasked with concocting wide tales and ghostwritten blogs to confound online truthseekers.
All of this is shown, not told, in a very breezy pace. The characters do come to life, to some extent, but we always only see them in action, even when being reflective; we never see them congeal as fully living, breathing persons. And that is one of the secret strengths of the book; what it is a depiction of a crucial time in a very twisted, broken world, that darkly resembles ours. We do not need to know the full bios of any of the cast. We only need to see how they act and react to crisis.
The scene: after 9/11 and 7/7 came the war with Iran, at last; an Anglo-American strike (possibly involving tac nukes) destroy the Iranian nuclear program- Isfahan is mentioned as a target. Then, like other futurist novels, the author casually mentions that a global flu epidemic kills a bunch of people (yet society and culture ends up vaguely similar to our own, when one would think a modern day plague would have much greater repercussions such as causing people to avoid big crowded public places like... well, the plague). And now it's 201x and a Democratic female president is in power in America, the Coalition is in Kazakhstan, FEMA camps are hosting third world refugees displaced by climate change, Syria is in shambles and everyone uses cell phones to browse the internet (some things just don't change). The aforementioned nuke is the opening spark to our tour of this world, and the first of multiple blasts.
The tone is jaded, if not cynical- it's seen it all before, but (just but)- humanity might be able to get out of this one. There may be heroes, or at least sympathetic victims, and they may survive, and perhaps even find the truth. But being jaded is more fun than un-cynical, and this book has it in spades. The Execution Channel exists in the post "post-" world. It is post-security state; all of characters, both hunters of the intelligence agency, or renegade spies or activists on the run, act like duplicity and tradecraft is second nature. It is post-terror; the terrorists (never actually seen) commit wanton atrocities without so much as a manifesto announcing their identity afterwards. It is post-Other; the nativist mobs, frothing with self-righteous fury, commit wanton acts of hate on routine scapegoats, and the book describes their violence as expected, almost commonplace. It is post-activist; The peace movement impotently does the '60s thing while continuously imploding, accusing one another of being police agents and agent provocateurs. It is post-trust; near the start of the novel, after the nuke has gone off, the CIA and MI-6 spooks immediately start speculating that it was "blue on blue" - not an attack by AQ or the Chinese or the Russians, but *of course* a false flag made as a pretext prior to an American occupation of Britain; so little earnestness remains, even the cousins are not above suspicion.
But all of them, both the characters, and the factions they represent, seem to do it with a practiced, almost ritual, execution. Everyone acts that the worst case is something they had been expecting. To them, they truly live in a world of terror. A world where the threat of terrorism in the first world and heavy-handed reprisal is a fact of life. Must has been made of its tagline "The War on Terror is Over. Terror Won." and at the end, it does make sense. It is a post-terror world, one that has seen trauma after trauma, and bleakly continues with the motions. And unintentionally, this holds a mirror to out reality. Our world, blessedly, has not seen the level of terrorist activity or global warfare alluded to in The Execution Channel, but it is no less darkly reminiscent. A world where government intelligence agencies leverage our appetite for exposure to wiretap our tweets and seize our profiles. Where the mission in Afghanistan slogs on towards an inevitable end in 2014, not in victory, but in apathy. Where, as it turns out, (as in the book), a Democrat can play the game of drones just as well as a Republican.
So what is this doing in the sci-fi section, you ask? Aside from the author being a genre writer, and the ending's space cadet status, the novel does hint at certain- cosmic events. An entire section is named "The Planck Anomalies"- discovered from Pioneer on Plutonian shores, a series of radiation readings that seem to hint that everything we know about cosmology is wrong. The two leading answers to the Anomalies, we are told, is that either the universe is an elaborate illusive simulation created by posthuman intelligences... or everything to the edge of the Kuiper Belt in space is the real, but outside of that is created by aforementioned AI gods. Like so many other tantalizing plot threads, this is mentioned once and barely revisited.
Which of course, is one of the key weaknesses of this story. Characters come in and out of the action, some disappearing until the end of the book, and lack even any semblance of characterization at all. Most disappointing is Bob and Anne-Marie; I really enjoyed reading the digital astroturfing they're paid to do. But just as disappointing is the titular Execution Channel itself; a morbid sign of the world they live in, the LiveLeaks on the boob tube brings morbid faces of death every hour, and the first few chapters end with lists of its victims, grimly announcing the state of the world as spies are killed in Syria or corrupt officials are executed in China. But ultimately that's all it is, a way to provide flavor and set the tone, but does not become an important part of the plot at all, bar one scene. Its existence is quickly explained away at the end of one chapter, in what must be one of the more satirical moments.
Speaking of which, another sci-fi element is that Mark Dark explains in a "As you know, Bob" blog post that the history of their world is one in which Gore had won the 2000 election, not Bush. He goes on to reiterate a very different 9/11, with targets in Boston and Philly, committed in revenge for the Dem President's decapitation strike on Osama Bin Laden. Regardless, their world ends up with results quite similar to ours, and worse. Ken MacLeod explains in an interview himself that the reason was to show that imperialist actions and the rise of a security state could happen regardless of which party is in power. Given recent spy scandals, this observation seems quite poignant. (Though why Gore would invade Iraq as well, I don't know; maybe he could have jumped to the strike on Iran and have that be analogous to taking out Saddam and the aftermath of nation-building)
On a lighter note, the other aspects of the world he's weaved is convincing. Pluto is still named a planet and Kim Jong-il is still puttering about, which nicely dates this novel to the late Bush era. The cohesiveness of the antiwar movement as well, operating in ways familiar to MacLeod's '60s and '70s roots, seems overly optimistic in retrospect, as well. No Hope nor Change, no 2008 economic recession, no Wikileaks, no Fukushima, no Arab Spring, no Snowden - our world, with its holographic Tupac at Coachella, reads like a futurist novel at times as well, though a much tamer one. MacLeod fully captures the power of blogs (remember pajamas media? So mid-00's!), but misses the boat on social media. His characters don't capture video for uploading, though it's probably to be expected given how they're all engaged in the espionage game and would avoid such trivial vulnerabilities.
Finally, I must touch upon the controversial ending that comes completely out of left field, which I was spoiled upon prior to reading it and will not spoil here to the errant reader. Suffice to say not only does it bring about the sci-fi elements hinted at earlier into the forefront, it is a useful reminder of the author's past as a Trotskyist activist- it whimsically gives the communist powers a bit of credit, in stark contrast at all of the skullduggery that the capitalist hegemons had been indulging in for the rest of the book. My main complaint isn't even the literal setting-breaking craziness that ensues- I'm still wrapping my head around it- but how the characters seem to break apart at that section, either. Antagonist figures go full villainous. Protagonist characters lose their agency, at the face of action off-screen, then neatly wrapped up in a coda that's basically a "where are they now?" summary.
Theory: the book is a clever satire of Singularity stories. That starry-eyed genre whereupon we invent a rapidly self-learning AI and suddenly mind uploading and clinical immortality and post-scarcity nanobots are suddenly a thing. Well, that's the cruft of the genre, but at its core Singularity is about the next great technological change that shifts all of our paradigms and suddenly we're living in the true post-post world. And, well, the ending might as well be the Singularity, even if there are no superintelligent computers involved. It is, at least, an abrupt end of a stage of history, and embarking of a brave new universe.
Points, also to Mr. MacLeod for introducing me to the word "parapolitics", and by proxy the fringe journal Lobster devoted to the subject. And to Heim Theory, another crackpot field so elaborate I'm surprised that internet Tesla-worshiping free energy believers haven't jumped upon yet.
In a nutshell, why I like it: This is basically Children of Men in book form. With conspiracy theory blogs. And allusions to the Matrix theory. Oh, Spy vs. Spy action.
I am convinced that The Execution Channel is not so much a story, as it is a snapshot, of a world both bleaker and terribly promising compared to ours. Set in an alternate present of a War on Terror gone far worse than ours, we watch the war get even worse through the eyes of several disparate Anglo-Americans hopelessly entangled with the events. The key viewpoint characters include a pacifist British student involved with antiwar protesters who accidentally witness the key component in an apparent nuclear detonation that destroys an American air base in Scotland. Next is her father, an IT consultant who is actually a turncoat spying on behalf of France, and appears to have all of the abilities of Liam Neeson's character from Taken and Taken 2, except better suited for flight than fight. That his other child is a son in the Army is an ironic note. Best of is Mark Dark, the most geographically distant of the cast, a blogger of conspiracy theories and rumors of war, chasing the threads behind the action from fake web stories to crank letters. Minor characters include the spies that chase them, hilarious portrayals of determined, but quixotic, socialist antiwar agitators doomed to irrelevancy, and tantalizingly- Bob (oh hello, Laundry series) and Anne-Marie, consultants for a government contractor tasked with concocting wide tales and ghostwritten blogs to confound online truthseekers.
All of this is shown, not told, in a very breezy pace. The characters do come to life, to some extent, but we always only see them in action, even when being reflective; we never see them congeal as fully living, breathing persons. And that is one of the secret strengths of the book; what it is a depiction of a crucial time in a very twisted, broken world, that darkly resembles ours. We do not need to know the full bios of any of the cast. We only need to see how they act and react to crisis.
The scene: after 9/11 and 7/7 came the war with Iran, at last; an Anglo-American strike (possibly involving tac nukes) destroy the Iranian nuclear program- Isfahan is mentioned as a target. Then, like other futurist novels, the author casually mentions that a global flu epidemic kills a bunch of people (yet society and culture ends up vaguely similar to our own, when one would think a modern day plague would have much greater repercussions such as causing people to avoid big crowded public places like... well, the plague). And now it's 201x and a Democratic female president is in power in America, the Coalition is in Kazakhstan, FEMA camps are hosting third world refugees displaced by climate change, Syria is in shambles and everyone uses cell phones to browse the internet (some things just don't change). The aforementioned nuke is the opening spark to our tour of this world, and the first of multiple blasts.
The tone is jaded, if not cynical- it's seen it all before, but (just but)- humanity might be able to get out of this one. There may be heroes, or at least sympathetic victims, and they may survive, and perhaps even find the truth. But being jaded is more fun than un-cynical, and this book has it in spades. The Execution Channel exists in the post "post-" world. It is post-security state; all of characters, both hunters of the intelligence agency, or renegade spies or activists on the run, act like duplicity and tradecraft is second nature. It is post-terror; the terrorists (never actually seen) commit wanton atrocities without so much as a manifesto announcing their identity afterwards. It is post-Other; the nativist mobs, frothing with self-righteous fury, commit wanton acts of hate on routine scapegoats, and the book describes their violence as expected, almost commonplace. It is post-activist; The peace movement impotently does the '60s thing while continuously imploding, accusing one another of being police agents and agent provocateurs. It is post-trust; near the start of the novel, after the nuke has gone off, the CIA and MI-6 spooks immediately start speculating that it was "blue on blue" - not an attack by AQ or the Chinese or the Russians, but *of course* a false flag made as a pretext prior to an American occupation of Britain; so little earnestness remains, even the cousins are not above suspicion.
But all of them, both the characters, and the factions they represent, seem to do it with a practiced, almost ritual, execution. Everyone acts that the worst case is something they had been expecting. To them, they truly live in a world of terror. A world where the threat of terrorism in the first world and heavy-handed reprisal is a fact of life. Must has been made of its tagline "The War on Terror is Over. Terror Won." and at the end, it does make sense. It is a post-terror world, one that has seen trauma after trauma, and bleakly continues with the motions. And unintentionally, this holds a mirror to out reality. Our world, blessedly, has not seen the level of terrorist activity or global warfare alluded to in The Execution Channel, but it is no less darkly reminiscent. A world where government intelligence agencies leverage our appetite for exposure to wiretap our tweets and seize our profiles. Where the mission in Afghanistan slogs on towards an inevitable end in 2014, not in victory, but in apathy. Where, as it turns out, (as in the book), a Democrat can play the game of drones just as well as a Republican.
So what is this doing in the sci-fi section, you ask? Aside from the author being a genre writer, and the ending's space cadet status, the novel does hint at certain- cosmic events. An entire section is named "The Planck Anomalies"- discovered from Pioneer on Plutonian shores, a series of radiation readings that seem to hint that everything we know about cosmology is wrong. The two leading answers to the Anomalies, we are told, is that either the universe is an elaborate illusive simulation created by posthuman intelligences... or everything to the edge of the Kuiper Belt in space is the real, but outside of that is created by aforementioned AI gods. Like so many other tantalizing plot threads, this is mentioned once and barely revisited.
Which of course, is one of the key weaknesses of this story. Characters come in and out of the action, some disappearing until the end of the book, and lack even any semblance of characterization at all. Most disappointing is Bob and Anne-Marie; I really enjoyed reading the digital astroturfing they're paid to do. But just as disappointing is the titular Execution Channel itself; a morbid sign of the world they live in, the LiveLeaks on the boob tube brings morbid faces of death every hour, and the first few chapters end with lists of its victims, grimly announcing the state of the world as spies are killed in Syria or corrupt officials are executed in China. But ultimately that's all it is, a way to provide flavor and set the tone, but does not become an important part of the plot at all, bar one scene. Its existence is quickly explained away at the end of one chapter, in what must be one of the more satirical moments.
Speaking of which, another sci-fi element is that Mark Dark explains in a "As you know, Bob" blog post that the history of their world is one in which Gore had won the 2000 election, not Bush. He goes on to reiterate a very different 9/11, with targets in Boston and Philly, committed in revenge for the Dem President's decapitation strike on Osama Bin Laden. Regardless, their world ends up with results quite similar to ours, and worse. Ken MacLeod explains in an interview himself that the reason was to show that imperialist actions and the rise of a security state could happen regardless of which party is in power. Given recent spy scandals, this observation seems quite poignant. (Though why Gore would invade Iraq as well, I don't know; maybe he could have jumped to the strike on Iran and have that be analogous to taking out Saddam and the aftermath of nation-building)
On a lighter note, the other aspects of the world he's weaved is convincing. Pluto is still named a planet and Kim Jong-il is still puttering about, which nicely dates this novel to the late Bush era. The cohesiveness of the antiwar movement as well, operating in ways familiar to MacLeod's '60s and '70s roots, seems overly optimistic in retrospect, as well. No Hope nor Change, no 2008 economic recession, no Wikileaks, no Fukushima, no Arab Spring, no Snowden - our world, with its holographic Tupac at Coachella, reads like a futurist novel at times as well, though a much tamer one. MacLeod fully captures the power of blogs (remember pajamas media? So mid-00's!), but misses the boat on social media. His characters don't capture video for uploading, though it's probably to be expected given how they're all engaged in the espionage game and would avoid such trivial vulnerabilities.
Finally, I must touch upon the controversial ending that comes completely out of left field, which I was spoiled upon prior to reading it and will not spoil here to the errant reader. Suffice to say not only does it bring about the sci-fi elements hinted at earlier into the forefront, it is a useful reminder of the author's past as a Trotskyist activist- it whimsically gives the communist powers a bit of credit, in stark contrast at all of the skullduggery that the capitalist hegemons had been indulging in for the rest of the book. My main complaint isn't even the literal setting-breaking craziness that ensues- I'm still wrapping my head around it- but how the characters seem to break apart at that section, either. Antagonist figures go full villainous. Protagonist characters lose their agency, at the face of action off-screen, then neatly wrapped up in a coda that's basically a "where are they now?" summary.
Theory: the book is a clever satire of Singularity stories. That starry-eyed genre whereupon we invent a rapidly self-learning AI and suddenly mind uploading and clinical immortality and post-scarcity nanobots are suddenly a thing. Well, that's the cruft of the genre, but at its core Singularity is about the next great technological change that shifts all of our paradigms and suddenly we're living in the true post-post world. And, well, the ending might as well be the Singularity, even if there are no superintelligent computers involved. It is, at least, an abrupt end of a stage of history, and embarking of a brave new universe.
Points, also to Mr. MacLeod for introducing me to the word "parapolitics", and by proxy the fringe journal Lobster devoted to the subject. And to Heim Theory, another crackpot field so elaborate I'm surprised that internet Tesla-worshiping free energy believers haven't jumped upon yet.
In a nutshell, why I like it: This is basically Children of Men in book form. With conspiracy theory blogs. And allusions to the Matrix theory. Oh, Spy vs. Spy action.
March 13, 2019
This was a re-read but it turned out I had very little memory of the original read. I wanted to fill in the gaps in my Ken MacLeod reading and this was the last of that. This was all over the shop so I understand why it never stuck in my head. The spy sub-plot was too obtuse, some of the character's motivations poorly mapped and it just ends with no real resolution. There are parts that stand out and the title concept, The Execution Channel, is genius but the story itself is average. Hence my three stars.
May 12, 2017
A good read but slightly disappointed. Fall revolution series hooked me completely but Execution Channel failed to deliver in the end. Don't get me wrong it is frighteningly disturbing now nearly 10 years after its first release. especially given Trump and Brexit.
March 11, 2019
So one is forced to wonder in the current climate, is this what post Brexit Britain will look like
Typically dark McCleod. He is the flip side to the light socialist utopia his friend Banks wrote about. Thought provoking
Typically dark McCleod. He is the flip side to the light socialist utopia his friend Banks wrote about. Thought provoking
February 22, 2018
one of the worst books I've read in a long time
July 31, 2018
An undervalued author. Really rather good. Give him a try why don't you?
February 1, 2019
... what.
February 7, 2020
En paranoid technothriller med overraskelser hele vejen ned. Og en skarp kurve fra nærrealisme til "hvad fanden skete der lige der?" Værd at læse.
May 27, 2021
TOM CLANCY IF TOM CLANCY WASN’T A FASCIST!
November 21, 2023
DNF I couldn't finish this book, heck I didn't even get 1/4 of the way through, like nails on a chalkboard.
December 24, 2023
Meh. Is there anything more tedious than an elderly Trot? I gave up 3/4 of the way through & speed-read the rest.
July 27, 2025
Every bit the Ken McLeod novel and none the worse for that. Weaves a satisfying narrative around familiar themes.
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