The Execution Channel

by Ken MacLeod

Overview

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.

James Travis is a British patriot and a French spy. On the day the Big One hits, Travis and his daughter must strive to make sense of the nuclear bombing of Scotland and the political repercussions of a series of terrorist attacks. With the information war in full swing, the only truth they have is what they're able to see with their own eyes. They know that everything else is—or may be—a lie.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765320674
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/10/2008
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ken MacLeod is the multiple award-winning author of many science fiction novels, including the Fall Revolution quartet, the Engines of Light trilogy (Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light, and Engine City), and several stand-alone novels including Newton’s Wake, Learning the World, and The Restoration Game. Born on the Scottish isle of Skye, he lives in Edinburgh.

Editorial Reviews

In the near future, the war against terror is far from over, and nobody's sure who's fighting whom. The near-future setting of MacLeod's latest (Learning the World, 2005, etc.) is grimly familiar: a constant drip of foreign terror atrocities mixed with the occasional shock of an attack on the West, with the permanent drumbeat of war in the background. Not long after antiwar activist Roisin Travis films a cargo plane at a U.S. airbase in Scotland unloading a strange-looking device, the entire base is annihilated in what looks to be a nuclear blast. As follow-up attacks flare up, the inconvenient witness Roisin (along with her father, who is spying for the French) makes a run for it from the "interrogation"-happy security services. Meanwhile, government agents wage a protracted campaign of online disinformation about the attacks, trying to obscure the actual reasons behind them-not that they know what those are. All the while, the titular Execution Channel is available 24 hours per day, showing everything from a captured GI being butchered in Waziristan to the stoning of a Nigerian adulteress. MacLeod nimbly melds a tech- and culture-savvy appreciation of what the blogosphere might look like in a few short years with some old-fashioned spycraft. It's a frighteningly familiar world, where electronically-distributed information is easily distorted. In the end, reality seems just so much code. A thrilling, well-crafted spy novel.

Kirkus Reviews

"Ken MacLeod's novels are fast, funny and sophisticated. There can never be enough books like these."

—Kim Stanley Robinson

From the Publisher