Ken MacLeod // Orbit // Out Now

In a nutshell: “The war on terror is over… terror won.” A suspected nuclear attack on home soil forces an increasingly authoritarian Britain and its divided populace to choose its allegiance: Europe or America.

Review: Being described as ‘the modern-day George Orwell’ is not going to help anyone. The Execution Channel’s back-cover, however, proclaims Ken MacLeod in precisely these terms, those marketing personnel responsible for the choice of quote perhaps having been misled by his novel’s apparently dystopian overtones. A nuclear attack on an airforce base in Scotland and apparently coordinated suicide attacks on oil refineries and major infrastructure in the days that follow bring mayhem to a Britain already turning toward the promised safety of totalitarianism.

The Execution Channel of the title – a constant, reality TV-style broadcast of hangings, stonings and death by torture – features hardly at all, more an incidental bearer of bad news than a star worthy of top-billing. A surprise twist shows MacLeod’s familiar belief in a future technological utopia, but more than anything else it is intrigue and espionage that lie at the heart of this tale.

Embroiled more than most are the Travis family. Father James is an IT expert with a survivalist streak, daughter Roisin a peace campaigner, and son Alec a soldier serving in one of the many Central Asian theatres in which Britain has become mired since first joining America’s Middle Eastern venture. The backdrop of a shadowy battle between the arrogant, American-led West and the secretive, paranoid East is presumably intended to create an air of international intrigue, but an insistence on placing Scotland front and centre in all things serves instead to add a whiff of provincial television drama to proceedings.

Events unfold in all the detail a world of weblogs, 24-hour news and internet-ready phones can offer. This is a familiar future, its technology indiscernible from our own and its history built upon each and every one of today’s headlines; an episode of Newsnight ready and waiting to be broadcast precious few years from now.

But today’s headline do not always tomorrow’s history make, and even such ubiquitous horrors as Gitmo, FEMA, IEDs and Al-Jazeera will soon become obscure and ancient, lost and forgotten. Even the revelation, a hundred pages in, that this is a future already divergent from our own thanks to an apparently successful election campaign for Al Gore in 2000, and a 9/11 in which Boston, and not New York, is the target, isn’t really enough to dispel doubts that this is a book a little too present for its own good.

Grander observations on the nature of Authority, its absolute need to control and the subtle strategies by which it achieves it are largely absent. Politics are present here but they are details; job descriptions and party lines, handy demarcations and shorthand designations, detached from human nature and more acknowledged than examined.

So, Orwell this isn’t. The title of modern-day George Orwell remains Orwell’s own – that’s precisely the point, as if there was ever any doubt. This, the modern-day Ken MacLeod, is too modern, too tied to current events, too close to what’s actually happening to offer real political allegory. But that shouldn’t spoil the enjoyment for today; tomorrow it won’t matter anyway.

This review originally appeared in issue 1 of Death Ray magazine.