EXECUTION CHANNEL
"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. It's the day when the world changes all the way down to its fundamental assumptions." "In a world just down the road from our own, online bloggers vie with old-line political operatives and new-style police to determine just where reality lies. And on every cable system, the mysterious Execution Channel broadcasts deaths from around the world, around the clock." "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." "For in this near future - our near future - day-to-day life becomes much like real intelligence work today: a world in which everything has meaning, and nothing has meaning, and the meanings change as lies build on lies, until someone who intends to lie is finally telling the truth."--BOOK JACKET.
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What Hacker News says
- > SF is rarely character-led and it may be optimistic to expect depth or nuance from it
I don't agree with this assessment at all.
The best SF I've read has believable characters with real motivations.
Off the top of my head:
* Paul McAuley's Quiet War series
* Ken McLeod's Fall Revolution series, "The Execution Channel"
* Bester's "The Stars My Destination" - a recent read, and the character arc is cribbed from The Count of Monte Cristo, but the SF parafernalia is a backdrop for the character.
- I prefer Macleod's near-future stuff to his space opera: e.g. The Execution Channel, The Night Sessions, The Restoration Game, Intrusion.
Given he's an avowed socialist, the political battering he deals out to left-wingers in his work is interesting.
- Apposite reading right now: "The Execution Channel" by Ken Macleod. Yes, it's a work of science fiction -- by someone with a background in fringe political groups who were being actively infiltrated/used for disinformation during the cold war, and who's been thinking about just how far things could go wrt. the internet.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Execution-Channel-ebook/dp/B00CBFX...
- Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel is a sci-fi political spy thriller taking place in a very intensified war on terror, with a backstory that Gore was elected president. The alternate history backstory was intended by MacLeod to show that the paranoid milieu and the security state could take place under any president. The difference is that he didn't have an in-universe explanation for the divergence, the sci-fi in the story didn't deal with it.
- > Agency focuses on an alternate present in which Britain did not vote to leave the EU and the US did not elect Donald Trump as its 45th president. But this is no Remainer fantasy: an unspecified conflict in the Syrian city of Qamishli has brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Reminds me of Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel, which goes out of its way to mention that Gore was elected president- and an alternate 9/11 that hits Boston and Philadelphia leads to the War on Terror anyway. Though written in 2006 or so, it felt particularly prescient a peace later despite being pre-smartphones and social media- it capture an increasingly paranoid world choked full of state-sponsored internet disinfo, influential conspiracy theory bloggers, climate change refugees. Despite the weird ending and not the best plot, the world-building and general tone manages to have resonance nearly fifteen years later.
- There is a deeply unpleasant variation on this in Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel:
