Ken MacLeod's comments.
The title comes from two quotes:
“Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation.”—Alasdair Gray.
“If these are the early days of a better nation, there must be hope, and a hope of peace is as good as any, and far better than a hollow hoarding greed or the dry lies of an aweless god.”—Graydon Saunders
An exclusive chapter excerpt from my forthcoming novel The Night Sessions is up at FantasyBookSpot.com.
Free PDF copies of the fine forthcoming anthology Seeds of Change (in which I have a very short story, 'A Dance Called Armageddon') are available to reviewers and bloggers here.
18 Comments:
This looks interesting and I'll be picking it up. I just hope it turns out better than another work that referenced the Banco Ambrosiano collapse. (OTOH, if you were a director, how bad a film would you be willing to have your name on if you also were the auteur of 1 & 2? For me, at least "Krull" level badness.)
Near-future Edinburgh-set policier with plenty of VR spectacles and shadowy police/security/political types? Prepare yourself for lots of comparisons with Halting State. Looks good, though.
ajay - yeah, I'm prepared for that. But it's a very different novel and different take on the near-ish future than Halting State. Still, if near-future Scottish police procedurals are the Next Big Thing ...
I love novels set in my old stomping ground of Edinburgh. Probably the main reason I read Ian Rankin. I remember one set in the early 1990s which featured a suspect who was a member of the pinball-playing clique at the university's Teviot Row union. Freaked me out a bit because I was a member of that particular pinball-playing clique at the time. I've felt Rebus shadowing me on other occasions too. I also liked Stephen Baxter's gleeful destruction of Edinburgh in Moonseed, especially when Kings Buildings was swallowed up by the earth. No, I didn't particulary enjoy my time studying there.
Gordon, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that The Night Sessions doesn't feature the destruction of Edinburgh. But it does show a future Edinburgh messed about with in (I hope) interesting ways.
And if there's grave-desecrating neo-Gnostic goth clique at Edinburgh University, I haven't been stalking it, honest ...
Absolutely. I'm all in favour of a Wave of Near-Future Scottish Police Procedurals sweeping the nation (starting, presumably, somewhere other than Thanet). We should try to get more authors on board. Like Irvine Welsh. (Maglevspotting
Well Welsh has just released a crime novel but unfortunately it's set in Florida. I'm sure his take on near-future Scotland would be an interesting one though - a subaltern approach looking at people below the digital divide maybe as opposed to the technocratic take on society we usually see in sci-fi. I'm sure it wouldn't be a procedural though; more like a fuck procedural.
I enjoyed The Execution Channel and I'll definitely be buying The Night Sessions. One thing, though ... I realise this probably comes under the heading of terminally geeky trivia, but I kept wondering while I read the excerpt: what's the derivation of the word "leki"?
I have read the book but don't remember the reference - leki could refer to electricity supply as in "have you paid the leki?". You have to be Scottish really...
No offence meant Ken but the first sentence of The Night Sessions is confusing me. As a one time resident of Easter Road and Leith Walk I'm fairly sure they don't actually intersect! Traffic being backed up to London Road or Duke Street would make more sense.
Coming to see you at the Book Festival, I take it the book will be out in time for that?
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This looks interesting and I'll be picking it up. I just hope it turns out better than another work that referenced the Banco Ambrosiano collapse. (OTOH, if you were a director, how bad a film would you be willing to have your name on if you also were the auteur of 1 & 2? For me, at least "Krull" level badness.)
By Jonathan, at Thursday, June 26, 2008 10:00:00 am