EXECUTION CHANNEL
by Ken MacLeod · first published 2007
6mentions
3recommended by
5HN commenters
2013–2020first – last mentioned
60% recommend40% neutral
"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,
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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…
on “CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup” ↗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.
on “List of spacecraft in the Culture series” ↗…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.
on “Asimov’s Empire, Asimov’s Wall” ↗There is a deeply unpleasant variation on this in Ken MacLeod's The Execution Channel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Execution_Channel
on “Not in front of the telly: Warning over 'listening' TV” ↗…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…
on “William Gibson on the apocalypse: “it’s been happening for at least 100 years”” ↗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…
on “William Gibson says today’s internet is nothing like what he envisioned” ↗