Ken MacLeod's latest novel is another near-future story, set in Scotland midway through the 21st century—a bit further away than The Execution Channel, but close enough so that its technological aspects are extrapolations from current developments. The one big technological innovation in the story is the emergence of human-equivalent artificial intelligence and self-aware robots. The technological focus is elsewhere: on the impact of advances in computers and other technologies on forensics. The Night Sessions is a police procedural, starting with the bombing of a flat occupied by a Roman Catholic priest.

This particular crime is significant because of the big change in MacLeod's future society: a radical separation between religion and politics. The previous history of his future includes disastrous wars in the Near East, which left Jerusalem a radioactive ruin; depending on who's talking about them, these are called either the Faith Wars or the Oil Wars. In their aftermath, the United Kingdom and the United States both turned against religiously motivated politics. In the United Kingdom, at least, the turn was initially brutally repressive; now things have settled down to an official policy of “non-cognizance”—more or less a religious “don't ask, don't tell”—but the main viewpoint character, Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson, has memories of taking harsh measures against churches earlier in his career. MacLeod envisions a profoundly secularized society, and explores how it might work.

But, in a well-told mystery, there's always a story behind the story: the plot of the investigation is the uncovering of the plot of the criminal. Religious concerns are much more important to the hidden plot that Ferguson uncovers. And MacLeod has been ingenious in coming up with an unexpected, but logical, religious issue, one that leads to a dramatic conclusion, and that ties together all the elements of his future setting.

I find myself ambivalent about MacLeod's political speculations. On one hand, I'm well aware of how often religion has been used as an excuse for authoritarianism, and how much harm this has led to; like MacLeod, I find the motives of American fundamentalists disturbingly similar to those of Islamic radicals. Having a radically secularized society, where religion is a purely private matter, strikes me as desirable. The path MacLeod imagines for getting there, on the other hand, is disturbingly authoritarian in its own right. Not that I take MacLeod to be advocating this; rather, he's envisioning how it might happen—in the ugly, bloody way so much of history happens. But it makes his imagined future hard to desire, however appealing it is to envision life in a world where religion has been stripped of any power to compel. Nonetheless, this is an interesting and thought-provoking book.

The Night Sessions also is not an easy one to get hold of, at least for Americans. MacLeod's usual American publisher, Tor, has not yet announced plans to release it. I got my copy, at some extra expense, from Forbidden Planet London, who will take American credit cards and ship internationally. I hope that Tor will make it possible for other LFS members to read an American edition of this book. But thanks to global commerce and the Internet, the impatient have other options.