The Night Sessions
British Science Fiction Association Award 2009.
A bishop is dead. As Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson picks through the rubble of the tiny church, he discovers that it was deliberately bombed. That it's a terrorist act is soon beyond doubt. It's been a long time since anyone saw anything like this. Terrorism is history...
After the Middle East wars and the rising sea levels – after Armageddon and the Flood – came the Great Revulsion. The first Enlightenment separated church from state. The Second Enlightenment has separated religion from politics. In this enlightened age there's no persecution, but the millions who still believe and worship are a marginal and mistrusted minority. Now someone is killing them.
At first, suspicion falls on atheists more militant than the secular authorities. But when the target list widens to include the godless, it becomes evident that something very old has risen from the ashes. Old and very, very dangerous...
Ken MacLeod
Ken MacLeod (born 1954), an award-winning Scottish science fiction writer, lives in South Queensferry near Edinburgh. He graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in zoology and has worked as a computer programmer and written a masters thesis on biomechanics.
MacLeod's novels often explore socialist, communist and anarchist political ideas, most particularly the variants of Trotskyism and anarcho-capitalism or extreme economic libertarianism. Technical themes encompass singularities, divergent human cultural evolution and post-human cyborg-resurrection. MacLeod's general outlook can be best described as techno-utopian socialist.
He is part of a new generation of British science fiction writers, who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Iain M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Charles Stross and Liz Williams.