The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod

This is a really difficult book to categorize. It's not exactly science fiction, more of a political thriller than anything, but it has an SF "wrapper". In the beginning of the book, a member of a future civilization, playing a highly advanced MMORPG, discovers that a group of Synthetic Psyches (AIs) have created a vast simulation, which turns out to be a Matrix-like reality that we are currently living. She also appears at the tail end of the book, to explain what's going on to the protagonist, hence the SF wrapper.

The heroine of the story is Lucy Stone, a Western girl who was raised in the tiny area of Krassnia, part of the former USSR. The area was once ruled by the Vrai, a race of warriors who claimed to be descended from the Romans, and who folklore says guarded a secret kept atop or inside a mountain, which each young adult Vrai had to experience in order to come into their full powers over the peasants in the area.

Lucy is now living and working in Scotland (MacLeod's homeland) as an admin for a game design firm who have developed an MMORPG with some novel features. First, it employs a novel game engine which allows it to run on any platform, even outdated systems with limited resources. It adjusts its graphics and physics engines on the fly, so to speak, and can display in any mode from 3D down to wireframe, without slowing gameplay. Next, players begin as members of a horde of orc-like creatures with primitive weapons, assaulting the stronghold of elf-like rulers of the land. If and when they win their way to the top of the mountain, they become rulers themselves, and turn about to find themselves facing a new horde of orc-like creatures, composed of all of the players who have newly joined the game.

One passage I found amusing:

"I found another hobby: role-playing games. In those days we played them around a table with rule-books and score-sheets made from paper. (You don't believe me? - Check Wikipedia.)"

It turns out that Lucy's mom has been involved with the CIA (and perhaps some other shadowy agencies) and used to pass information to them about the Krassnian region when they lived there. Her employers come up with a plot to use a game based on the Krassnian folklore as a clandestine forum where democratic dissidents can meet and plan their revolution against the Soviets. Lucy and the guys at her game company are recruited to adapt their new game to this template, which turns out to be not too much of a stretch, as Lucy has been central in developing its storyline and has subconsciously included most of the plot elements remembered from her childhood.

This novel has more twists and turns than a nest of pythons, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

The only other book I can recall reading by McLeod was Cosmonaut Keep, which sticks in my memory by not really sticking in my memory. However, I saw this book at the library while pickings were slim and thought the blurb, at least, sounded interesting. This book reminds me a great deal of some of Charles Stross' near-future fiction; dark, highly technologically driven, dystopic in places.

The setting, for the most part, is Scottland, with some of the action also taking place in New Zealand. Sometime in the last decade, the forces of Christian fundamentalism precipitated a conflict with radical Islam, resulting in a battle on the plains of Megiddo (Armageddon of Revelation fame), which devastated both sides. The backlash from the secular public and governments worldwide decimated and discredited Christendom, leaving it no place in public life. Those few churches that remain for the most part worship in secret, and have no official recognition by the state.

Many of the remaining robot warriors who fought in the Faith Wars have now been decommission, their self-aware brains being transplanted into the bodies of maintenance robots working on the two space elevators (shades of Arthur C. Clarke), or into lekis, Law Enforcement Kinetic Intelligences. One of these lekis, named Skulk, is partnered with Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson, the man assigned to investigate the murder by bombing of a Catholic priest. It appears that a militant sect of christianity is on the rise again, warring against the apostasy of Catholicism and godless secularism.

A fun passage, I thought:

"...a Laplacean Deity is one that knows the position and speed of every particle in the universe. A Cartesian Demon is an entity that feeds consistent false information to all the senses. Now, the same entity can't be a Laplacean Deity and a Cartesian Demon at the same time."

Ya kinda gotta know a touch of math to get that.

This is a very disturbing novel on some levels, in that it shows a possible future in which christianity has forsaken its role as humanity's moral compass. The "christians" in this book really seem to have nothing that identifies themselves as different, or Christlike, from the rest of society, but are merely identified by their narrow-mindedness and thoroughly discredited conservative beliefs about reality.