The Night Sessions: A Novel [Hardcover]

Ken MacLeod (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Orbit; First Edition edition (August 7, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1841496510
• ISBN-13: 978-1841496511
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 9.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #944,554 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ken MacLeod's SF novels have won the Prometheus Award and the BSFA award, and been shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He lives near Edinburgh, Scotland.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Strong characterisation, plot and an understated question about consciousness, February 12, 2010

By 

Nigel Kirk (Canberra, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Night Sessions: A Novel (Hardcover)

I loved the Asimov robot novels, which in so many ways were germane to our thinking on robots. Then for a while some robot stories became a little familiar, even predictable. Not any more, this novel asks challenging questions about consciousness, even `specism'.

The crime whodunit plot unfolds in a style a little like Peter Hamilton's Greg Mandel series and reminds me of how differently some Brits (and Scots) write crime. The novel has strong characterisation, plot and exploits its Edinburgh setting well. I'll be reading more of MacLeod.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Robots with a human face in a post-terror world, October 28, 2011

By 

Ivo Dell'ambrogio - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Night Sessions: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is a quite enjoyable detective novel. With robots. Here is the setting: the Faith Wars that had started with 9/11 have ended in a partial nuclear Holocaust, and the world has now turned its back on religion. For a still traumatized humanity, it's a time of environmental and societal mending as well as renewed progress and space exploration, where robots - who had accidentally awakened to consciousness on the battlefield - uneasily mingle with people. When a bomb attack kills a priest in Scotland and apocalyptic fundamentalist leaflets are found in a church, the specter of terrorism is back...

Although The Night Sessions is ostensibly a whodunnit (and a gripping one at that), the background social commentary and political speculation are quite interesting and make up most of the fun. But the best part is probably the brilliantly depicted interaction between the human and robotic characters, which sometimes I found quite touching. They are all just people, you know.

Highly recommended.