This book is dedicated to Ken MacLeod's friend, the late Iain M. Banks; and it reads very much like an Iain (no "M") Banks novel, in that it focusses on individual lives against a backdrop of political turbulence. The turbulence is a level of political, industrial and economic unrest similar to that of the 1970s, but in a near-future independent Scotland. The surveillance state is a given; so much so, camera drones are accepted as a part of the environment, as are picket lines, barricades and revolutionaries handing out flyers. Only slowly are the details of the world filled in, and then not always in detail; it takes a while to realise that when characters say something like "since the war", they are referring, not to the Second World War but to a war that hasn't happened yet (though as I write this during the sixth week of the Russia/Ukraine conflict of 2022, I am keeping my fingers crossed).

We follow Ryan, from his schoolboy days in Greenock, through his adolescence and young adulthood. We see the world through his eyes; and as if the world wasn't turbulent enough, he has an interest in secret projects, UFOs, Men in Black and the whole paraphernalia of the secret state as Ryan supposes it to be (that is, rather more exciting and exotic than it probably is in reality, either in our world or his). He and his mate Callum have arrived at, and maintain, a sense of aloof scepticism about the whole thing, right up until the day that they have an encounter with something inexplicable in the sky and lose a few hours of their lives. This affects each youth differently: Callum seems to shake it off, and yet develops an air of something secret that he is keeping to himself; whilst Ryan begins to experience altered states of mind and strange dreams. Whilst in that state, he receives a visit that does little to allay his fears or paranoia.

How this event directs their lives is the theme of the novel. Its repercussions, real and imagined, echo down through the following years. Eventually, matters come to a head over a Scottish space project that almost goes appallingly wrong. In the aftermath, Ryan takes some decisions, has some close encounters with himself and others, and eventually faces up to his fears, which have morphed into something bordering on an obsession.

I said that this novel reads very much like an Iain Banks "mainstream" novel, a bit like The Crow Road or The Business. But none of Banks' mainstream novels were so overtly science fictional as this (Transitions doesn't count, as that was only a no-"M" novel in the UK). There are throwaway lines and ideas in this book that sound very much like something that Banks and MacLeod came up with in the pub; and Glasgow and Edinburgh are quite well drawn in ways that will chime with anyone familiar with either city (though neither becomes a character in the way that Ian Rankin - another drinking buddy of the two authors - writes Edinburgh in his Rebus novels). Descent is written in the first person, not something MacLeod has done often, but something Banks did more frequently. I wasn't sure that I would take to the style to begin with, but once inexplicable things started happening I soon warmed to it.

Ultimately, this is a "coming of age" novel, disguised as a story of conspiracies; and there is one conspiracy hidden in plain view that is all the more frightening because no-one is talking about it. The UFO stuff is rational; contrary to what some may think, science fiction readers and writers rarely touch upon UFOs, mainly because most UFO theories come over as really BAD science fiction, though I was open to the description of the Defence Technology Hypothesis for UFO sightings, that they are cover stories for sightings of advanced (and secret) US technology. As I had recently been reading an account of "black" US Air Force projects from the 1950s and the late 1990s, that struck a chord with me, though I resolutely refuse to vanish down that particular rabbit hole!

So another thought-provoking novel from Ken MacLeod. The protagonist is rather too wrapped up in himself to be likeable, but he turns out OK in the end (pretty much); indeed, at the end of the book he makes an alliance of convenience with someone who he has kept encountering under dubious circumstances throughout the story. MacLeod's political analysis is, as ever, insightful, though he retains his ability to write from the point of view of someone with divergent political views to his own. Approach this book with an open mind, and you will find yourself on an interesting journey that may not take you to anywhere you would expect. ( )

This 2014 novel is the most recent Ken MacLeod book I've read, and it has some near-future optimism that has become dismayingly dated in the last seven years of climate catastrophe and global pandemic. But it's not set in any particular year, and I guess the sort of sanguine pivot away from Neoliberal hell that it depicts is still imaginable.

The story is set firmly in MacLeod's own Scotland throughout, and its central plotline involves a sort of phildickian epistemological struggle with ufology. It is recounted by the protagonist Ryan Sinclair, who begins (after telling of a recurrent dream) with his teenage close encounter. The book also involves a troubled love triangle of the sort that MacLeod has treated before in The Stone Canal, although this one is squared off more neatly.

The Orbit first edition hardcover I read made it seem like a much bigger book than it actually is, with heavy page stock and a generously-sized typeface. It's a fast read, and entertaining throughout.

Set in a near future Scotland, Ryan is a schoolboy who has a thing for conspiracy theories, secret jets, weather balloons and so on. But one day when a silver object drops out of the sky knocking him and his friend out for a couple of hours, he really isn't sure just what he has seen. On returning a couple of days later, the are has been sealed off and it is being cleared. He is having weird abduction dreams and a visit from a Reverend who seems to have no record on the internet, he starts to think he is deep with in a conspiracy himself now.

Fast forward a few years and Ryan is now working as a hack journalist; he has met Gabrielle and they are living together, when he catches up with Callum his friend at the UFO incident, and a girl called Sophie, a girl from school and university. Shortly after the guy he met after the event appears again, this time he is not a priest, but a politician. His personal life becomes every more complicated, and the paranoia starts to rise again and he thinks that he may never get to the bottom of this.

The book is dedicate to Iain Banks, and it feels like and has been written as a tribute to the fiction that Banks used to write, but with some of the magic that MacLeod is capable of. There are complex and dysfunctional characters, it is a brilliant dystopian world, with pervasive surveillance using tiny insect sized drones. The world is in some sort of turmoil too, with revolutionary groups and change in the air.

Whilst it feels like a Banks book, and there is plenty of complexity to the plot, it sadly doesn't have a similar dramatic ending that a Banks book has. Still worth a read though.



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We mooched on, agreeing that the country was in a terrible state and that something should be done about it. In the light of what was to be done, and so soon, you might imagine us quivering with radical zeal. You would be wrong. Sixteen years old, smack in the middle of the pissed-off mid -to-late teens demographic, our generational rebelliousness consisted of a yearning for order. We'd had years of what seemed like it's endless, pointless opposite.

There is a scientific discovvery underlying some of the events of the book that is an open secret among scientists but unknown to the public, and its ramifications could have been the focus of a really interesting plot. Unfortunately it is lost in an uninteresting tale of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy spies on girl using drone technology, which fizzles out rather than ending satisfactorily. ( )

A strong return to form from Ken MacLeod. Ryan and Callum are teenagers when an 'incident', which might involve UFOs, but then again might not, affects them out of a clear blue sky.

MacLeod has not finished with his focus of the surveilance state, and the machinations of governments and corporations against the better interests of citizens, but 'Descent' has an altogether more optimistic tone than either 'Intrusion' or 'The Restoration Game'. One of the best for the year.

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