I was really impressed with 'Intrusion'. The near-future setting was excellently drawn and extremely thought-provoking. On the one hand, I found the casual loss of civil liberties and oppressive state protectiveness towards women and children convincing. On the other hand, I had the horrible feeling that this was the best case scenario; it felt like a legacy of Blair and Brown, not of the Coalition's assault on the NHS. (Indeed the government in confirmed to be Labour-led.) Although 'Intrusion' reads like a dystopian narrative, it also evokes a stable UK with a social safety net and free healthcare. A worse scenario would retain the unrelenting government surveillance and perpetual war on terrorism, whilst public services are shredded by 'free' markets. Moreover, the world of 'Intrusion' has clearly got to grips with climate change, largely using GM organisms and carpeting the Sahara desert with solar panels. On these bases, it looks bad but a lot better than the future that the UK is actually heading for.

So this novel made me confront my own ambivalence; is the total sacrifice of civil liberties inevitable in order to address climate change? Have we left it so late to reduce emissions that the only remotely effective policies would have to be enforced by an oppressive state? Moreover, would you prefer to have your privacy invaded and liberty curtailed on the basis of state welfarism or market forces? And that old favourite: to what extent does material comfort compensate for loss of privacy and freedom? To what extent do we even notice the loss of something as ill-defined as freedom? The 21st century UK of CCTV and PRISM et al has shambled carelessly into a 1984-style surveillance society, but is it worth worrying about?

The wonderful thing about 'Intrusion' is that it has no easy answers whatsoever. At various points, characters discuss their angles on civil liberty, based on theory (nice name-checking of Foucault, for example) and experience (of police profiling especially), but never come to firm conclusions. This of course rings much truer than such discussions leading to absolute agreement on a clear answer - who has ever had that experience? I also found the feeling of individual helplessness in the face of monolithic institutions and their procedures viscerally convincing. 'Intrusion' reminded me the extent to which technology exacerbates this helplessness. A government algorithm finds some pattern in your movements and net use, automatically tagging you as suspect. How does one argue with that? Is it better or worse than human civil servants arbitrarily suspecting groups of people, for their behaviour or some other characteristic, such as ethnicity? Naturally, algorithms are ultimately written and controlled by humans, so have no inherent independence, let alone objectivity. Perhaps, though, they foster the development of that dangerous mindset of deferring individual judgement, "I was just doing my job", which has led to so many atrocities in the past.

Wow, I'm three paragraphs in without making any reference to what 'Intrusion' is actually about. Briefly, a family in near future London are expecting a second child. The mother, named Hope, doesn't wish to take 'the fix', a GM medicine that corrects various potential genetic defects in a foetus. She cannot articulate why she refuses this even to herself, incurring a mixture of suspicion, anger, and bafflement. The small act, of refusing to take a pill that isn't even technically compulsory, triggers a fascinating escalation of events. Whilst I was very invested in the fate of Hope and her family, the wider implications and bigger questions raised by the story made it exceptional. For instance, issues around the future of feminism, the intersection of women's rights and children's rights, and bodily autonomy.

There are many other issues I could mention (the role of science in politics! the nature of criticism!). Rather than rambling further, though, I'll conclude by noting that it is a timely, subtle, well-written, and intelligent novel. I highly recommend it, especially if you feel stifled by the slew of ephemeral news headlines and want to contemplate the implications of trends in 21st century society in more depth.

(Unrelated footnote: I would have lost this entire review by inadvertent clicking, were it not for the Lazarus extension for chrome. SO glad I installed that.) ( )

I have a hard time rating this book. I found the narrative generally slow and a bit boring. It didn't keep my interest for more than a page or two at a time.

That said, the ideas that the book deals with are well illustrated and engaging. I don't know if the slow, often boring plot was a necessary side effect of the in-depth analysis and rich world building that help paint a very scary, and extremely plausible view of the future. The dystopian utopia that the characters live in and how it is contrasted with the other side of their "Warm War" shows a lot of things that are on the way to very wrong in our society.

This is, of course, the goal of great sci-fi: paint a picture of a world gone wrong to throw our current world in stark relief and highlight the things that are wrong or going wrong today.

Intrusion does that very well. It's just not that engaging to read (until the last 50 pages).

If you have the time, read it for the ideas, themes and analysis, but don't expect much from the plot. ( )

This novel follows a couple who are expecting their second child through a dystopian, "day after tomorrow" Britain where genetic engineering is commonplace, but an intrusive state takes it upon itself to draw the worst conclusions from legitimate dissent. There is a type of person - at least, here in the UK - who moans about "the nanny state" and its interventions, real or imagined, in people's everyday lives. But these are also the sort of people who, following any instance of child abuse or neglect, will loudly moan "Why didn't the authorities DO anything???" The world of "Intrusion" shows the logical end point where the state takes the Precautionary Principle to its logical ends.

In a departure from previous books, MacLeod focusses in on the domestic life of Hope and Hugh, and their son Nick. This focus on the personal is something different for MacLeod, but it is the only way this story could have been told. Hope is expecting their second child, and comes under pressure to take "the fix": a one-time bioengineered pill that will fix any genetic defect in her unborn child, But she resents not being able to take that decision for herself. Exemptions for those with faith-based objections exist; but none for "mere" conscience. Parents of "Natural Kids" can complain about the possibility of an unfixed child mixing with their unfixed children, but no-one can complain about their faith-based exemptions posing the same risk, because their faith provides a cast-iron defence again criticism. Presumably, their faith provides an adequate shield for their own kids, whilst the idea that their kids might pose a threat to other Natural Kids from atheistic parents is unthinkable, because that would be religious discrimination.

Through a series of chance encounters, Hope becomes a focus for a range of dissidents. Her attempts to invoke the law amount to nothing; the political process equally offers her no relief. Matters are complicated when her husband and son are shown to possibly have a rare genetic trait connected to the range and depth of their perception, which the fix would remove from their unborn child.

All this is played out against a society where mothers are "protected" against health risks, such as passive smoking, alcohol or caffeine consumption by a state which is prepared to sanction interventions against the slightest infringements. This becomes positively Orwellian when these concerns interact with the ongoing war on terrorism; a shadowy group known as Naxal, emerging from South Asia, appears to be opposed to the very concept of "civilization", and the state is accordingly exercised to root out not only support for Naxal, but any suggestion or questioning that the state itself may be wrong in its attitude towards dissent.

The result is a dystopia that is all too recognisable. MacLeod may have departed from his usual subject and focussed intimately on one family, but his themes and political questioning are what we have come to expect. And ten chapters in, we find that this dystopia is presided over by a Labour government that has wholly embraced the trappings of a traditional socialist party, but underneath it all has a completely statist attitude to power. "Left" and "Right" are by now merely road signs.

The climax of the novel sees Hugh, the husband, fleeing London with the family for the shelter of his ancestral home, the Scottish Isle of Lewis. Here we see just how his genetic inheritance plays out and how it fares when confronted by the secret state and its organs of repression. How this conflict is resolved has some surprises.

I burnt through this novel in a few days; its world is so familiar, so close to our own but only separated from it by a half turn, that I was anxious to see what happened next. It isn't an easy book in terms of its message - too much security can be a bad thing, and MacLeod accurately captures the unthinking hypocrisy of the public and the absurd yet inevitable results that the law can lead inevitably to. Not a comforting read, but probably MacLeod's most important novel to date. ( )

Disturbing look at how the nanny state could take over all aspects of life in the future.

Concerns a mother who is having second thoughts about taking 'the fix' which is a genetic cure all pill for an unborn child. Set a few years hence, Macleod covers the possibilities of surveillance in the home, monitoring of individuals and so on.

Slightly scary as I think we are part of the way there with the successive governments that we have had. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2018/10/review-of-intrusion-by-ken-macleod.html ( )