I keep reading and reasonably enjoying Ken MacLeod's books, and i'm not entirely sure why. This one starts out with a really intriguing social-sf question - should a woman have to take a simple pill, with no side effects, to make sure her unborn child is healthy - and degenerates into (totally unrelated to the question) silly science subplots, ideological wankery and lame thriller-lite evil-government shenanigans. That said, I still think it's a step up from his recent books - the characterizati...

Brilliant stuff! I'm love stories in which a democratic society "evolves" into a dystopian one. This is a very disturbing near future, in the tradition of 1984, but with some very interesting science-fictional twists and with some very real and plausible future technological trends. Alongside Paul McAuley's In the Mouth of the Whale, this novel is the best of 2012 so far.

Ken MacLeod presents a vision of a near-future world in which many of our freedoms are rolled back in the cause of child protection, specifically the protection of the unborn foetus. For starters, smoking and drinking are illegal in pregnancy. Employers must prove their workplaces pose zero risk to pregnant women and as a result many women (pregnant or otherwise) operate from home where the legal restrictions are looser. And then there’s ‘the fix’ – single-dose medication (produced by SynBioTech...

I'd never read or heard of McLeod before, but the back of the book sounded interesting. However, it was let down majorly by the writing style. Why do I care about the name of every street in Acton? I live locally so recognise town names such as Ealing/Hayes/Uxbridge but can't imagine how boring that is to someone unfamiliar to the area. And don't get me started on the endless Scottish landscape descriptions most of which I ended up skimming over. The two halves of the plot took too long to meet

I actually got my biro pen and started editing this book at one point, it was that awful. The female characters are flat, forced and uninspiring, and they seem mostly irrational. Half of the text could have been missed out as it was just filler, the dialogue was terrible ("Man!" Said Bernard.) - there was so much rambling going on. I read 115 pages and still nothing had happened. When something exciting finally did happen it felt really out of place and unjustified.I really like dystopian thrill...

I read this in one sick day, because I couldn't put it down. The way a society slides into total control felt sickeningly believable, and the contrast between the "free"--yet heavily regulated--world and the "other side" is something I've been discussing with people for years. I found the other SF plot of this intriguing and wish it had been allowed to go further.

I found this book deeply frustrating. Like my favourite kind of science fiction, it poses some really interesting questions about technology, society, and the interaction of the two. However, as a novel, I found it absolutely wretched. The central premise of the book is that in the near future, a pill ("the Fix") is available to pregnant women that eliminates a wide variety of genetic disorders from their unborn children. A fairly oppressive nanny-state government makes taking the Fix all but co...

MY REVIEWI requested and gratefully received this paperback from Orbit Books with the intention of reading and reviewing giving you my honest opinion.So I’ll start with the cover which did initially attract me to the book. It shows a spoon holding a rather “normal” looking somewhat inoffensive tablet. Upon reading the book you find out the tablet is called “The Fix” in simple, basic terms it is a tablet all pregnant women are encouraged and somewhat expected to take. The Fix claims to literally

This review first appeared on my blog here.Ken MacLeod is an author whose work I sometimes really like (the Star Faction books) but who at other times doesn't really connect with me (the Engines of Light trilogy). Intrusion falls into the second category.It is one of several recent novels by MacLeod which are stand-alone near future dystopias, rather like the series of similar works produced by John Brunner in the 1970s. There are two main elements to Intrusion: an encroaching "nanny state", par...

Got annoyed and bored (great combination) and decided I had better things to do that read any more.

Intrusion is a fine example of how fiction can bring philosophical debates closer to home. It takes the ethical debates about the possibilities of biotechnology choosing their most affecting parts (what about the children?!?) and crafts them into a dystopian vision.In the world where Hope and Hugh live genetic engineering has found way to remove almost all of the childhood ailments in a simple gene-altering pill form. Hope is tempted by its possibilities but would choose not to take it neverthel...

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'

Story set in the near future - a world transformed by bio-tech and computing power but subject in the free world to a high level of police surveillance and control. Individual rights (e.g. women's rights) have been subsumed into the rights of society to make the right choices for people (with in particular control of pregnancy and even pre-pregnancy effectively turning women back into domestic slaves with intrusive monitoring of their health and lifestyle choices) and free market doctrines repla...

Ken Macleod has been moving his SF from far future tales spanning distant star systems to colder, more rationally-extrapolated near-future visions of distinctly worryingly plausible futures. Intrusion features perhaps his most minimally-different future yet: a Britain of ubiquitous surveillance, extreme policing and enforced conformity done with the best possible taste. No Orwellian dystopias here: Macleod is almost infinitely cleverer and more believable, not to mention being far better SF.Intr...

This is a strange moment for me. I want to assign a high rating for this book, I want to love it and I want to tell everyone to rush out and buy a copy. But I can't do any of those things and this leaves me feeling conflicted and confused. I love Ken MacLeod books, and I do not love this one. This leads to a cognitive dissonance I seldom experience.There is nothing egregiously wrong with Intrusion, but there is nothing wonderfully great about it either. The characters are well rounded, the plot

This and more reviews, interviews etc on Dark Matter Zine, an online magazine. http://www.darkmatterzine.com. This review was written by Nalini Haynes for Dark Matter Zine.Hope and Hugh Morrison are expecting their second child. This is the second time Hope has refused ‘the fix’, a magic bullet that cures all genetic abnormalities while immunising the foetus against many childhood illnesses.In this Brave New World overtly referencing 1984, a father sued his wife forcing her to take the fix becau...

I really enjoyed this British dystopia of the liberal nanny state. It's so refreshing to read a thoughtful, creative dystopia that does what good SF does best: extrapolates current social trends to their extreme. In future Britain, women's bodies are tightly regulated so as to prevent any harm to future children, but in a way that seems perfectly normal, rational, and egalitarian (Handmaid's Tale this is not). When one average woman decides that, for no apparent reason, she doesn't want to take

Ken MacLeod may have moved away from the SF novels of his earlier career to (more lucrative?) mainstream techno thrillers, but his interest in politics and sociology remains as urgent as ever. This makes Intrusion a superb example of extrapolative SF, a sort of 1984 for the modern world.Except in this extrapolation of 1984, everyone is fed, schooled, employed and safe; all the infrastructure necessary for civilisation is in place. And what culminated in the institutionalisation of the ultimate p...

A disturbing, near future dystopian vision of Britain that is frighteningly plausible. Besides the central premise, there are many other extrapolations arising from society as we know it to construct something that, taken as a whole, paints quite a worrying picture of our future. There are several parallels with George Orwell's "1984" although this story presents a far more subtler mechanism of control, and one no doubt more relevant to today's readers. What we have here is a "nanny state" tyran...

I’ve seen some SF novels described as being ‘cosy catastrophes’, I think Intrusion could be described by a related term, ‘cosy dystopia’. The world the characters live in (a near future Britain) is superficially pleasant and at the start of the novel they’d probably say they were genuinely content with their life, but despite that this is clearly a dystopian novel. One of the effective parts of the book is how Hope Morrison’s life gradually falls apart and her discontent grows with the world she...