"Are you saved ?"
"yes"
"Are you prepared to die ?"

The Night Sessions, Ken MacLeod's latest novel is set in the near future, after the "faith" (or oil) wars, when religion is barely tolerated by political society, disdained and tainted; and the police and state have a policy of 'official non-cognizance' of religious activities. It's a police thriller, where the victims are, apparently, being killed for their religious beliefs.

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It's also a world where there are (some) intelligent robots, though people quickly backed out the AI chips from any military tech that went sentient, where the battle for Armageddon happened, and the secular world that came must have shaken some beliefs, but a very tiny core remained strong.

But the Scottish protestant faiths based on Calvinism take their strength in the belief that only a tiny number will be saved. In this secular, independent Scotland that MacLeod creates, police use robots but don't necessarily trust them. But the rest of the world with perhaps a different take on matters is never far away. The AI robots have their own society, values and beliefs. They are after all intelligent, and as many authors forget, not necessarily like us humans.

Night Sessions explores the intersection of Robotics, Creationism, AI and religion, especially fundamentalist religion. As one character puts it, "Engineers have an inbuilt flaw towards Intelligent Design." It is an interesting take on the idea of robot religions but MacLeod doesn't explore their views of their religions too deeply; probably a good idea: we have little concept of what a robot mindset might be. That is reserved for John Campbell, a lay preacher mislaid in a secular world with mutual mistrust. His exploration of this mindset is revealing, and only mildly sympathetic; religion has consequences and Campbell is not relieved of these by retreating to the wilderness.

On the whole, The Night Sessions is an entertaining and sometimes funny read; I liked the cameo image of the Detective, racing on a bike to a crime scene, robot on his back: a nice anachronistic mix of the future and past, with a metaphor for the book as a whole. Well recommended.