Infomocracy by Malka Older

Infomocracy

3/5. A scifi thriller about a messily contested election in a future "microdemocracy," where the units of government are one hundred thousand person "centenals," each of which can vote in its own government – corporate, idealist, religious, policy-based, environmentalist, whatever. The supermajority is up for grabs, and the "neutral" information organization that makes the whole system run just wants to keep it standing.

More thriller than scifi. The world-building is both great and not – I kept going Okay, but… over things, but to be fair, if you take several steps back, you really ought to go okay, but… over our current concept of nation state nationalism too, so. And bits of this did make me snort painfully. Like how you can lead a citizen to information, but you can't make him think. But it's mostly a thriller with thriller problems: the women are compulsively sexualized, the male lead is a dull doof, there are weird and gratuitously pointless action sequences in evening gowns, you know the sort of thing. I think Ada Palmer's micro non-democracy in Too Like the Lightning is going similar places, and that's a much better book.

But. It did finish with this, as two of our main characters, both political operatives of different sorts, tiredly contemplate their post-election futures, and maybe, just maybe, leaving politics.

"You really think you could live like that?" Mishima is trying to imagine what it would take to slow her pulse down, how it would feel. She imagines the problematic mountain range of her psyche smoothing into a gentle, dull plane, the colors overlapping into blah. Even if she survived like that, even if she liked it, she can't imagine it would last. There would be an emergency somewhere, someone would call her, offer her payment and per diem, tell her she's the only one who can help, and that would be it.

Shut up, I thought savagely. You don't know me.

Borderline by Mishell Baker

Borderline

3/5. Millie, a double amputee, is recruited out of the psych facility where she is being treated in order to work for the organization monitoring the flow of fairies into Los Angeles.

This surprised and challenged me in a good way. For one thing, when you have a lot of friends with disabilities, as I do, you can't help but notice how often disability abhors a vacuum. It brings friends. And, yeah, no shit living in this world with a physical disability can precipitate a psychological disability, too. In Millie's case it's the other way around – her injuries are the result of a failed suicide attempt – but people don't like to write about multiple disability. It's "too much." But reading about Millie felt very familiar to me, particularly how the Nexis of oppression for her could shift from the physical to the psychological depending on the circumstances. I know this girl. I've known this girl a lot. She's had a hard life, every version of her. Her narrator voice does have an unpleasant tendency to 'splain Borderline Personality Disorder in such sweeping terms that she seems to reduce herself to her diagnosis, but it's in the service of explaining a lot of the things she does to readers who would mostly really not understand her, otherwise.

The challenging part is, well. Confronting my own internalized ableism as I read about Millie and screamed internally at her a lot and just wanted her to get her shit together, oh my god woman. But she can't. That's the point. And that was hard for me, whose presentation to the able-bodied world depends so heavily on having my shit together epically. I'm working on it.

Anyway. It's a good, surprising urban fantasy. The plot sort of runs on rails and you can, like, see where the author was working through her index cards or whatever, but it's good. And there's something rich to this world, to the link between fairy and the inspiration of creative work in Los Angeles. I will be interested to see where this goes.