State Tectonics by Malka Older

State Tectonics

3/5. Third book in this series (trilogy?) about a future political system and the upheaval in successive microdemocratic elections.

The last book of 2018, and it's a good one. If you want a book about women – mostly women of color – working together and supporting each other and picking at complex problems from different angles based on their assorted technical and analytical and espionage skills, here you go. And at its heart, this book is having a sustained argument with itself about the value of neutral information in a political system, and what it can and can't do to insulate voters from manipulation. It doesn't come to any conclusions, to be clear, but it's the thought exercise that counts.

Also, points for the title.

2018 reading

My only reading goal for 2018 was to read more than I did in 2017, and oh boy did I do that, as 80 is a lot more than 45 (I'm counting novellas, not counting anything DNF). So that was a success. And, as I suspected, reading more made me want to read more. I got that compulsive pleasure button for reading back, thank God. There is hope, for those of you who also thought your brains were too tired for this.

I don't have any particular goals for 2019 except, maybe, for a nebulous goal to enjoy things more. Or, to flip it around, to stop finishing things I'm not enjoying. There is a bomb that is going off in my life later in 2019, in a good way? Hopefully? So all I really want to do is treat my time as valuable before I have even less of it than I do now.

Here are some standouts from 2018, in no particular order.

YA fantasy: In Other Lands

Science fiction: Null States

Post apocalypse: The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

Het romance: The Suffragette Scandal

Queer romance: A Charm of Magpies

Military: The Guns Above

Nonfiction: The Gene: An Intimate History

Fantasy: The Traitor Baru Cormorant