lightreads

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.

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.