(December 2017)
The first of Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle, the
last of which comes out this summer. Given all the other trilogies I’ve still
to catch up on, starting a new one seems like a bit of a leap of faith, but I’m
very glad I did. The “relate it to what the reader knows” tagline would be something
like “Snow Crash meets The West Wing,” in that Older takes the
almost throw-away concept of micropolities from Stevenson’s book and then
explores that through the slightly melodramatic viewpoints of young political
operatives working behind the scenes. The two main PoV characters are Ken, a
fixer for the broadly progressive Policy1st party, and Mishima, a security
chief for Information.
Following a worldwide conflict of some sort (Isn't
it always?), the world's governance has been reconfigured into a kind of global
first past the post system. Each constituency is an even 100,000 people, which
obviously mans that they're packed very tight in urban areas and cover large
swathes of wilderness. In major cities the laws thus change from block to block,
à
la Snow Crash. There are global
elections once every decade, and campaign for the third such is in full swing.
These are policed by Information, which is essentially Google with its own
police force, and the closest thing this world has to a global bureaucracy.
