The plot and the characters, were fine, nothing spectacular but not bad by any means. For a book detailing a global election process with the in-universe goal of empowering the populace, having American systems designed limit voting is an absolutely baffling experience. and that stuff just baffles me, as someone who's government just mails every person there vote-card by default. but also voter registration is mentioned. A Japanese protagonist thinking about the implications of people drinking from brown paper-bags on street corners in okinawa - things like that. I also bounced off hard at how American the election processes were, in a book that's about a global government where the US has collapsed and mostly takes place in Japan, and the middle-east. but the overarching plot deals with the supermajority, and with the exception of the reader understanding that this sounds important, and that's why its probably important, its never spelled out what a supermajority does with regards to individual centenals of a different government, and as such it is absolutely unclear why we should care? this micro-democracy has some fun plusses and minuses that are neatly explored.
It's interesting that there's a world where you cross a street, and suddenly there's a different set of laws and public regulations. and also there's a super-majorities that governments want. The world is segmented into Centenals, areas of the globe where a 100.000 people live, and each centenal votes for their own government - the election and the internet is overseen by a non-democratic organisation called Information.
but ultimately fall flat, in that the world building lacks the scaffolding for it to make coherent sense. For Mishima, a dangerous Information operative, the whole situation is a puzzle: how do you keep the wheels running on the biggest political experiment of all time, when so many have so much to gain?Ī sci-fi political thriller in a time global voting? sounds right up my alley, and this book has some neat ideas micro ideas with regards to voting, information, populism, etc. For Domaine, the election represents another staging ground in his ongoing struggle against the pax democratica. For Ken, this is his chance to do right by the idealistic Policy1st party and get a steady job in the big leagues. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything's on the line. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. It's been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global micro-democracy. I haven't done mini reviews in a while, and read a bunch of stuff these past two months, figured its time to regale my fellow speculative fiction fans with my much needed opinions. Jos' Mini Reviews, featuring Malka Older, Jodi Taylor, Richard Swan and Django Wexler.
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