June reads: State Tectonics (Malka Older)
Jun. 27th, 2019 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealThomas Jefferson said that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," but he was writing in the 1780s, before advances in technology made communication and political change more rapid. I'm not sure how long he'd give any political system today, much less in the late twenty-first century, which is when the Centenal Cycle (trilogy) is set.
I found this book the same way I found its two predecessors, it was on the "new fiction" shelf in my library, and pretty much read it to complete the trilogy. The worldbuilding is interesting--in a future where a Wikipedia-type hub has taken over the world, individual constituencies with populations around 100,000 elect their own party from one of many cosmopolitan platforms. However, the worldbuilding is a lot more memorable than the characters. The only thing I really retained about the protagonists from the first two is that one of them, Mishima, has a "narrative disorder;" she's prone to finding patterns where other people only see, or there might actually only be, random noise. I'm not sure what that's supposed to represent in contemporary terms; paranoia? typical cognitive biases?
The hints of how other institutions have changed (Olympics! religion!) were more interesting and I wanted more of those. Ultimately the takeaway from this seems to be that nothing is really going to last, we just have to keep tinkering with things. Which is in the spirit of the technocrats and wonks, I guess, but also kind of begs the question of "what was the point of the last two books then."
I've been logging a lot of my media stuff offline (spillover from board game logging, that's an adventure of its own), so here were my brief notes on the first two, for comparison:
Infomocracy:
I found this book the same way I found its two predecessors, it was on the "new fiction" shelf in my library, and pretty much read it to complete the trilogy. The worldbuilding is interesting--in a future where a Wikipedia-type hub has taken over the world, individual constituencies with populations around 100,000 elect their own party from one of many cosmopolitan platforms. However, the worldbuilding is a lot more memorable than the characters. The only thing I really retained about the protagonists from the first two is that one of them, Mishima, has a "narrative disorder;" she's prone to finding patterns where other people only see, or there might actually only be, random noise. I'm not sure what that's supposed to represent in contemporary terms; paranoia? typical cognitive biases?
The hints of how other institutions have changed (Olympics! religion!) were more interesting and I wanted more of those. Ultimately the takeaway from this seems to be that nothing is really going to last, we just have to keep tinkering with things. Which is in the spirit of the technocrats and wonks, I guess, but also kind of begs the question of "what was the point of the last two books then."
I've been logging a lot of my media stuff offline (spillover from board game logging, that's an adventure of its own), so here were my brief notes on the first two, for comparison:
Infomocracy:
Lots of 538 parallels with Information! :p Parties felt a little too stereotyped at times. Shifts between present and past were jarring, and some slang took a while to get images for (“crow”???) Centenal motif was cool.
Null States:So many characters. Didn’t feel as “caught up to by the present” as the prequel though.
