Null States - The Library of the Uncommons

Paperback, 448 pages

English language

Published Aug. 7, 2018 by Tordotcom.

ISBN:: 978-0-7653-9954-0

(1 review)

The future of democracy is about to implode.

After the last controversial global election, the global infomocracy that has ensured thirty years of world peace is fraying at the edges. As the new Supermajority government struggles to establish its legitimacy, agents of Information across the globe strive to keep the peace and maintain the flows of data that feed the new world order.

In the newly-incorporated DarFur, a governor dies in a fiery explosion. In Geneva, a superpower hatches plans to bring microdemocracy to its knees. In Central Asia, a sprawling war among archaic states threatens to explode into a global crisis. And across the world, a shadowy plot is growing, threatening to strangle Information with the reins of power.

2 editions

enne📚 reviewed Null States by Malka Older (The Centenal Cycle, #2)

Null States review

2 stars

Content warning minor plot spoilers for Null States

I also read the sequels to the SFFBookClub Infomocracy book this month. Null States is the second book in the series.

I think this also suffers from "trilogy book two syndrome". The first book is fairly self-contained, but this book is mostly setting up plot that gets resolved in the third book. In particular, this book is more murder mystery and local politics rather than global election action thriller, but the resolution of the mystery doesn't create a lot of closure. In the end, it's discovered who is behind the murder vaguely, but they escape and there's very little known about them or their motives. This does get answered, eventually, in the last third of the third book, but it left me a little bit wanting here.

I think I also enjoyed the increasing plot focus on Information as an entity that a lot of people find intensely creepy (cameras everywhere, etc) and also as something that cannot be neutral even if it tries to bill itself as such.

Subjects

Fiction, science fiction, general