Infomocracy

Book One of the Centenal Cycle

By: Malka Older

Narrated by: Christine Marshall

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 microdemocracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything's on the line.

With power comes corruption. For Ken, this is his chance to do right by the idealistic Policy1st party and get a steady job in the big leagues. For Domaine, the election represents another staging ground in his ongoing struggle against the pax democratica. 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?

Infomocracy is Malka Older's debut novel.

PRAISE FOR INFOMOCRACY

“A fast-paced, post-cyberpunk political thriller... If you always wanted to put The West Wing in a particle accelerator with Snow Crash to see what would happen, read this book.” —Max Gladstone, author of Last First Snow

"Smart, ambitious, bursting with provocative extrapolations, Infomocracy is the big-data-big-ideas-techno-analytical-microdemoglobal-post-everything political thriller we've been waiting for." —Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings

"In the mid-21st century, your biggest threat isn’t Artificial Intelligence—it’s other people. Yet the passionate, partisan, political and ultimately fallible men and women fighting for their beliefs are also Infomocracy’s greatest hope. An inspiring book about what we frail humans could still achieve, if we learn to work together." —Karl Schroeder, author of Lockstep and the Virga saga

very enjoyable.

the political concept use in this story is thrilling and the characters are likeable. i would give this book to anyone who enjoys politics

Good story, bad narration

I found the story very engaging and enjoyed it a lot, however I never could quite get immersed in it, mostly because of the narrator's constant mispronunciation of the Japanese names (which make up about half of the characters), as well as fairly poor attempts at various accents.

Pattern Recognition-Snow Crash Remix. So good!

Feels like diving headfirst into a mash-up of early Neal Stephenson (think Snow Crash) and William Gibson (think Neuromancer or Pattern Recognition). Good fast clean cyberpunk fun with just enough twistiness and interesting reality to get your brain going.

Obvious at times, but interesting concept.

The world building is pretty interesting, but doesn't quite hit verisimilitude... The writing is a little flat, but not unbearably so. While some scenes were reminiscent of darker Cyber Punk, others were written like someone's blog, so it's a little hit & miss.

If you thought current elections are bad...

Malka Older's Infomocracy: A Novel presents a dystopic vision of the future where all the problems with current political elections are combined with the online convenience of voting and the world has somehow been transformed into one giant entity with continuously changing gerrymandered districts. The premise is a world with dozens to hundreds of political parties and corporate governors who vie every decade for a slice of the ruling pie. The resulting largest winner gets "supermajority" status and receives special powers. Overseeing the integrity of the exercise is group known as Information. The plot revolves around a dispersed group of individuals working this space who come to a realization that someone is "rigging" the election.

The sci-fi elements are mainly expanding digital technology and flying cars. The actual function of all this choice is never clearly articulated, nor is the origin for this societal organization. In other words, exactly how existing nations voluntarily ceded their sovereignty and what they received in exchanged is ignored. At the same time, why the planet would place the integrity of the process, selection for decadal rule to an unelected, and unsupervised entity: Information, is also a mystery. Finally, why no ones objects to a member of one political party becoming involved with the vote tampering investigation is a bit surprising. While the action is engaging, the societal structure in which events occur is nearly entirely driven by extrapolating current trends to unreasonable levels.

The narration is solid with a reasonable range of voices with good pacing and mood that aligns well with with the plot. Close attention is required as while not a complex story, the arbitrary nature of the society requires close inspection.