the author takes an unusual approach to her unusual theme, and i liked it very much. set in the late 21st century, it addresses a near-future world driven by the control of information, a global world divided into small post-national entities (centenals) for voting purposes in order to provide more choice to citizens in their environment and to avoid stuff like wars, so meant to be a set of participatory democracies. naturally, there are forces both large and small that would like to mess with that, to acquire and use information for their own purposes - so much so you might almost want to call this a new form of espionage sf. excellent characters, great details, and a fine plot. first of a trilogy, so i plan to dive into the other two right now. ( )

WHAT A COOL FIRST BOOK. Felt like next level near-future cyberpunk obsessed with information and politics instead of misogyny and machismo.

This was a good book that I just didn't really get into. I'm not sure why. ( )

Its a complete DNF. The premise was interesting but i couldn't get into it. ( )

"Infomocracy" depicts a world so digitally connected it makes our current communications technology look about as advanced as smoke signals. I'm sure it's not the only science fiction novel out there to imagine a more thoroughly digitized world, but this novel also describes a world in which nationalism has largely become a thing of the past and has been replaced by a boundary-free system of "centenals" of one hundred thousand voters each. Furthermore, its heroes -- and occasionally, its villains -- are campaign operatives and what are unmistakably Google employees. Much of "Infomocracy" is set is offices or in the sort of neutral, comfy, work-friendly public spaces where people who can wield a laptop like a weapon congregate, and a lot of it has to do with computer-based work. The author's description of software environments is meticulous and sometimes even loving. In short, this one is for hardcore tech geeks.

It's also, by and large, a surprisingly optimistic future, which, after years and years, of reading about dystopias, I didn't know how much I needed. There's trouble afoot and people are still pretty fallible, but a lot of our nastier social problems have been overcome in the world that the Older envisages here. Freed from the specters of war and nationalism, this future seems highly automated, stridently globalized, and sort of fun: there's a lot of good times to be had, a lot of interesting food to try, and a lot of interesting art to experience. And there's a bit of a romance between the book's two leads, both of whom are the products of a high-tech, peripatetic world that has more-or-less done away with hard-and-fast cultural and political boundaries. The writing here is surprisingly seductive, especially when compared to the book's less-human elements, and, to her credit, Older deals with both Mishima and Ken's complicated cultural journeys with a gratifying amount of nuance. While other readers have complained, I actually found her to a surprisingly is a consistent and effective writer -- at leas compared to many other sci-fi authors -- and the world she describes here is -- to borrow a techie term -- beautifully rendered. There wouldn't be a plot here, of course, if everything went right, and so there's a crime to be solved and baddies to overcome, and, underneath it all, real doubts about the viability of the democratic model, even one that functions as smoothly as the one in "Infomocracy" does. This one's not a heavy read, perhaps, but it is an interesting, well-crafted one. ( )