I really enjoyed this book and I feel pretty confident that it is the sort of book that will only get better with a re-read as it is quite dense and complex. It tells the story of Information and its continuing struggle to navigate the world of micro-democracy that was introduced in book one. What I really appreciated here was the change in focus with the protagonist. Roz was a peripheral character in Infomocracy and she takes centre stage here, which was great because it allowed for a real opening up of the world and a different perspective. Once again, Malka Older has included an awful lot in the narrative and it is very twisty, which can be a little difficult to keep up with at times. However, the pacing is good and the characters were compelling enough to keep my interest through the difficult passages. I remember liking Infomocracy more the second time I read it, and I really do think that this is one that I will have to re-visit in order to get the full impact of it, but overall I thought it was a fascinating look at politics and the nuance of democratic rule.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Nerdy political science fiction with an international cast of characters by an author who has done humanitarian work in Asia and Africa? Null States sounded like exactly the sort of book I would enjoy. It opens with a bang, as a political leader is assassinated. After that, however, I didn't find many thrills in this political thriller.
The hook of the Centenal Series is Information, a global organization that promotes democracy through dissemination of (what else?) information. Characters are able to instantly call up almost unlimited information about people or places, or translate other languages. Older imagines a world where, as a result of this technology, nationalism and military conflict are on the wane, while technocratic leaders are selected in peaceful elections in communities of 100,000 people, known as “centenals.” While this is an appealing set up, the execution is lacking. It sometimes seems as if there are enough named characters to fill a centenal, each with the most miniscule backstory. This may be less confusing if you've read Infomocracy, the first book in the series, which I have not. While the main characters of Roz and Mishima (who first appeared in Infomocracy) are compelling, the rest are forgettable or make no impression at all. Older's writing style and slow pacing did not inspire me to care about the characters or to wonder what will happen in the conflict between Information and the “null states” of the title. The heaps of praise from various reviewers suggests that this novel will appeal to many, given its imaginative setting. But for me, Null States has too much information and too little excitement and charm.

One doesn't often think of political science science fiction, but that is what we have here. The second book in an intriguing series which posits a near future stateless form of democracy, based on dividing the world into "centennals" of 100,000 people who each elect a government. These governments, often spread in a patchwork fashion across many continents, act with local authority but are also competing for a global "supermajority."

This system of centennals never quite coheres as an actual plausible alternative political system to the nation-state, but it is very useful in throwing into relief the pathologies of our own democratic system. In book 1, Infomocracy, the plot and characters often felt secondary to building this system and musing on political issues, but in Null States things are better balance. The plot, characters, and ideas all serve each other, and it reads like a pretty compelling techno thriller, with the bonus element of making you think. Bonus points for the weirdly touching relationship between Ken and Mishima - I didn't think this book was the place I'd find a compelling portrait of a busy working couple who made their relationship work, but that's what we get and I really enjoyed it.

The sequel to Infomocracy (2016) is not a high tech thriller following a Supermajority elections full of corruptions but a story focused on the aftermath of such an election. It focuses mainly on centenals (micro nations of 100 000 inhabitants) that just joined the micro democracy system and it opens up with the murder investigation of the former governor of the Darfur centenal. The actions mainly takes place in Darfur but also Geneva and China and it was interesting to see how Information differed in various places.

I won’t talk about the plot in any more details just because it would 1) completely spoil Infomocracy and 2) also spoil Null States since not a lot actually happens and it would be too easy to disclose a bit too much about the story and you wouldn’t have much to discover by yourself.

I am pretty torn about this book and I don’t really know if I enjoyed it or not. I felt the same way about Infomocracy but I hoped Null States would convice me a bit more. I really admire this series for the worldbuilding, the ideas and the tech. The most interesting parts for me were all the parts about Information: how it worked, how it installed itself in all the centenals and how it influenced the micro-democracy system. All the centenals part of the system have complete access to the Information network but it also means that everything they do is recorded. For people brought up with Information (like all the main characters), being recorded at all time is nothing special and having access to everything in a matter of seconds is as natural as breathing. However, for people new to the system, this constant surveillance is too much and most of them tends to find this quite unsettling if not threatening.

In Infomocracy, Information was definitely the “good guy” of the story: an organization that worked in favor of democracy and distributed information to everyone while always being partial. In Null States, we can definitely sense a shift in their role, a lot of their actions are quite questionable and they don’t seem to be supporting the Supermajority goverment as much as replacing them completely, the elected government turning into a figurehead while the real decisions are made elsewhere.

This aspect I found fascinationg, however, as I said, I have mixed feelings about this series, my main problem being that I disliked almost all of the characters except two minors characters that happened to be inhabitants of Darfur. I found Ken and Mishima flat and bland and I actively disliked Roz, the main charactre of Null States. I don’t have to love characters to enjoy a book but when they all annoy you and act completely selfishly during the entire book, it starts to get on my nerves.

Roz was unbearable, she was rude to everyone including the people she worked with, she was extremely close-minded and couldn’t bring herself to at least attempt to open herself to other cultures and opinions other that her own. She acts like a robot 99% of the time and suddendly transform herself into a cheesy mess when she decides she’s in love with a guy just because she’s attracted to him. I mean I almost gave up on Null States several times just because I was so fed up with Roz’s behaviour.

It’s a shame because this series has a lot of potential and clever ideas however I don’t know if I am going to read the next book, I want to know how this series is going to end but I don’t know if I want to read it in those characters perspectives…

If you read and enjoyed the first book then you’ll probably like Null States too but if you didn’t, I don’t think you’ll enjoy this one either infortunately…

3 stars.

Malka Older‘s Centenal Cycle is set in the latter half of the 21st century and yet, like all good science fiction, it speaks to the current moment.

Null States (Tor, 2017), the second book in her series, builds on the first, Infomacracy, which introduced readers to a near future in which the Earth is crisscrossed by a network of small but stable democracies. But in Null States, efforts to strengthen and expand this world order are threatened by unknown plotters.

What makes Older’s books so timely is that they address some of the most vexing challenges of the Trump era, including the difficulty of separating truth from lies and the uphill effort to foster trust in government.

Drawing on more than a decade of experience working for organizations that provide humanitarian aid and development, Older’s books introduce the idea of mini-nations known as microdemocracies. These tiny states are capped at 100,000 citizens in an effort to ensure that the minority always has a voice. Each microdemocracy can vote for any government around the world, so that coalitions of micro-sovereignties are not massed in one geographic location but scattered around the globe. In a dense city, this means that different microdemocracies can arise every few blocks, with one (for example) under-girded by Rastafarianism and the next guided by the principles of Chabad.

In order to ensure the efficient and fair administration of this system, an organization called Information provides expert advice, education and resources. Older describes Information as a cross between Google and the United Nations. Perhaps Information’s most important function is to constantly stream verified, annotated facts to every citizen as an antidote to fake news, a term that has grown increasingly popular in recent years even though the underlying problem, as Older points out, has been “going on probably for as long as we can trace history and politics.”

For Older, science fiction is an opportunity to explore neither dystopia nor utopia but the real world in between — a place where her policy-minded imagination can explore practical solutions.

“I wanted to show some ideas I’d been thinking about that would improve things in some ways, but they could also make some things worse,” she says in my interview with her on New Books in Science Fiction (You can listen to the interview here: http://newbooksnetwork.com/malka-older-null-states-tor-2017/). “There is no perfect system. We’re not aiming to find some system that will work for every case and every country and every group of people and then we’re done. I think what’s really important is the process and the struggle.”

In Null States, Malka Older continues to explore the near future laid out in Infomocracy, where the world is experimenting with micro democracy as a form of government and Information is the omnipresent internet/search engine/bureaucracy that founded the system. In the first book we explored elections and democracy as a concept.

Here, the author continues to lay out the pros and cons of the seemingly Utopian setup, this time focusing on new centennials being brought into the fold out of homogeneous, even nationalistic former states, as well as the titular null states or countries that do not participate in micro democracy. There is once again mystery, political tension, world hopping and a wide variety of cultures. Plus, we're already familiar with the cast of characters, so this novel also takes the time to develop the world and set it up for exciting things to come. The writing is confident as ever, and makes for a smooth fast read.

This series is a near future techno-political thriller that discusses extremely relevant issues about privacy, democracy, political relations, culture and the internet, without imposing any one conclusion. It's smart, absorbing and stimulating. Greatly looking forward to the next installment.

La ciencia ficción es, por definición, un campo abierto a la especulación. Cuando esta especulación, estas posibilidades se aplican a temas poco habituales se publican títulos que se salen de lo corriente, como Infomocracy.

Null States es la continuación de Infomocracy, y ahonda sobre las ideas políticas de la primera entrega. Es importante comprender que el sistema de microdemocracias en el que se sustentan estas obras, ni es omnisciente ni es universal, por que existen estos estados que siguen siendo naciones (Rusia, China, la siempre imperturbable Suiza...) que son como agujeros negros para Information.

La acción se basa en una zona de Sudán que ha adoptado recientemente el nuevo sistema político y que requiere un seguimiento más personalizado para llevar la transición a buen cauce. Aparece sin embargo un elemento disruptivo, un asesinato que pone patas arribas un sistema de por sí débil en su concepción.

La narración toma dos vías, por una parte la que se desarrolla en Sudán, con una investigación de asesinato un tanto chapucera porque si todo depende de la información que obtienes de las fuentes automatizadas y NO hay fuentes automatizadas apenas, poco podrás rascar. Esta parte de la novela me ha resultado fallida, por la falta de recursos de los protagonistas y por el bloqueo que les supone no disponer de sus herramientas habituales. La otra parte es una trama de espionaje apasionante, aunque breve, con escenas de acción, persecuciones, infiltración... lo tiene todo. Muy inmersiva y bien narrada.

¿Por qué este contraste tan exagerado? Supongo que Older no quería escribir un thriller de espionaje sin más y quería seguir explorando la microdemocracia, solo que... no ha conseguido equilibrar la narración.

Lo mismo pasa con los personajes. Mishima, a quien ya conocíamos con anterioridad, protagoniza las escenas más interesantes de la novela, persiguiendo a los autores de un atentado o infiltrándose en una antigua superpotencia gracias a los culebrones a los que es adicta (no es broma). Pero los personajes de la otra parte de la historia parecen sombras, no desarrollan una historia propia. Roz se salva un poco, pero no mucho, de esta generalización apabullante.

A pesar de estos aspectos negativos, sigo con curiosidad por saber cómo se desarrollará la tercera novela, porque en el final de Null States aparece un nuevo jugador que promete emociones fuertes.

Null States by Malka Ann Older
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thanks to Netgalley for the Arc!

When I read the first book in the series, Infomocracy, I loved it for the hardcore idea-based SF couched in a technothriller base, and Null States continues on in the same tradition.

Only, this next novel isn't all about a high-tech election based on micro-democracy with a mix of intrigue and corruption. Rather, it's about population areas outside of the Infomocracy and an assassination that grows ever more complicated as the novel progresses.

In a lot of ways, it's better than the first. I had some issues with the original in that we were steeped in political information and states and parties that meant very little to me until much later. This one was much more focused on specific and interesting locations. Plenty of mystery, plenty of interesting character development, and plenty of good futuristic technothriller.

The science isn't as interesting as the politics, however. There's plenty to say about possible modes of thinking and action and communication, all of which use hands-free instant communication technologies that veer deep into total computer tech, widely used across the board except for certain locations or differences of use. And that's where we get some of the most interesting sequences, in my opinion.

I love idea novels. :) This one should give us a lot of interesting avenues. Perhaps even some real dialogue on the intersections between emerging tech and how people will eventually get things done.

As for world-building, this is also top-notch. It's far enough away from us to have full freedom and near enough to us that we recognize everything. I can't complain at all. :)

I suppose my only complaint might be the fact that I sometimes got lost in locations and names, not being 100% conversant in all places or languages, but it wasn't bad at all. It just took some more effort.

Overall, though, I'm very happy to say this is continuing the story (and the original MC) in high form.