Null States, by Malka Older, was published in 2017.
It’s the second book in the Centenal trilogy.
I downloaded it from the Sno-Isle Libraries. Then I downloaded it from the King County Library System. Then I downloaded it from the Seattle Public Library.
It was 723 ePages on my phone.
The story starts two years after the events of Infomocracy.
The third, and most controversial, global election is over. Information, the organization that oversees the elections, has lost some popularity, but, since they’re not a political party, they’re sure that they’ll recover.
Information has rebranded itself as a “global oversight and transparency agency.”
There is talk of changing the elections from every ten years to every five years. There is talk of scraping the micro-democracy system completely. But this is all informal speculation.
Roz (who was in the first book) is in an Information field office in Kas with the rest of her SVAT team for a briefing. (SVAT is Specialized Voter Action Tactics, a sort of aid team with weapons.)
The briefing is about a man commonly known as Al-Jalabi.
The region formerly named Darfur now contains 78 centenals of 100,000 people each. Thirty of those centenals have elected a government named DarFur, led by Al-Jalabi. Al-Jalabi wishes to expand into other centenals.
Even though DarFur means “house of the Fur,” Al-Jalabi strongly states that it is not a nationalist government. He points out that there are many DarFur citizens who are not members of the Fur tribal nation.
Some DarFur citizens have staged a rally in a neighboring centenal ruled by 888, a corporate government that originated in China. There has been some tension, but, so far, no open hostility.
Xenophobia is still a motivation for some political movements.
Roz and her team have scheduled a meeting with Al-Jalabi.
As Al-Jalabi is arriving for the meeting, the tsubame he’s flying in explodes, in view of the SVAT team.
(There are low-flying hovercraft known as crows. They’re used for public transport. There are also privately owned crows. In the first book, Mishima had a crow, supplied by Information, that she outfitted as a camper. She’d moor it to the roof of a building on work trips. A tsubame is a smaller version of a crow.)
Roz and her SVAT team begin an investigation, working alongside the local government. Roz’s first impression is that it was an assassination, but she’s going in with an open mind.
Roz soon learns that there has been open hostilities, some fighting, and even some casualties in the region. How was Information unaware of this? It wasn’t a coverup. It’s merely that Information doesn’t have many surveillance cameras in this part of the world. (What did DarFur do with the money Information provided for the surveillance equipment?)
“Null states” is a term referring to areas where Information has limited or no access to data.
Micro-democracy was supposed to eliminate wars, because it has eliminated centers of power. In a sense, it has. But skirmishes are still happening all over the globe.
This is one thing I’m loving about this series: It presents a world that’s neither a utopia nor a dystopia. It’s a complicated world that’s trying very hard to be a utopia, but it’s still new, so it hasn’t quite gotten everything right.
Mishima is in Saigon. She no longer works for Information. She’s a freelance consultant.
Ken is in Seville. He’s supposed to be taking life slowly as a local government official, but he’s traveling the world as a paid speaker.
Eventually, Roz hires Mishima as a consultant, and Mishima recruits Ken as an assistant.
The mystery of the death of Al-Jalabi deepens as Roz learns that six other government leaders have recently died in various types of accidents around the world. There’s nothing tying them together. The deaths are alarming, but not suspicious. Al-Jalabi’s death would have been seen as another accident, a crash of a tsubame, if Roz and her team hadn’t been there to witness it. Now, Information is re-evaluating those other deaths.
This is a story of public surveillance, told from the point of view of those doing the surveillance.
Al-Jalabi’s widow, who is bidding to take over her husband’s vacant post, accuses Information of killing her husband. Why would we kill him, responds Roz, Information had no interest in him. If you had no interest in him, counters the widow, then why are you recording everything we do?
Roz learns that one of her coworkers is a member of Privacy=Freedom, a Luddite government that controls two centenals – one in California, and the other in Thailand. They’re not strictly anti-technology, but they believe that technology shouldn’t be invasive. Roz wonders why a member of Privacy=Freedom is working for Information.
The situation gets more complicated when a bombing kills several members of a former supermajority government. The bomber escapes across a border into Switzerland. Switzerland has rejected the micro-democracy model, is still a country, and has made itself into a null state. Information has no jurisdiction there, and has no access to the country’s internal surveillance systems.
The world building in the book is awesome.
It’s a murder mystery and a thrilling tale of global espionage. There are exciting battle scenes. It’s thought-provoking science fiction. And it took me forever to get through this book. The story is thick with evidence, clues, suspects, and investigations. I wasn’t able to renew my initial library loan, and I was less than halfway through the book, so I had to borrow another copy from a different library. Then that second loan was almost over, I was about 77% of the way through the book, and I wasn’t able to renew it, so I borrowed it from a third library. (Maybe it could use a little less world building?)
I loved this little scene, which illustrates how much Information is a part of everyday life: Roz sees a sign written in a language she’s unfamiliar with. Her glasses translate it as: ZEINAB’S WORLD-FAMOUS COFFEE. There’s a footnote from Information, stating that there’s no recorded evidence of Zeinab’s coffee being known any farther away than Khartoum.
The mystery of the leaders’ deaths is only partly solved. The ending sets us up for the third and final book.
I enjoyed this book. It was worth spending two and a half library loans to get through it.
Feeding Squirrels On My Way To Work 