At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Joel Cunningham tagged
twelve science fiction & fantasy books for the post-truth era, including:
Infomocracy, by Malka Older
It’s right there in the title, y’all: this eerily timely novel, released in the buildup to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, examines how technology and the control of information sway the actions of people and governments in a near-future landscape in which the democracy we’ve known and (mostly) loved for more than two centuries is gone. Nations no longer exist. Instead, people belong to units of government known as “cetenals,” each 100,000 voters strong, that vote as one to elect a corporate-backed power for a term of global rule. The abolition of national borders in no way means a discontinuation of politics as usual, and indeed, the various political strategists, information-mongers, and dissidents that move the plot along exhibit skills at manipulating information and adding weights to their sides in the balance of power that would serve them well in 2017. At it’s core, this book is a clarion call to pay attention to what your government is doing—but that means doing the work, and figuring out what the information is, and what information you can trust.
Read about
another book on the list.
The Page 69 Test: Infomocracy.
--Marshal Zeringue
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