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The Will to Battle, Ada Palmer. This is really good! Rereading book 2, it struck me as well-constructed but gave me fewer feels than I expected -- this book made up for that! The description of the 2454 Olympics is a magnificent set piece. Also we finally get to meet a character who's been semi-invisible up to this point, and who might be one of my favorite characters (kind of feels like a Mary Sue/self-insert type character, but I enjoy that). There are a lot of mysteries set up here, and I have only foggy theories at best -- rereading book 1, though, a lot of things made a lot more sense after the reveals of book 2, so I have to assume there are hints that I've been missing?
Anyway Utopia is the best (even if I doubt I'd take their oath), and I hope they are in fact on top of this 196883-dimensional chess game. Though, everyone in this world is just implausibly good at psychohistory/predicting the future, and you have to roll with it. Such a contrast to our current state of pandemic modeling; though some of that can be explained by improvements in technology/surveillance. The politics shown still feel more like LARP politics than real politics, but that's fun to read.
Anyway Utopia is the best (even if I doubt I'd take their oath), and I hope they are in fact on top of this 196883-dimensional chess game. Though, everyone in this world is just implausibly good at psychohistory/predicting the future, and you have to roll with it. Such a contrast to our current state of pandemic modeling; though some of that can be explained by improvements in technology/surveillance. The politics shown still feel more like LARP politics than real politics, but that's fun to read.