Our score
Excellent
The Infinite State
Richard Swan opens The Decurion Saga with a galaxy-spanning fascist empire and a widow rich enough to try buying her way out of it. The Infinite State is dystopian science fiction with real political machinery under the hood, closer to a procedural about how oppression administers itself day to day than to a standard rebellion story.
From the review
Every morning in the Decurion Empire begins with a call and response. Who gives you life. Who gives you purpose. Who gives you joy. The answer is the same two words every time, and Richard Swan repeats them often enough that by page fifty you are supplying them yourself before the question finishes. That is the whole book in miniature. The Empire does not need to watch every citizen. It has already installed itself in the grammar. Katherine Fuller inherits at the worst possible moment for the party. Her husband was a senior man in Pater Aeternus, the governing body of the Empire, and his death leaves her holding a fortune the state never intended a woman to control. What she does with it drives the novel. She buys a world. An unsettled one, legally, through the Empire's own property statutes, and then she starts assembling the people who could run it. Not a rebellion. A colony with a constitution. Swan clearly understands that this is more threatening to a totalitarian state than a war fleet, and he works through the legal mechanics in enough detail that you believe she might pull it off, right up until you start counting how many people already know.
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