Skip to content →

Category: books

Lockdown reading : Centenal

Published March 21, 2021 by lievenlb

In this series I’ll mention some books I found entertaining, stimulating or comforting during these Corona times. Read them at your own risk.



The Centenal Cycle is a trilogy written by Malka Older.

A Centenal is the basic political unit of a future micro-democracy. It is a neighbourhood consisting of 100.000 people which can vote for any government it wants, from anywhere in the world.

“Centenal-based microdemocracy naturally requires extensive use of technology. In my book, it’s provided through a massive international bureaucracy known as Information, which offers voters data about the thousands of possible governments and helps those governments manage what may be far-flung territories once they’re elected.” (Malka Older)

In this trilogy Malka Older draws from her own life: she obtained a Ph. D. from Sciences Po exploring the dynamics of multi-level governance and disaster response, and has more than a decade of experience in humanitarian aid and development.

The Centenal Cycle consists of these three books:

Infomocracy (2016) (link containing excerpts).



It’s been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global micro-democracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything’s on the line.

Null States (2017).



The future of democracy is about to implode.

After the last controversial global election, the global infomocracy that has ensured thirty years of world peace is fraying at the edges. As the new Supermajority government struggles to establish its legitimacy, agents of Information across the globe strive to keep the peace and maintain the flows of data that feed the new world order.

State Tectonics (2018) (link containing excerpts).



The future of democracy must evolve or die.

The last time Information held an election, a global network outage, two counts of sabotage by major world governments, and a devastating earthquake almost shook micro-democracy apart. Five years later, it’s time to vote again, and the system that has ensured global peace for 25 years is more vulnerable than ever.

Here’s a short interview with Malka Older on Sci-Fi, AI and its possible uses in the writing process.

Here’s a longer clip in which she talks about ‘Speculative Resistance’ at the Personal Democracy Forum 2018.

Leave a Comment

Lockdown reading : Penumbra

Published March 7, 2021 by lievenlb

In this series I’ll mention some books I found entertaining, stimulating or comforting during these Corona times. Read them at your own risk.



It’s difficult to admit, but Amazon’s blurb lured me into reading Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan:

“With irresistible brio and dazzling intelligence, Robin Sloan has crafted a literary adventure story for the 21st century, evoking both the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or a young Umberto Eco, but with a unique and feisty sensibility that’s rare to the world of literary fiction.” (Amazon’s blurb)

I’m a fan of Murakami’s later books (such as 1Q84 or Killing Commendatore), and Stephenson’s earlier ones (such as Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon), so if someone wrote the perfect blend, I’m in. Reading Penumbra’s bookstore, I discovered that these ‘comparisons’ were borrowed from the book itself, leaving out a few other good suggestions:

One cold Tuesday morning, he strolls into the store with a cup of coffee in one hand and his mystery e-reader in the other, and I show him what I’ve added to the shelves:

“Stephenson, Murakami, the latest Gibson, The Information, House of Leaves, fresh editions of Moffat” – I point them out as I go.

(from “Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore”)

This trailer gives a good impression of what the book is about.

Why might you want to read this book?

  • If you have a weak spot for a bad ass Googler girl and her tecchy wizardry.
  • If you are interested in the possibilities and limitations of Google’s tools.
  • If you don’t know what a Hadoop job is or how to combine it with a Mechanical Turk to find a marker on a building somewhere in New-York.
  • If you never heard of the Gerritszoon font, preinstalled on every Mac.

As you see, Google features prominently in the book, so it is kind of funny to watch the author, Robin Sloan, give a talk at Google.

Some years later, Sloan wrote a (shorter) prequel Ajax Penumbra 1969, which is also a good read but does not involve fancy technology, unless you count tunnel construction among those.



Read it if you want to know how Penumbra ended up in his bookstore and how he recovered the last surviving copy of the book “Techne Tycheon”.

More information (together with reading suggestions) can be found at Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore: a reading map.

Leave a Comment

Lockdown reading : the Carls

Published February 28, 2021 by lievenlb

In this series I’ll mention some books I found entertaining, stimulating or comforting during these Corona times. Read them at your own risk.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (AART for the fans) by Hank Green came out in 2018, and recently I reread it when its sequel A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor appeared last summer.


“Protagonist April May discovers a large robot sculpture in Midtown Manhattan. She and her friend Andy Skampt decide to film it and post the video online, which goes viral and makes April an overnight celebrity. All over the world identical structures—known as “Carls”—have appeared in major cities at exactly the same time.” (Wikipedia)

Here’s an artist’s impression of said video, followed by the ‘Queen sequence’ (one of many puzzles in the book). On an audio fragment a faint trace of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” is heard, and April discovers the code “IAMU” after fixing a series of typos in the Wikipedia article about that song.

Three reasons why you might want to read this book now:

  1. It’s about the dangers and pitfalls of social media and online fame. (Something Hank Green is familiar with as he runs with his brother the YouTube channel Vlogbrothers.)
  2. It’s about a global pandemic. (Not caused by a virus, but by a contagious dream, containing 4096 ‘sequences’=puzzles, each resulting in an HEX-sequence to be combined into a vector-image.)
  3. It’s about the consequences of hate speech. (It’s hard not to draw parallels between ‘Peter Petrawicki’ and a former president, and between the actions of the ‘Defenders’ and the events of January 6th.)

AART doesn’t end well for April May, and it was hard to image Hank Green ever writing a sequel without doing a Bobby Ewing shower scene (showing my age here). And yes, the book ends with a two word text message from April: “Knock Knock”.



The sequel ‘A Beautifully Foolish Endeavour’ is perhaps even more enjoyable than AART. The Dream is now replaced by a Magic Book, and the storytelling (at first) no longer done by April herself but by her four evangelists (Maya, Andy, Miranda and Robin), Green’s very own Mamalujo so to speak.

Leave a Comment