Lots to love in this book, and I am tempted to give it full marks. It’s just clunky enough in its plot to dock it a few points, but the ideas in the book are powerful, and its message of hope is great. It also rewards the reader for knowing a bit about geopolitics, which I’m a sucker for.

A recent episode of The Incomparable covered this book, and even though the reviews were mixed, it seemed up my alley, so I gave it a try. It’s very obviously a book of ideas and is sometimes clumsy and didactic. That said, I wish I had taken more time to sit with those ideas; I rushed through the book to finish it before my loan was up, and I’m sure I missed bits. Even when it’s clumsy (or when I missed stuff), the ideas are interesting though. What’s more, the worldbuilding is fascinating—not least because it is so focused on the Global South to find the settings, characters, and ideas of this imagined future. Even when the plot felt arbitrary or forced, I was so delighted by a book where “the West” was so deliberately absent and the background was so detailed that I enjoyed the whole thing.