I was pretty frustrated by some early sociopolitical commentary in this book, particularly along racial lines, but that lessened immensely after a couple chapters. It's still dripping with imperial core pretention and high academic elitism. Still, the story has some fun beats, the setting - when it stops being imminently self-congratulatory and Liberal - raises some interesting questions, and the analysis of weaknesses in electoral democracy demonstrates a material experience and theoretical familiarity that would be expected of a storyteller with the author's background. The story really picks up about halfway through; until then it's a bit of a slog. All in all, I wouldn't advise buying the book, but if you have access to it and no compelling reads besides, you could do much worse.