1984 meets The Handmaid's Tale meets Blade Runner 2049. That's the best mashup I can think of for this book.

I flew through The Infinite State and I barely know how I managed it. The pacing was breathless and tense and nonstop, I really like Swan's writing style! I will wholly admit this is my first book by him, but man... what a banger to start with. This was clearly a poignant project he was passionate about that involved processing a lot of things all at once. It took risks, it was fun, and the characters were all difficult people in an impossible situation.

I love when a book can engage in political commentary without it feeling overburdened and I felt like Swan did a great job. For me, it occasionally felt hamfisted at parts but that's because I am very aware (too aware) of political systems and how they work - that was a Me problem not a Richard problem. For someone who has no foreknowledge, I think the explanations of fascism and democracy are fantastic. He made them conversational and didn't bulldoze you with a billion explainers on theory, he just gave very accessible overviews of what different political systems are and the fact that none of them are perfect. These explainers were essential, too, which sometimes books can forget about when we get too deep in the weeds. He gave readers as much theory as they needed to understand the Empire's threat and the reasons Gabriel was an important project.

I loved the atmosphere Swan included in this book, too. The dreary landscapes of the Empire juxtaposed with the humid, colorful Gabriel was a great visual and even before he described Gabriel in such a way I was already seeing it in that palette. One thing he did well, though, which I think is both hard to do and uncommon to see is the threat of a concept. It's challenging to get the sense of threat in a fascist state translated into a fictional book - let alone a fictional space book - because there's no one singular threatening enemy. Books tend to crystalize around a clear enemy and a clear hero or heroes. I love when they manage to subvert that and turn either into something new, which Swan manages in The Infinite State. He makes the very concept of fascism the bad guy and shows you using the actions of his characters. From the Emperor to Cyprian to Droor to Morita to Morozov, Swan makes it hard to separate the idea of "bad guy" into any singular operator for the Decurion Empire. It isn't even the Decurion Empire that's the villain, necessarily, its the systems and antithetical mindsets that let the Empire exist in the first place.

Swan was very smart and thoughtful about how he leveraged human nature and how the Empire acts in conflict with what we have naturally evolved into. As someone who lovingly refers to myself as a defiant optimist - someone who refuses to stop believing in the best in things or people or situations - I felt very, very seen in this book. Swan believes in the inherent human desire to help and do good and the Empire beating and tormenting that out of people is turning its people into these twisted, abominable visages of humanity that are in direct conflict with one of our most important base instincts. It's the denial of agency and the discouragement of joy that sets the Empire's people to suffering. In their suffering, they're too tired and scared and cynical to do anything to oppose their fascist overlords.

He put so many different facets of what fascism does to people in here that I feel like I could talk about this for a dozen pages at least. One of my favorites was his demonstration of how the Empire's own worst enemy was... the Empire. Not the Free Nations, but itself. You can only stagnate and oppress your people for so long because you start to fall so far behind you create the tools for your own system to collapse. Denial of what human beings are and what we need at our core is a house of cards that always collapses in on itself, it's only ever been a matter of time.

His inclusion of the technology disparity was also very, very fun to watch. When Katherine gets out into the wider world (space, fine fine fine), she's blown away by how much of their suffering in the Empire is the Empire's choice. It's a decision that helps facilitate the repeated subjugation of their people by keeping them sick when they don't have to be, overworked when they don't have to be, poor when they don't have to be. It was a great way to show that the obligation of a government is to care for its people and its decay begins when it loses sight of that goal. When our basic needs aren't met and a government turns it into a flagellation of the people, a moralistic chiding that blames the people it was established to govern instead of itself, it begins to poison itself and heralds its own doom.

Somehow, in all of this, we also managed to fit one of my favorite topics to rant about and I will do my best to stay high level with it: the military industrial complex. I hate the military industrial complex and I got the impression Swan does, too, but he was much better about making The Infinite State informative as to why it's so damaging and terrible for a population to let military privateers run amok than I would have been. The Perpetual War Council from the get go gave me TMJ because, yeah. If you're engaged in perpetual warfare, you're probably in the wrong. He talked about the human canon fodder of their own children the Party members create, how the constant forced birthing and obsession with pregnancy is just a mechanism to feed the constant machine of interstellar war and has nothing to do with women's rights or family, the lack of technological improvement feeds their trumped up propaganda narrative about the nobility of these stupid wars, and how the distance of the people watching the footage of these endless wars keeps them removed from the true horror of them and thus continually in support of these "expansion efforts". The arms fair made my skin crawl, but Swan also was very smart about including why it's necessary to be armed when everyone else around you is armed. I appreciated that inclusion a lot because it's under discussed how when everyone around you has nukes, you need to be able to also defend yourself from nukes kind of thing. Smaller countries arm themselves up because everyone around them has armed themselves up. If they don't they just open themselves up to being overtaken under the guise of "protection" and then fully annexed against their will. Sounds remarkably like a very recent conflict occurring actively today, right?

Okay, I won't preach, I swear. As someone who loves political themes in books and believes fully that reading is political, books are political, and books are affected by the political climate of the era they were written in, this was a very bold story that directly faced down modern issues and conflicts most authors shy away from or leave room to pretend has nothing to do with modern day situations. I felt like Swan confronted complicated current events in a smart, accessible, thoughtful way that you could couch as a reader in terms of science fiction and places that don't exist. While the removal from the current day is there plainly and front and center (in my opinion), the way he bluntly addresses systems is very easily taken into our own world. Too often, authors rename fascism like "urblanagism" or "portoricianism" or give it some made up name that allows us to remove ourselves even farther from the concepts and pretend that's fully made up and not real and doesn't exist outside of the context of that story. Swan didn't. He called a spade a spade and I think in the era of surveillance states, flirting with fascism, and watching once-great governments forget that their priority is the wellbeing of the people they govern? This distinction is relevant, important, and will be a lens into the current state of the world to future readers.

Pater Delenda Est