More Words, Deeper Hole

It's not the end of her second term. She's still in office in 2069. So (1) is out.

There's no way on God's green Earth that the election isn't contested if it's a democracy. I don't want to give away any spoilers, but there's quite an October surprise. So (2) doesn't make sense.

There is plenty of saber-rattling. Major plot points hinge on the possibility of war. What there isn't is a parallel to the Cold War. That's actually what James said: "I was also pleased that this book did not imagine a seemingly endless cold war."

As for the Presidency being wonkish by then: no. The President is a major character in the book. We see a huge amount of political detail. It's politics not far removed from our own, with a Congress and the Speaker and everything ... except that they appear to have forgotten to hold an election.

It ain't (3), either.

The authors just screwed that one up. An unbelievably stupid screw up. Luckily for me, it happened late in the book. If I'd realized on page 40 that they'd just forgotten it was an election year (bizarrely, they remember the World Cup) I would have put it down and stopped reading.

Noel Maurer