I'm reading this on my lunch breaks:
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Pretenders to the Throne of God
The fifth installment in the "Tyrant Philosophers" series, the series takes inspiration from the european independence movements of the 1840s. It is based in a world where magic isn't just real, but where hundreds of different magic systems all come together and clash, as each different culture has several ways that things are done. From helliers calling demons through contracts to work the industrial mills, to the leftovers from thousand-year-dead necromantic empires that locked themselves away in their tombs, to a city that has actually figured out utopia, and can work any miracle (but the city has a hard population cap) to minor gods who actively manifest and can do miracles, to the keepers of a mysterious forest that seems to allow people to move between realities... For a price.
Between them all (or, rather, surrounding them), we have the Palleseen: a new imperial power swiftly taking over the world. Strictly "rational", abhorring all gods, woowoo, and mumbo-jumbo, the Palleseen are all-business, exporting their "perfection" (in the form of absolute bureaucracy) to the rest of the world by diplomacy, and, failing that, the underside of an iron-shod army-regulation boot. From a Pal-occupied city turning into a powderkeg of rebellion, to the front lines of one of the Palleseen's ever-present wars, to a country facing the Pal's more diplomatic face, to a city under siege, we see this world the Pals seek to "perfect" through the eyes of the weirdos, the outcasts, and those whose livelihoods rely on the messy inefficiencies of human life (those whom the Palleseen philosophically reject, and yet rely on as integral parts of civilisation) weirdos both fighting against and part of the Palleseen engine.
This series examines the inescapable fallacy of a system which claims to be perfect, and how systems that work require the flexibility afforded by diversity of thought. Through every crack we glimpse as the imperialist war machine plods implacably forward, we glimpse the inevitable fall of such a machine, and have to ask "at what point is there hope in standing against an unbeatable foe? Should you stand against it anyway?"
