Too Like the Lightning (2016)

Ada Palmer, a historian of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, imagines an Earth whose centuries of peace rest on a few powerful people and the bargains between them. By 2454 flying cars cross the planet in hours, so nations have given way to seven Hives that people join by choice, and since the Church Wars religion has been restricted, leaving talk of God to sensayers, part priest and part counsellor. The crisis that threatens it is told by Mycroft Canner, a convicted criminal serving his sentence among those leaders, in a deliberately eighteenth-century voice that takes a few chapters to settle into, and he works on you as busily as on them. It is the first of four books and stops abruptly, so have Seven Surrenders to hand.