The activists, while an essential part of the book, were annoying enough to drop it that quarter star. There were also a couple of places where it almost wavered across the line between "smack you in the face with reality" and "preach at you", though in general I thought it did an excellent job at making the politics and the story one cohesive whole. Otherwise basically a perfect book that I really want to rate a full five stars. I particularly loved how it pretended to be something just a little bit different than it was at the beginning, with the footnotes echoing a more traditional "alt-future" vibe—there were some where if you didn't know better, you'd think the facts were made up, and some that were clearly a "future fact". By the time the footnotes became just "here's this terrible statistic about the US prison system", I felt like a thoroughly boiled frog. Also a very interesting contrast to Too Like the Lightning (thinking particularly of the Servicers), which I read sort of in parallel. This will definitely sit with me for a while.