I'm not caught up yet with
Finder, but I'm getting close: there are two more books after this one, which means I'm now in the back third. And I find the world-building is still what causes me the most consternation, but I'll try to hold that for the end.
Voice was published in 2011, collecting pages published online a few years earlier and (I think) somewhat revised for book publication. It's the ninth Finder collection; see my posts on Talisman, Library Vol. 1, Dream Sequence, Mystery Date, The Rescuers, and Five Crazy Women for more background.
The world is medium-future, set on an Earth that seems to have been depopulated. There are some cultural artifacts from our 20th century, but McNeil never explains how we got to this world. It's divided into a few gigantic domed cities, which seem to be more a vertical stack of basically 20th century cities (literally, sitting on top of each other and held up by handwavium since we never see the massive structural columns that would require) rather than the more usual Trantorian hives of corridors and apartments.
This is because, I think, McNeil wants to have an essentially late-capitalist 21st century society in those cities, with some shiny advanced tech, to tell the stories she wants to tell. So there need to be individual houses - gigantic mansions and hovels - that stand alone, have streets in front of them, and cars whizzing by. There need to be dive bars with windows in their bathrooms one can shimmy out of, and recognizable malls. If the dome means the poor sections are noirishly gloomy all of the time, well, that's a bonus.
Living in the city is a massively regimented and stratified society with no apparent government, organized almost entirely by custom and ruled by a matrix of self-defining and often competing "clans," who form the aristocracy and have all of the money. For example, Medwars are all dark-haired people who get medical degrees and work as cops - this is almost literally how McNeil describes them, albeit not all at once. In the books, we tend to focus on the Llaverac clan in the city of Anvard, a flighty, image-obsessed, all-female-presenting group of mostly media personalities to which the Family of Protagonists belong. They may be more corrupt, greedy, and Procrustean than the average clan, for maximum drama, but McNeil's notes make it clear they're not different, just more obviously flamboyant about it.
McNeil here finally makes it clear that most people are not full clan members - that's been implicit for a while, and is the thrust of the main plot of Voice. Her notes also say pretty explicitly that the rest of the population have only bad options: there's seemingly no way to just do a job, open a store or provide a service, so everyone not part of the aristocratic clans is either an indentured servant of someone in the clans or dependent on "patronage" from an aristocrat, which McNeil notes repeatedly is not just about being a sex slave...so it's probably mostly being a sex slave.
The rest of the world is desolate wilderness, at least according to those city-dwellers. (They may be somewhat biased.) In particular, we've never seen anything within a million miles of farming anywhere in this world; maybe they have massive hydroponics levels in those cities or maybe it's just a detail McNeil doesn't care about. Living in that wilderness are Ascians, who I'm afraid come across as Wild West Movie Indians a lot of the time: principled and free, with Strange Ways and Complicated Rituals, second-class citizens even below the "culls" and half-breeds of the clans, their craggy faces filled with pain at the indignities they are forced to endure in this sad world.
Voice is the story of Rachel, oldest child of the Grosvenor family we've been following from the beginning. (Her sister Marcie's story was told in Talisman.) She's the one of the three kids who basically fits Llaverac standards, so it's her job in the family to be accepted as a full-clan member, to be the aristocrat who can protect the other members of the family for the next generation. And this is the story of cotillion season, more or less: a televised pageant (since Llaveracs are dramatic down to their core) in which that year's "girls" compete for however many slots are available, to either become part of the ruling class for the rest of their lives or, if they fail, to have a moment of fame helping them to find a fairly nice person to whom to be a sex slave.
(I may be slightly exaggerating. Prostitution is respected in this world, as we saw in Mystery Date. But it also seems to be a career choice a lot of attractive young people find themselves shoved into for lack of other options, and I don't think their later lives go all that well.)
Rachel is competing this year, one of twenty young Llaverac "girls" (many of whom have penises, as we see in the first scene). And if she does not get clan status...well, her mother is still around, and fairly powerful. They have other connections. Her life won't be immediately destroyed. But the options for both her and her two sisters will narrow massively, and the clock will start ticking against the time their mother is no longer around to protect them. (There's something very Jane Austen about the core set-up, under all the girls-with-penises and shrugging acceptance of the sex-slave career path.)
Voice's main plot is set in motion by an act of violence: Rachel is mugged, on the way home from what seems to be the first night of this gala competition. And she loses the physical token she absolutely needs, as part of this complicated ritual, to assert her right to be a full-clan Llaverac.
Rachel is flighty and has a deep well of self-loathing, but this is an existential crisis that she throws herself into - she has to get that token (an antique ring) back, or scheme some kind of replacement. She thinks if she can find Jaeger, her mother's occasional half-Ascian lover and the overall main character of the whole Finder series, that he can solve the problem for her.
One of the main types of fiction, for centuries, is Protagonist Faces Impossible Problem, Sees How Everyone Else Has Failed, and Succeeds (Because Protagonist). That's more-or-less what happens here: Rachel's story, as a Grosvenor, is happy in the end, but McNeil's notes make it clear that there are...millions, maybe? of similar stories every single year in this society, and they mostly end with the culls becoming sex slaves, or, at best, indentured servants who are also probably expected to have sex with their bosses, at least as long as they're nubile and attractive.
And that led me to my main worldbuilding complaint this time. This story starts with a small act of violence, the mugging. That made me realize how little violence there is in this world, despite immense pressures and no clear government above the clans. We see cops a lot here, as we have before. But McNeil makes it clear that they're all Medwars, and she also makes it clear that each clan is most concerned about the clan, and handles things their way. Even assuming that the other clans bribe cops six ways from Sunday - they must, right? - when it comes down to it, the police are already a distinct, discrete, separate and self-organized group in this society, and I still don't see why they would care about or listen to anyone outside their clan about anything.
But, more importantly: this is a world with only bad choices, most of the time, for most young people. It is profoundly unfair, and obviously so, corrupt and twisted - with mass-media to spread stories of that unfairness.
There would be multiple terrorist movements in a city like Anvard. Maybe an Ascian one as the most radical, setting bombs to collapse major parts of the city. Young anarchists or communists, some variety of visions for a cleaner, fairer world on the other side of bloodshed. Maybe even clan-aligned groups that attack rival clans, a la Ireland in the 1970s or the Middle East for the past seventy years.
The clans also would not be static. One or two might be actually ancient, but I'm sure several have been smashed in the past century, destroyed by combinations of bad planning, scheming by rivals, the inevitable paucity of their new-member pipeline, and just bad luck. And others would have jumped up - maybe street gangs, maybe corporations - creating new clans with initially vague criteria or taking over the name of defunct clan and pretending to be its inheritor.
This world just seems way too static for how much stress everyone in it is under. There's just no way that it keeps chugging along in the same vein this way. Maybe the next city over was destroyed by a terrorist bomb, and everyone is scared and tentative because of that. Maybe the Medwar cops mostly spend their time smashing cells of radical groups looking to destroy the entire society.
Maybe. But, even though the stories McNeil tells are engrossing and thought-provoking, I can't help but think this whole world is collapsing even as we look at it: that it's going through it's own late-capitalism crisis, and McNeil just hasn't shown us the bloody end of it yet.