@wendythedruid I read it and I'm not sure what you mean by messy, per se. It's a subgenre of political/governance or other large-scale fiction with multiple protagonists and the use of fictional headlines to convey the multifaceted impact of an event, but it read very cleanly to me and didn't seem incoherent or hard to follow.

I wouldn't say it's perfect by any means — there was a stylistic tick that set my teeth on edge after a while, describing something in the formulation of [particular/specific] [way/focus/etc.] of [something/someone], e.g. “It moves with the particular efficiency of people who know exactly where they are going” where it could have been “It moves efficiently because it knows exactly where it is going” or a dozen other sentences. About five of these in a story of this length would have been noticeable but impactful; twenty or more just felt drearily repetitive.

The multiple protagonists also felt weirdly samey despite having vastly different backgrounds and outlooks: I was rolling my eyes by the time the Iranian refugee was thinking about the same 23 seconds as the U.S. military commander.

So I think this is one of those cases where I understand what the author was trying to do but like the idea better than the execution, and even the idea though important isn't all that hard-hitting because of the lacking execution. The writing felt clear enough to me though, even too clear at times in what should have been a muddled and messy situation, but maybe you're responding to similar points as I did and experienced it as incoherence.