About the Book
From the two defining personalities of post-cyberpunk SF, a brilliant collaboration to rival 1987's The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.
Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a
gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or
another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar
system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the
sun.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has
largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds
sometimes wander… and when that happens, it casually spams Earth's
networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that
emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane
species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden apple.
So until
the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there's Tech Jury
Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing
dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young
Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the
latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy
technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful
moments on bathroom floors.
