Thomcat
2/14/2026
Future global civilization controlled through drugs, and occasionally some folks slip through the cracks. This book has connections to 1984, Brave New World and even Logan's Run, but with a much better fight scene at the end.
The protagonist grows and stumbles throughout the book, the other characters are fairly flat. Both technology and vast distances are hand waved, but none are outside the scope of what we have today. It felt like Unicomp was leaning towards AI, but then this book was released in 1970 and Levin didn't go there, favoring instead programmers with ultimate power. I did like the writing.
I felt the "rape leading to relationship" was clumsy and didn't belong. The homogenized future consists only of English speakers, and this colonial direction even includes Mars. There are only a few Levin books that haven't been turned into film, and this one is unlikely to cross that line soon.