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Stealing Worlds Kindle Edition
From Karl Schroeder, author of Lockstep, comes the near-future, science fiction, hacker’s heist, Stealing Worlds.
The Verge—New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Check Out in June
Sura Neelin is on the run from her creditors, from her past, and her father’s murderers. She can’t get a job, she can’t get a place to live, she can’t even walk down the street: the total surveillance society that is mid-21st century America means that every camera and every pair of smart glasses is her enemy.
But Sura might have a chance in the alternate reality of the games. People can disappear in the LARP game worlds, into the alternate economy of Notchcoin and blockchains. The people who build the games also program the surveillance networks—she just needs an introduction, and the skills to play.
Turns out, she has very valuable skills, and some very surprising friends.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTor Books
- Publication dateJune 18, 2019
- File size3205 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for Stealing Worlds
“Lesser writers use technology as a metaphor; Schroeder is a master of rigor in technological speculation. Part prophet, part critic, Schroeder is a hell of a storyteller.”―Cory Doctorow
“Karl Schroeder seizes cyberpunk traditions and larps them into the onrushing era of blockchains, sentient contracts and rapid-paced convulsions of reality!”―David Brin, author of The Postman and Existence.
“This is a vivid exploration of what the coming decades might really be like, combining several major contemporary forces for change, like AI and climate change and online gaming, in a startling new vision. Add a tense plot and engaging characters, and the result is science fiction at its best.”―Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of New York: 2140
Praise for Lockstep
“It is easily the most invigorating, most scientifically curious book I've ever read that's written in a way that both young people and adults can enjoy it. It's a book that will make everyone who reads it smarter.”―Cory Doctorow, author of Walk Away
“There's a gee-whiz wonderment quality to the Lockstep that's infectious. It's also incredibly gratifying to find such a universe.” ―iO9
“Schroeder consistently has fascinating science fictional ideas and manages to make them into unputdownable stories with real characters.”―Jo Walton
“Schroeder brilliantly explores what hibernation might give―and take from―humanity. Sure, we'll get the stars. But who controls when you'll wake up?”―David Brin
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Stealing Worlds
By Karl SchroederTom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2019 Karl SchroederAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7653-9998-4
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Acknowledgments,
Part I. The Precariat,
Part II. Cloud Country,
Part III. Furo,
Part IV. A Dollhouse in the Snow,
Tor Books by Karl Schroeder,
About the Author,
Copyright,
CHAPTER 1
On a warm night in June, Sura Neelin walks past the homes where her friends once lived, past her old high school and the corner store where she used to buy Popsicles. She turns down a gravel-surfaced alley canopied by black trees, and before she's ready she's standing in the backyard of her old house. She hesitates under its shadow, flashlight in one gloved hand, screwdriver in the other.
The cicadas are winding down, the sounds of traffic and police drones not so frequent this far from the main roads. She enters the backyard through the same old rickety fence that she used to use as a chalkboard. What light there is comes from neighbors' windows peeking from behind silhouetted branches. She can smell but not see the grass, yet this yard is where she learned to walk, and her steps are sure as she makes her way to the back porch.
The screen door didn't have a lock on it when she lived here, and it doesn't now. It eases open and she pokes her head around the doorjamb. Right over there is where Nick McAllister kissed her, when they were scrunched hip to hip in Grandma's orange beanbag chair. It had been hot weather like this. Dad used to keep cartons of beer stacked next to the window; Mom didn't want the stuff cluttering up the kitchen.
There's an Ikea shelving unit where the beanbag once sprawled. Sura straightens up, realizing she's still got her feet on the porch steps. Afraid to commit. With a muttered curse she forces herself on; she knows where the boards creak on this floor, so she zigzags to the brick-framed kitchen door and puts out her hand to feel for its lock.
It's been changed. But that's what the screwdriver is for.
She jams it into the keyhole and bumps it with a practiced hand. The knob turns, she eases the back door open, and steps inside.
It smells like home.
And just like that she's hit with a wave of memories from the first months after Mom died. Dad flew home, and they spent whole days cooking just to keep each other company. Those images lead to others, of birthday parties, late-night snacks, and that day the water sprayed out of the faucet and she couldn't stop it, had to phone Dad and he'd told her, annoyed, about the cut-off valve under the sink.
She has no excuse for being here. She's here on a rumor. Like as not she'll get caught and things will get infinitely worse for her; but how much worse? They're bad, sure, but bad like everybody's life is bad. Debt bad. No future bad. Broken promises and bitterness bad. She can put up with that. She doesn't know for certain that she'll die if she walks away right now.
Sura takes a ragged breath, looks around herself, and sees that the kitchen's been repainted. Even in the dark she can tell that the shade of sky blue is relentless. Mom would have hated it.
One more deep breath, measured now, and she moves to the dining room.
* * *
Everything was fine this morning. — Fine, that is, in the sense of only being fucked up in the usual ways. At ten o'clock Sura was out riding her bike, because jittery nerves and annoyance at being let go from yet another short-term contract had her pacing the kitchen. She was trying not to look at the bills — those made of paper that are piled on the table, and the many imminent cancellation notices piled up in her inbox.
She reassured herself that everybody is in this position. It's even true, at least for those of her old friends who'll still talk to her. The economy is roaring ahead, growth is up, and the GDP has never been higher; it's just that nobody's getting by.
The white slab of warehouse which was Sura's last shit job is a couple of miles southwest of her apartment. "Forward warehousing" has finally come to Dayton: all round the city dozens of cars have rented out their trunks, which contain cigars and scotch and stuff. Every now and then one of these trunks will pop open, seemingly at random and often while the car is driving, and a drone carrying a bottle of Talisker's or Oban will zip off at right angles, delivering the package to a waiting customer and justifying the company promise: Five minutes or it's free.
Of course, the trunks need to be restocked, from slower drones that originate here. And while the public face of the operation is relentlessly high-tech, the warehouse is staffed with minimum-wage humans, mostly immigrants and kids fresh out of college, who are run off their feet. Sura wore a tracker badge because the fetchers' movements are optimized to the second, like the drones'. If she stopped walking for a minute, they docked her pay. Longer than a minute and, well ... here she was.
The bike took her through Hillcrest, a neighborhood she's known since she was a kid. Everything looked fine on the surface, though with the city's aggressive deroading program in full swing, half the streets are blocked off. Their asphalt has been torn up and grass and trees planted in its place. Still, the houses she passed seemed well-kept and delivery drones came and went. There's money somewhere, for somebody.
She glided along winding paths past the beautiful homes, peeking through living room windows while calculating how far that last paycheck would get her and wondering what came next. The last of Mom's savings have run out; her buffer is gone. Nobody who knows her will let her couch surf. Time to go online and hunt for some stranger who needs a roommate.
It's six years since Mom died. The echoes of that still chase her, in the form of crushing debt and memories of Mom's long slow decline. Toward the end Sura's whole waking life was consumed with taking care of her. The trauma's still with her but she'd go back to that time in a heartbeat because, despite the awfulness and the sense of them being abandoned both by the world and by Dad, her life had meaning. The tightly structured days, the narrow focus, the complete impossibility of going out; it all hurt. So many movies missed. Yet she'd kept Mom's music playing for her right up until the last day.
She still listens to the old tunes, but the life behind them is gone.
The warehouse job felt like her last chance at a lot of things — income, purpose, some kind of dignity; with it blown sky-high, a long, dull period in her life seems to be ending. She'd put her head down and peddled harder but the anxieties built and built, chasing her like leaves in her wake. She wasn't going to make it. In desperation, for the first time since Mom died Sura gave herself permission to reach back to a coping mechanism from before that time. She'd had a trick for dealing with shit once, an effective one. It's been years since she used it because in the old days, it usually ended with her doing a B&E. Mom never knew, and in her last days, Sura had promised never to disappoint her. Still ...
She calls this maneuver the fuck-you.
The bills, the dead-end jobs, the nervous exhaustion of living in a country that's in a state of perpetual, low-grade civil war — all of these things nag and peck at her, all day, every day. Really, there was only one thing to say to all of it.
Fuck you.
She smiled. Yes, this is exactly what she needed.
Money problems: fuck you.
Nobody likes you: well, fuck you.
Dad's an asshole, and Mom is dead: then, fuck you.
The rush of anger was exhilarating — but it's just the primer. Now some old neglected engine caught, a power she'd built for herself as a kid in those many evenings spent in her room listening to Mom and Dad fight. Cycling down these familiar streets, canopied by green and awash in the roar of the cicadas, Sura shouted screw you to all the baggage of her life and kicked it overboard.
Her imagination broke free at last. Lifted by fantasy, she pictured herself rising to visit the treetops. She felt the tentative touch of millions of leaves as she turned and gyred above the maze. She looked down upon herself and from here it was plain she was being observed, but not by the neighborhood-watch drones. The cicadas were taking note of her, and the squirrels, skunks nesting under the porches, raccoons in the garages. Even the trees must feel her presence, as they breathed her exhalations. None were spies for some dark extractive power. Rather, she moved in the embrace of her neighbors and friends, a family she'd been born into.
She glimpsed it then, the web of exchanges holding this family together. True, the flowers traded their nectar, there were markets in the bushes, but there were also gifts being bestowed, such as the oxygen sighing from the leaves, the flows of nutrients in the ground as older trees gave of themselves to nurture the younger. Light flooding everything, heat making the air tremble, and everywhere little leaf factories banging on incoming molecules with their trip hammers, infinitesimal welders on microscopic scaffolds throwing sparks as mitochondrial cranes lofted newly minted proteins to tiny workers assembling new cells. All these trillions of projects ran independently yet were somehow nested in harmonious circles, invisible to the old man mowing his lawn, to the worried drivers, the delivery guy hauling boxes out of the back of his van. A secret known only to her.
On the bike path, at the eye of this hurricane of motion and industry, a small woman, earbuds in, sped along to a soundtrack of digital beats and pygmy chants.
For a few minutes, she was actually and miraculously herself. She could do anything, and maybe she should ... And then her phone rang.
She had her smart glasses on, so she replied in hands-free mode. "Hello?"
"Sura, thank God I got through. Listen, it's me, Marjorie."
Marj. The fuck-you collapsed. The bike wobbled. "What do you want?" She'd spoken to Dad's new piece exactly twice since he and Mom split up. Why the hell was she calling now?
"Sura, I know you've got — I don't know how to say — Listen. Have you received any packages lately? From your dad?"
"What? No, what?"
"Okay. Um. Sura." She heard Marj take a sharp, half-caught breath. "He's dead, Sura.
"Your father's been murdered. And the people who did it may be after you, too."
* * *
Jim said if something like this happened, to look in that spot you signed, Marjorie had told her. He said you'll know what he means.
Now, she crosses her old dining room in three quick steps. She's all focus and knows exactly where she's going. Whatever furniture these new homeowners may have put in the way, she can push it aside, she can even smash things if she has to because looting this place is literally only going to take a second.
She was eleven when they renovated the house. Dad brought her in one day, and she was fascinated to see how the interior walls had turned skeletal. The living room's outer wall was now exposed brick.
As she traced its roughness with a finger, Dad grinned and pulled a Sharpie out of his pocket. "Why don't you sign it?" he said. "They'll be putting new drywall up tomorrow. Nobody'll ever know it's there. Nobody but you and me."
SURA NEELIN she wrote on the brick. The rest of the gutted interior barely registered on her. She had signed her house!
She has her phone out and ready, the NFC reader app glowing on its face. Dad used to tease her by asking if she remembered where her signature was. She was always proud to show him: just step into the living room and turn right, go to the wall and slide the phone along it at the height of her solar plexus ...
She steps in and turns — and there are bookshelves on the wall.
Sura just stares at them. Dad had been so clever, after all: how could he hide a file storage chip so nobody can ever find it no matter how many drawers they rip out or light fixtures they unscrew, yet have the information literally at your fingertips? Simply slap an NFC sticker on the back of the drywall, right where his daughter had signed the bricks it would rest against. Snap snap snap said the nailgun, and then the new wall was up. The NFC tag was Dad's secret stash, so secret that she was nineteen before he told her about it — and by that time, the house was sold.
The new owners haven't gutted the place the way the Neelins did. And why shouldn't they screw two sets of bookshelves into the studs? They don't know that this was the wall the couch was against, the one Mom spent her last weeks on as the cancer killed her. The shelves are about three feet tall and start about three and a half feet up from the floor. Hipshot in a slab of streetlight that leans in from the front window, Sura contemplates the steps she's going to have to take to get through the one that's covering her signature.
She pushes back on the memories of kneeling by the couch, mashing Mom's food for her; Think, think. With luck, the shelves are just open frames with the drywall exposed behind them ... She pulls out some Nora Roberts hardcovers and puts her hand out to find faux-wood particleboard where there should be wall. The shelf's got a back. Hopefully that's not too thick, you can only read an NFC from an inch or two away, and the drywall drastically thins the signal. She slides the phone around for a while, but the backing of the shelf must be blocking it entirely. She can't be sure she's even swiping the phone over the right spot.
Shoulders hunched, feeling the ghosts now and the presence of sleepers in the master bedroom directly overhead, she begins pulling books with trembling fingers. She stacks them carefully but quickly until the shelving unit is empty, then feels for the heavy screws that must hold it up. There they are. Lucky she still has her screwdriver.
The first screw doesn't pretend to budge. "Damn fuck shit motherfucker cunt shit ..." She lacerates her palms twisting, but it's no use. The whole plan's gone south, she should bolt out the back, find some alternative, except she can't because Dad's sins are being visited upon her, and if it were just the cops coming after her (and her sitting calmly on her couch, arms held up for the handcuffs) then that would be okay. It won't be the police or the FBI, though. The FBI care, but they don't care, not to the point of murder. According to Marj, the people who do care aren't going to be nice about asking for whatever it is Dad put behind this wall.
For the very first time she knows that if somebody comes down the stairs, bleary-eyed and demanding to know what's going on, she's going to have to hurt them. She can't leave this spot, is trapped to run as long as it takes in a tight circle around this one damned screw — Leaning in, teeth grinding and her whole body a ramrod, she finally feels it give. She keeps folding herself around it, as with a series of groans and creaks the thing loosens and comes out.
That was the top left one. A little clear voice in her head comments that she should have begun at the bottom.
Fine fine, whatever, she goes for those screws. The lower right one is easy, and that leaves the lower left. As she starts on it, she hears footsteps on the stairs.
It really, really doesn't matter at this point. She keeps cricking her hands around the screwdriver.
"Who are you?"
It's a little girl's voice.
Sura glances back. There's a silhouette on the stairs.
"I'm just fixing the bookshelf," she whispers. "Go back to bed."
"Oh. Okay." The figure turns and starts back up.
Cindy-Lou Who, thinks Sura and she nearly laughs out loud. The third screw pops out and the shelf becomes a pendulum. She grabs her phone off The Cambridge History of China and slides it along the wall, swinging the shelf this way and that to get at the smooth white surface behind.
Ping.
Now it's ballet time but with no soundtrack she can imagine; somehow Sura's turning on her toes as she threads the stacks of books, then she pads through the dining room, the unfamiliar kitchen and porch. She's unreeling her whole life, bye-bye Momma, bye-bye Dad and grief-cooking, bye-bye Nick and your kiss, and she's on the lawn pocketing an unknown legacy, and walking raccoon roads under the darkest trees and burnt-out streetlights, out of a neighborhood that's no longer hers.
* * *
She spends twenty minutes standing in the bushes across the street from her apartment block. She's cased buildings like this dozens of times; it's almost refreshing to be doing it again after years away from the craft.
When she's satisfied that nobody else is lurking around her place, Sura jogs from the shadows to the apartment's bright lobby. Her heart is pounding as she approaches her own unit, it's absurdly like she's about to break into her own home. But there could be someone there.
Nobody is, there's only the depressing bills, the useless knickknacks she's accumulated over the years. She doesn't turn on the lights.
The apartment is small enough that the only place she could find for her 3-D printer was on a stand in the walk-in closet. Leaning under jackets and blouses, she calls up one of the files she took from the NFC tag. The file's name is SURA PRINT ME. She shoots it to the printer.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroeder. Copyright © 2019 Karl Schroeder. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B07GVCBKGZ
- Publisher : Tor Books (June 18, 2019)
- Publication date : June 18, 2019
- Language : English
- File size : 3205 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 311 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #220,380 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #618 in Hard Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #810 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Books)
- #1,326 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
I was born September 4, 1962 in Brandon Manitoba. My family are Mennonites, part of a community which has lived in southern Manitoba for over one hundred years. I am the second science fiction writer to come out of this small community -- the first was A.E. van Vogt!
I moved to Toronto in 1986 to pursue my writing career. I married Janice Beitel in April 2001 and our daughter Paige was born in May 2003.
I divide my time between writing fiction and consulting--chiefly in the area of Foresight Studies and technology.
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Unfortunately this time he chose bitcoin and so the book was obsolete before it hit the shelves.
So, one can argue with many of his technological choices, but that isn’t what I would like to discuss. I have arguments with the underlying ethics of the characters( whether these have anything to do with Schroeder himself is, other than one point to be noted later, both unknown and irrelevant).
The main subplot of the book is (classically for the genre) the amnesia of one of the main characters and her attempts to find out who she is. This is the character called Compass, hence the compass on the cover. As a twist, although she cannot remember moment to moment and confabulates to fill in the blanks, some of her extended family is still present to, in their view, support and help her. They have been doing this since the traumatic ( and stereotypical) event that occurred when she was 12 and triggered the memory loss. She’s somewhere in her twenties now, from context. So, we have, presented in a completely positive light, an adult woman who is being continually pressured to become the person she was at the age of 12. Her aunt and cousin interfere with her choices, her autonomy and her sense of self—essentially via high tech possession— to return her to the “ innocent” person ( they thought) she was at 12. Who she though she was at 12, and every other age, has been /completely erased./ The language they and others use to describe her is infantilizing.
The sex/love interest of the protagonist has also escaped a family who try to restore her to the person she used to be—or perhaps the person they thought she once was. She has escaped and found a way to study at university. At the climax of the book, her family also appears out of nowhere to kidnap her and lock her away where they try to brainwash her via argument etc to become what they want. This is portrayed as completely awful and her lover and friends( including Compass) rescue her and return her to the life she chose as a teenager.
From what I have said so far, there are three differences between these situations
1. Compass is exposed to extremely high tech means of persuasion and the other character to extremely low-tech means.
2. Compass has no friends who argue against her family, while Character B has a full support network.
3. Compass has no independent sense of self with which to resist her family, while the other character’s mind remains entirely her own.
From this, to me, it would be FAR FAR WORSE to be Compass. The other character’s situation is horrible, especially since I do not agree that “ prostitution is work,” but she escapes multiple times and is always free to change her mind. Compass is living a nightmare.
So what differences have I hidden from you?
Compass is Native American ( Anishinaabe to be precise) and her family intervened to prevent her from becoming deeply entwined in capitalist power structures in her search for herself. In particular, they are horrified that she tries to incarnate as a fast-fashion clothing outlet.
Character B is from a Southern Christian family that disavows technology, has huge amounts of money( how, if they have disavowed tech?) and has built bunkers. Schroeder names this future faction Trumpist.
Let me note one thing about Schroeder himself: He is Canadian and from his portrayal I do not believe he has ever met, as human beings, anyone from this particular American minority. After all, as everyone can see, I am writing from the United States and I have never knowingly met a bunker-building anti-tech evangelical Christian. They certainly exist, but they are a small minority. There’s no shame in not meeting every subgroup that appears in one’s book, but perhaps, in order to not look like one is ignorantly stereotyping foreigners, one should at least try to see things from all characters’ points of view, and not just learn about people by reading the words( or worst of all, the tweets) of those who hate them the most.
I will end on a positive note. This book becomes extremely fast paced and impossible to put down about a third of the way in. Although the ending is predictable, some of the intermediate plot point resolutions are more nuanced than the above may lead you to guess. I do still recommend reading the book, if one can stand reading a few hundred pages about bitcoin, but read carefully and with an eye towards argument. The future it portrays is meant to be both horrifying and hopeful, and it is, but the horror is not (only) where the characters believe it is.
Top reviews from other countries
The author's first novel, Ventus, was eventually followed by another novel in the same universe although largely using completely different characters and a few hundred years in the past. This book is set in that universe again, and again doesn't really share main characters but is set in a few hundred years in the past. If trends continue, the next book in this universe should be sent in the actual past. But of course, trends probably won't continue, and that's part of what this book is about, how existing patterns don't work anymore (if they ever did) and using technology to find new ones.
I'm a big fan of Schroeder's work, and as such this is one of a very small number of books I've pre-ordered long before it came out. And on some levels, the book gave me exactly the sort of thing I love the author for... incredibly interesting speculation on technology and how it shapes and is shaped by human behavior, interesting ways AI can work, and so on.
Sadly, the book is a bit of a disappointment compared to other works by the author, just on a storytelling level. While the characters were mostly good (in a few cases I had trouble remembering who certain people were supposed to be, but only a few) it lacked in a couple other areas. A lot of the time the plot seemed to just wander, just exploring various ways the ideas he's playing with change things and interact, which is fun, but left me feeling the book didn't really get started until most of it was gone. Also, in particular, a few of the more esoteric ideas didn't really give me a good sense of how they actually worked. Maybe subsequent reads would fix this (as I got a lot more from his other books on rereading). In particular, some of the stuff revolving around the games, I got generally what they were doing but I didn't really get enough of a sense of what a person who was actually doing that would experience, if that makes sense. How immersive they were, and how that works when they're potentially in a public space where something that's outside the 'theme' of the game could intrude at any time.
Additionally, from a 'future history' standpoint, how the book turns out didn't seem to me to fit very well with the backstory outlined in the other books, aside from a few key moments, almost to the point where I wondered if it was intended as an alternate timeline where things went a different way. This sort of thing is mildly irritating to me (the type of brain who still occasionally tries to do the mental gymnastics necessary to keep comic book continuity across multiple titles straight). After thinking it through a while (and recognizing that it's quite possible it's merely my memory of specific contradictions that's faulty, since I haven't read the other books in too long) I believe the differences are minor enough and timescales large enough that I can still buy into the idea that they're all the same universe, just with some unexpected stuff happening after this story ends and some of the connections working in different ways than I'd envisioned.
All in all though, there's still more than enough in this that I could enjoy it. It was just a bit disappointing by comparison to works of the author's that include ones that I count among my favorite SF novels of all time. It's still fun to explore these ideas, and I'm still there to check out any future novels.