First published 2014
Sandor Courane stands before TECT, the artificial intelligence that now rules Earth and its colonies. The computer has banished him to Planet D, where a mysterious illness slowly destroys every inhabitant. Courane fights to find a cure as his own memories slip away, but his only source of medical data is TECT itself. The AI has its own plans, and they don't include saving Courane or anyone else on the dying world. Across seven additional tales, Courane dies and lives again, each time confronting new versions of his struggle against forces beyond his control. Reality shifts and bends around him as he moves between worlds and lives. Effinger uses his everyman hero to examine the nature of existence itself, blurring the boundaries between what is real and what might be possible. Courane becomes both himself and his creator's mirror, swimming upstream against destiny while death and rebirth cycle endlessly around him.
Genres: science-fiction, dystopia, speculative-fiction
Vibes: dark, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: cycles-of-rebirth, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Planet D, Earth, Colonies
Period: Future
343 pages · Kindle Edition · Open Road Media Sci-Fi Fantasy
Content warnings: death, mental-illness