Karl Schroeder's "Stealing Worlds": visionary science fiction of a way through the climate and inequality crises

Karl Schroeder (previously) is literally the most visionary person I know (and I've known him since 1986!): he was the first person to every mention "fractals" to me, then "the internet" and then "the web" -- there is no one, no one in my circle more ahead of more curves, and it shows in his novels and none moreso than Stealing Worlds, his latest, which is a futuristic roadmap to how our present-day politics, economics, technology and society.

Stealing Worlds is a near-future novel of ecological and economic catastrophe, in which an ever-larger pool of people have been replaced by automation and an ever-expanding proportion of our planet is becoming uninhabitable due to climate change. Mass surveillance has spread to the internet of things, and every corner of the world is now studded with sensors that monitor things like compliance with a too-late ban on fossil fuels (while simultaneously feeding into a tight mesh of surveillance of every living thing, including humans), and ubiquitous blockchain technology is used to create transparency for the powerless masses, revealing their debts and locations to bounty hunters.

Sura, the heroine of Stealing Worlds, is barely clinging to survival when her father -- an activist doing mysterious research in Peru -- is assassinated in an attack made to look like an accident. His friends warn Sura to go underground, to use the synthetic identity her paranoid father created and nurtured for her. His paranoia is finally vindicated -- but proves to be insufficient, as Sura is quickly snatched by an armed skip-tracer who hauls her off to be turned over to her father's killers, who have used her massive debts as a pretense for kidnapping her. Read the rest