Excellent classic sci-fi. Superb at provoking interesting questions. Maybe The question for me: Who are you actually, when opportunity presents itself. Money, or power, in whatever form it takes, is absolutely terrifying when looked at from that lens. I’d wager that if you grew up in poverty, even more so. People become their absolute worst selves as they achieve what we label success in our society.

What if they the abstraction of influence was literalized, though? Replicating how we are socialized with that dynamic in place. Where the powerless are the designers of the world; dream crafting reality, what would that look like? The inclination to do good with power that essentially scales with ambition is a fantastic critique for many aspects of our society. From the meek “dreamers” in history, such as those we find in the future of this text, the IT space, Silicon Valley, etc. they really have shaped humanity. In some ways enriching life, other ways literally helped to destroy it further with those initial good intentions.

One of the best analogy for capitalism in this generation is that of the save the trees! Do you remember that? Save them! We’re cutting them down. Clear cutting, the world is going to be affected terribly. In response we have gone fairly paperless. And the servers we use to do this are now arguably far worse for the environment than that ever was. There are only seemingly intelligent solutions in capitalism. Stuff we can’t see the repercussions of initially. But capitalism is inherently a stupid beast. There is no good outcome and every solution becomes a new problem.

Such is the case in this book, only directly pointed at thought mechanics and the nature of humanity. I love when sci-fi books interrogate the human experience and make you think. Had this been a bit tighter of a story, short as it is, it would have easily have been 5 stars. As is, a solid 4 and more interesting than most scifi churned out today.