Archform: Beauty

Four centuries in the future, the world is rich - nanomachines watch the health of the wealthy and manufacture food and gadgets for everybody - but no utopia, as we see in the lives of five very different people: a singing teacher, a news researcher, a police investigator, a politician, and a ruthless businessman. Theirs is a society where technology takes care of everyone's basic needs but leaves most people struggling to extract a meaningful life from a world crowded with wonders but empty of commitment and human connection. Alternating the voices and experiences of these five characters in a tour de force of imaginative creation, L. E. Modesitt overlaps, combines, and builds their disparate stories into a brilliant tale of future crime and investigation, esthetic challenge, and personal triumph. In the same way that he has built fantasy landscapes of surpassing fascination, Modesitt creates a believable future, one imbued with a deep understanding of the way politics work and how people act and react when their sense of themselves, of justice, and truth, is exploited by others for power and control. When there's nothing left to need or want, will beauty live on in people's lives or disappear forever?

In the twenty-fourth century, Earth is vastly changed. Ecological and biological catastrophe have raged across the planet, but for the survivors, it is a world of plenty. Even the poorest live in abundance, and the upper class - the ascendant - command technological marvels. Ten years ago, rising star in the Marines Jonat deVrai, shocked his superiors by walking away from the Corps after witnessing atrocity and hypocrisy during the reclamation of Guyana. Starting his life over, he established himself as the world's expert on the effectiveness of "prod" - product placement, the only advertising which viewers will allow through the sophisticated filters they all use against unwanted intrusions on their electronic link networks. Prod, reinforced with sublims and the "res" - resonant frequencies, a form of sonic branding - is the wave of the future. Jonat now advises multinational corporations on their prod campaigns. Then his comfortable world is upset when the Centre for Societal Research approaches him to study the effects of res and prod on political campaigns. After a political rally, he is jumped by armed thugs in a parking garage. A day later, a sniper ambushes him. Suspicion and conspiracy race around Jonat. Who wants him dead? With his life on the line, deVrai must sort flash from fact before it's too late.