Society, after suffering various crises (including pandemics), has returned from the brink via a carefully controlled, male-dominated technocracy called the “SCS.” Only “Upper Sphere” elites have the right to easily marry, bear children, and serve useful functions as artists, planners, legislators, and the like. “Outcastes,” at the opposite end of the social spectrum, are simply housed, tolerated, and kept amused. Former soldier John Wilson—who was raised in reduced circumstances in embattled Chicago, distinguished himself in military service in a war against an Islamist empire, and was rewarded with a Harvard Law education—has a modest legal practice. But he secretly opposes the establishment’s foundations, particularly its religious aspects. Though he cooperates with SCS strictures on “pragmatic” grounds, he avoids opportunities for coveted class advancement, dwelling in a condo in a committed relationship with a sex robot. After Wilson transgresses an absurd tangle of laws by preventing a woman’s suicide on the waterfront, he’s summoned to a hearing to determine his suitability (the surveillance state has been monitoring him) for a dizzying Upper Sphere upgrade. The plotline—which is quite thin, though it strengthens in the third act—provides a framework for postulations, rants, classical allusions, arguments about the existence of God, and lengthy discussions of ethics, justice, altruism, love, and other heady subjects (the author has published numerous works, fiction and nonfiction, centered around the idea of adopting nihilism as a practical approach to life). Patient readers will ultimately be rewarded with an especially affecting conclusion, but first they must navigate the disassociated hero’s dense, often circular internal monologues and heady musings: “Struggle and doubt exist and with them Others exist, otherwise nothing exists. Without struggle and doubt, I would be one with the universe and disappear. I do not want to be one with the universe. I reject it as it rejects me.”
