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?