For some reason, I’ve read a number of novels recently set in the near future, working through the implications of environmental catastrophe, economic inequality, technological advances. I’m growing impatient with many of them because they assume people, in a pinch, will turn on each other, that those who aren’t predators risk being prey. Once the threat of fill in the blank comes to pass, we’ll not only lose everything, we’ll be at each others’ throats. This novel is a utopian fork of dystopia by someone who loves technology but doesn’t love the way intellectual property regimes restrict its use. Though I didn’t find it entirely successful as a novel (the prose is . . . prosaic, the technology seems suspiciously failure-proof, and the characters won’t stop talking), it poses an interesting thought experiment: what if, in a world of abundance unevenly distributed, people simply walked away from our market-based assumptions and started new communities based on sharing and repurposing rather than ownership and consumerism? What if we refused to want stuff but instead trusted we could make whatever we needed from scraps? (That's a new wrinkle on "freedom from want.") What if resistance was not futile, but also non-violent? What if all the singular technologies Silicon Valley titans dream about, including automation reducing the need to work, the ability to fabricate all manner of things, and even to overcome death itself, weren’t the preserve of the super-rich but rather were developed by people who rejected a precarious gig economy to make a different and better world?returnreturnIn between long conversations there are battles and kidnappings and sex and mind-bending plot twists as people who die live on as sentient and self-aware backups. Mixed in with “hey, what cool things could we do?” there’s also “what does it mean to be human?” and “why should we put up with things as they are when we could do better? And what does ‘better’ look like?”returnreturnJust as humor is harder to pull off than tragedy, writing hope is harder than writing despair. I appreciated the way this novel takes up the big challenges of our day and imagines not just how bad it could get but what alternatives we could create. Above all, I was grateful for the recognition that we aren’t all helpless or selfish at heart, that we have generous impulses that could save us if we put them to work, that when things go wrong, the neighbors will come out to help. As they do.