Have a Happy Golden Straub Day!

The message floated in the sky for all to read; citizens chanted it to each other, motorists tooted it on their car horns as they drove the uncongested freeways. Earth had become a paradise, courtesy of Cordwainer Hardware International; population dwindling, war a thing of the past, free, untrammelled sex the right of all. But is paradise everything . . .?

In this vividly realised novel, S. G. Compton charts the growth of CHI and the bland, idyllic world they engineered. Too idyllic for some; for beneath the surface darker forces were at work. At their heart was Scudder Laznett; brilliant, irascible, uncompromising. Scudder had begun a little game of his own; what that game was, Pete Laznett only discovered by slow degrees.

And what he discovered was horrifying.