Sea of Glass

When I was a kid, I had pretty typical taste in Science Fiction. It was Heinlein, Asimov, and even some Piers Anthony. This book changed how I thought about science fiction. It says something, not only about the fictional world, but about our world. Instead of being about rough sketches of a characters to advance an idea, it's about a child growing up and finding out what his world is and what it means. At the same time... man, is it bleak. I recommend this book to everyone, but some people just put it down midway because they don't like the ideas that that world has to live by. It's not a book for kids, but that's why I loved it, and think it's a book that everyone should read.

A darkly gripping and starkly graphic picture of the near future, told in compelling first-person by the central character, as he grows from child to adult. Difficult to put down, almost forcing the reader to continue to the end. Certainly among Longyear's best, and easily on the long list of alltime best sci-fi novels.

Thomas Windom's only sin was being born an illegal child in this Malthusian nightmare set in the not-too-distant future of an overpopulated Earth. Tommy is thrown into a brutal work camp with other illegal children, a place filled with unspeakable brutality and the aching sweetness of first love. He inevitably turns to studying the system which has enslaved him and discovers the key to the prophecy made by the all-knowing computer, Mac III, which runs this frighteningly believable world. The ideas and images remain with you long after the book is over. Unforgettable.

This is perhaps the most disturbing, and one of the best, books I've read in a long time. Longyear creates an overpopulated Earth and reveals it through the eyes of illegal child Thomas Windom, who enters a children's prison at the age of seven. As he grows older, his story broadens as he faces who he is and what he must become. To tell any more would spoil one of the best and most stark science fiction novels ever written. This allegory of the importance of the individual is as powerful as the author's best and most popular work, Enemy Mine. One of my favorite parts of Sea of Glass is the way Longyear uses movies from years past to describe the main character's outlook on situations. I read in an interview that Longyear gets many ideas from the television, and this story proves it true. With the exception of maybe one or two, I had seen the movies he referenced, which added another layer to the story. This is one of the most emotional books you'll ever read, and the guy who said he had a ten year gap between this and his next novel is crazy. Longyear has been publishing steadily since the seventies.

This is brutally realistic rendering of society as it could become. One of my favorite sci-fi books of all time, I reread it every year or two to keep it fresh in my mind. Very well written with deep emotion, it involves you from the opening line and holds nothing back. This one should have won the Hugo.