The Sea of Glass by Barry B. Longyear offers a fictional story about a young man raised in heavily guarded detention camps, for being illegally born in a society that strictly forbids overpopulation.
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Author: Barry B. Longyear
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 375
Goodreads Rating: 3.9 of 5
My Rating: 7.5 of 10
For The Latest Price: Sea of Glass
***Warning Spoilers Below This Point***
In an overpopulated world, the supreme ruler, MAC III takes drastic measures to curb the looming problem. It is now illegal to have children. They take children born during this time to orphanages and treat them inhumanely.
Thomas Windom is one of these “illegal” children. Discovered by authorities, they took him to the orphanages where rape, murder and frequent beatings are the order of the day. It radicalises the soldiers in these camps to treat the “illegal” children as if they were not human.
It leads to an uprising of the orphans and they form a club to retaliate. After one particularly bad incident, Thomas moves into an autistic state, later to emerge after six years. He learns that the world is inspired by a powerful supercomputer named MAC III who planned a war to reduce the overpopulated earth. To understand why the computer was doing this, he seeks knowledge, and this nudges the MAC. In a negotiation effort, the MAC gives Windom a chance to join it. It offers him a chip for insertion in his body and links him to MAC where he will work for MAC directly.
Thomas soon becomes an assassin, showing no remorse even for children he knew from the orphanages. He soon understands that MAC is advanced beyond human knowledge and that the war is intermittently inevitable. With this thinking, he pushes the button that triggers doomsday. He knew that MAC keeps an eye out for everyone, and he cannot escape MAC as he had previously done at the detention camps.
The scenes at the detention camp are disturbing and overdone. I give this book a rating of 7.5 out of 10 ratings because of a good plot, but the surrender of Thomas to MAC III was too simple.
For The Latest Price: Sea of Glass
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