World Running Down

"This is a science fiction story set in dystopian Utah. A salvager named Valentine is trying to raise enough money to gain citizenship to Salt Lake City, where he will be able to get gender-affirming surgery (he’s trans). Salt Lake City is the utopia of this world, and everybody else lives in the desert beyond it, scrabbling for scraps. Inside Salt Lake City, residents have free healthcare, housing, food, and comfort; outside it, people live in a very desperate state. Valentine takes a job with Osric, an AI trapped in an android body. And, of course, they fall in love along the way! The problem is, Val starts to realizes this job is not what it seems, and he has to choose whether he’ll sacrifice his principles to get what he wants – or give up his own dreams to help others. Yes, all these little city-states are run by super-smart AIs. There’s an interesting government structure between the AIs and the people who are leading the city-state. This book takes a neutral view of AIs in terms of morality – they’re not unlike people, except they’re much smarter. And then there are androids, which are not supposed to be sentient. So when Osric, an AI, is forced into an android body, he is very upset – it’s a poignant parallel to Val, who is struggling with his own dysphoria. It’s an example of how SFF can be used to tell human stories that are true to the contemporary world."