Sura Neelin's father died while investigating a possible ecological crime, and for reasons, she doesn't know she's next on the killer's list. It's hard to disappear in a world where every bit of data is mined for significance by marketers and governments, data fed by every digital interaction as well as millions of dashboard cams, traffic cams, environmental sensors, and drones. Without knowing it though, Sura's been training for this her whole life, honing skills in getting in and out of places without being seen. Good as she is, she's going to have to up her game if she wants to stay alive and find out who killed her father and why.

When everything is watching you, where can you hide? The answer turns out to be by dropping out of the real world and into the LARPs that are hidden in plain sight. Shakespeare was close when he said all the world's a play...but really it's a game, though games can be deadly.

Stealing Worlds is something of a departure for the author, though not in terms of providing a story both thoughtful and exciting. This book could have come from one of the cyberpunk heavy hitters, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, or Gibson himself, but it's all the better from Karl Schroeder. It's an intelligent onslaught of ideas about the impact of augmented reality on fully immersive LARPs, the application of cryptocurrency tools to identity registration, realizing the real world as a fully wired space and what lies beyond the clash of capitalism and communism when property owns itself and so does everyone else. This is thought-experiment science fiction of the best kind, and I hope it spawns a revolution or two.