Art Berry has a fairly unusual job, even by the standards of the revolutionary knowledge economy of 2012. Art is a "user-experience designer," someone who mediates between engineers—"autistics" one and all, in Art's view—and the customer. Art not only smooths out the marketplace path of products designed by others, but is able thanks to his insights to come up with startling new schemes and gadgets of his own. It's one such brainstorm that will result in a ton of trouble for Art.

But Art has affiliations with a group that's more important than any of his temporary employers, and that's the Eastern Standard Tribe. This cohort of like-minded souls believe in the superiority of the culture of their adopted time zone, the East Coast of the United States, whether they inhabit it virtually or physically. The members of EST work to accrue power and fortune and prestige to their region, and finds themselves maneuvering against other tribes such as the GMTs and PSTs. Currently, Art and his fellow EST tribesman Fede are operating in London under deep cover. Their mission? To screw up the user-experience design of European products, causing the Europeans to lose market share.

But the assignment is wearing Art down, and when he falls in love with an ex-pat California girl named Linda, he at first welcomes the emotional diversion. But Linda is subject to wild mood swings, which keep Art more jazzed than relaxed. Nonetheless, in an inspired moment of downtime, Art comes up with a grand money-making scheme he intends to sell to the the corporations that run the East Coast's freeways, earning a personal profit while helping his tribe. He cuts Fede in out of friendship, and eventually finds himself back on his beloved East Coast, dispatched to clinch the deal. But Fede's treachery, abetted by Linda, lands Art in a sanatorium instead. Desperate to escape and thwart his former partners, Art instead manages only to dig himself deeper and deeper into the quicksand of the mental-health bureaucracy. Will Fede and Linda get away scot-free? Will Art ever get down off the roof of the sanatorium, where he's made his last-ditch stand? And which tribe will win in the end?

Thrilling third-level speculations

Remember when the science-fictional date of "2012" used to represent the furthest reaches of the future, an era when personal jetpacks and moon vacations would be common occurences? Now, of course, that date is just around the corner, and we have, we think, a more accurate conception of what that future year will entail. Yet the prospect of writing believable, insightful SF about a time so close is actually harder than writing about the same year from, say, the vantage of 1945 or 1965. It takes a writer plugged into the zeitgeist, one with formidable lateral-thinking abilities, to conjure up a scenario that is neither too timid nor too bold. Luckily, Cory Doctorow is just such a writer, possessing the massive chops necessary for the job. I believe it was Isaac Asimov who first distinguished between first-, second- and third-level speculations, using the automobile as an example. A first-level speculation circa 1900 is that one day there will be millions of cars on paved roads. A second-level speculation is that there will be such a thing as drive-in movies. But a third-level speculation is that teenage pregnancies will rise as kids use cars to make out at the drive-in. Like Charles Stross, Doctorow is in the business of fashioning frissons almost entirely out of third-level speculations.

This ability was what made Robert Heinlein such a genius. And while it's become as big a cliche to call someone the "new Heinlein" as it has to call a singer the "new Dylan," I can't resist sticking that label on Doctorow. If Heinlein were alive today and Doctorow's age, this is the kind of fiction he'd be writing. The old RAH shibboleths—libertarian sentiments, "practical man" capability, etc.—are not really the defining essential qualities of the man. Instead, it's a keen sense of what's hot and meaningful in the culture and how it will develop. And that's what Doctorow possesses. In fact, the secret subtext for this second novel of his might be Heinlein's The Door Into Summer (1957), which also featured an inventor and a treacherous girlfriend and colleague.

In any case, Doctorow embodies his concepts and his grand theme—"Would you rather be smart or happy?"—in amiably goofy prose and in a very clever narrative structure. Just as Art's sensibilities are split between virtual and physical time zones, so is the story split between real-time and past-time narrative arcs: Art is simultaneously telling us his story from within the insane asylum and in the form of flashbacks. Likewise, he shifts between first person and third. This narrative schizophrenia is a perfect objective correlative to the ideas in the book. And for anyone who enjoyed the humor in Doctorow's earlier books (A Place So Foreign and 8 More, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) and his ability to spin off maxims—"perception of functionality trumps the actual function"—rest assured that his touch is defter than ever.

You won't have a giddier or more stimulating time anywhere than on Art Berry's "circadian merry-go-round."