Lady of Mazes

Author and professional futurist Karl Schroeder, whose novels Ventus and Permanence have established him as a groundbreaking visionary in hard science fiction, extends his imagination into Larry Niven territory, returning to the same distant future in which Ventus was set, but employing a broader canvas, to tell the story of Teven Coronal, a ringworld with a huge multiplicity of human civilizations.
Brilliant but troubled Livia Kodaly is Teven's only hope against invaders both human and superhuman who would destroy its fragile ecologies and human diversity.
Filled with action, ideas, and intellectual energy, Lady of Mazes is the hard SF novel of the year.

"With Lady of Mazes, Schroeder gives us another novel of marvelous insight—brightest glimpses of where our technology of communication and computation may be taking us." —Vernor Vinge
"A complete original . . . it's the most thought-provoking and interesting work of hard SF that I've read in the past year, and it deserves to be recognized as belonging to the cutting edge of the new far future in SF." —Charles Stross

"An astonishing saga. One helluva read!" —Charles Harness
"Karl Schroeder has always had a knack for intelligent and provocative thought experiments, disguised as space opera. Now he ups the ante with a fascinating riff on consensual (and conflicting) realities. Lady of Mazes contains more cool ideas than Ventus and Permanence combined." —Peter Watts