Harmony

Author: Project Itoh

Like China, Japan has one of the liveliest science fiction scenes in the world, and one of the least known in the West. Very few Japanese science fiction writers have seen their work translated into English (though the related field of manga has been much more successful in that respect). Before his early death at the age of 34, Project Itoh (the pen name of Satoshi Ito), was not only one of the top award-winning sf writers in Japan, he was one of the few whose work had appeared in English.Harmony is possibly his most successful work, set in a post-apocalyptic future that has become a utopia thanks to the medical benefits of nanotechnology. But not everyone is happy with this perfect, ordered existence, and three girls try to commit suicide in protest. They fail, but thirteen years later two of the girls reunite to investigate the terrible truth underlying their perfect world.Why it's on the listHarmony received a special citation from the Philip K. Dick Award when it first appeared in America.