"I've never thought about the future…. There's only room for the right here, and the want-it-now. The future is like the moon. You never expect to go there, or think about what it might be like." (p. 19)
Banished to the latch ruled by the Bangers, Spaz needs to travel across several other latches to visit his ailing sister on the other side of the Urb. This was recommended to me as "good science fiction" (I don't like science fiction), and it wasn't bad. I think it was readable (for me) because the characters were well-developed. And the story was interesting-- the idea of people foregoing the written word for direct brain probes, and the hopelessness of the Urb actually don't seem that unbelievable to me.