Inside our rapidly-changing world of ‘social media’, everyday people are more and more able to sort themselves into social groups predicated on finer and finer criteria. In the near future of Robert Charles Wilson’s The Affinities, this technique is certainly supercharged by fresh analytic technologies–genetic, brain-mapping, behavioral. To join among the twenty-two Affinities is definitely to improve one’s life. It’s like family, and more than family. Your fellow users aren’t like everyone else, plus they aren’t just individuals who about The Affinities are likely to like you. They’re also the people who have whom you can best cooperate in all regions of life–creative, interpersonal, also financial.

At loose ends both professional and personal, youthful Adam Fisk will take the suite of tests to find out if he qualifies for any from the Affinities, and finds that he’s a match for one of the largest, the one known as Tau. It’s utopian-at 1st. Problems in all regions of his lifestyle start to basically sort themselves out, as he becomes section of a global network of people dedicated to helping one another-to assisting him.

But as the differing Affinities place their new capabilities to the test, linked with emotions . rapidly chip aside at the energy of governments, of global corporations, of all institutions from the older world. After that, with dreadful inevitability, the different Affinities begin to visit war–with each other.

What happens next changes Adam, and his globe, forever.