Harvest the Fire

Harvest the Fire, Poul Anderson, Tor Books, 1995

This is part of a far future series about a poet, Jesse Nicol, living on an Earth whose cultural and literary glory days are in the past. He travels to the moon and falls in love with a Lunarian (a human subspecies) named Falaire. She wishes to escape the rule of the Cybercosm, an intelligent, self-aware, more-than-an-artificial-intelligence system which rules Earth with a benevolent, but iron, hand. She gets Jesse, also a pilot, involved in a plot to hijack the last interplanetary shipment of anti-matter and send it toward a Lunarian asteroid colony. The anti-matter would give the Lunarians enough energy to be permanently independent of the Cybercosm.

This is an excellent story. I have avidly read science fiction for over 20 years, and Anderson is my favorite SF author, so I don't claim to be totally objective or unbiased. Still, the characters are real people, the future society building is well done, and, overall, this novel is writing raised almost to an art form. Well worth reading.