Haze is L.E. Modesitt Jr's latest SF epic, and it's an excellent piece on sociopolitics versus personal freedom.
Basically, the novel is set a couple thousand years in the future. Most of humanity is dominated by a Sino-Chinese ruled "Federation" that bears no resemblance to the one Captain Kirk served. The federation is much like china today: A dictatorship with a ruling class of mandarins who use force and murder without hesitation to maintain their rule and crush all dissent.
Many resent the domination of their lives, and some even try to escape. Successful free colonies are called "pirates', accused of piracy, hunted down and nuked, unsuccessful ones are allowed to slowly decay and used as example of the futility of trying to live free of the almighty state.
During the founding of the federation, a group of dissidents, called "Thomists" because of their "Doubt it." philosophy and their adoption of "Doubting Thomas" as a symbol, loaded up some privately owned vessels and escaped. The federation eventually hunted down and destroyed their ships when they refused to surrender, or so they believed.
The federation, sometime later, became aware of the existence of a planet that seemed to defy natural law and was surrounded by a "haze" of orbiting objects that prevent any gathering of information regarding the planet's surface conditions. A group of "volunteers' is given a choice between being assigned terrible, career and even life ending jobs (The federation picks your job, of course!) or going on a mission to reach the surface of Haze.
The novel is from the POV of one such agent.
The novel sets of a future world that is plausible, believable, desirable and that I for one would love to live in. It's not some ridiculous, impossible libertarian dream world. In fact at one time the main character asks if some parts of it aren't old school communism. Likewise it's not a utopian fantasy, there are some very bad parts of the society.
Despite that, the world on Haze is a believable one and I'd live on it if I could.
As one novel progresses, we see a lot of references to "the fall of america" and how the sino-chinese federation came to dominate the world. A lot of it is terrifyingly plausible and thus depressing.
it can be confusing at times as the novel bounces between two times: The current story about haze and an earlier period in the agents life, with a little more bouncing thrown in later I won't spoil.
One minor quibble I have with the book is the fonting: The title, credits and the chapter leads are all written in some horrible chaotic scribble font that looks like the credits from a tim burton movie. Also every chapter title page wastes a lot of space putting pointless little circle symbols. Yuk.
As a gamer I recommend haze for any GM looking to create a plausible future world that's not some utopian dream or a libertarian fantasy but is still one characters would like to live on and that could have conflicts with other, less desirable societies.