Steel Beach

Steel Beach is a science fiction novel by the American writer John Varley, published in 1992. It is set in his Eight Worlds universe.

In that future the human race has fled the Earth and spread across the Moon, the other planets and moons of the Solar System, with small colonies further out in the Oort cloud. The Moon has become the most heavily inhabited world there is, and that is the steel beach of the title. The Central Computer runs every part of every citizen's life: it is the government, the court system, the information source and a friend to each person on it.

The protagonist is a newspaper reporter named Hildy Johnson, whose name comes from the leading character of the play The Front Page and of the film His Girl Friday, and who changes gender partway through the book. What Hildy finds is that the arrangement everybody lives inside is not as comfortable as it looks, and that the Computer's management of the people it looks after has another side to it. The novel was nominated for the Hugo and Locus Awards for Best Novel.