Biting The Sun by Tanith Lee

This story takes place in a far distant furture where there is no true death, sexual gender, racial ethinicity, sexual orientation nor even work. People are born and spend the early part of their lives being raised by foster parents who usually sign some kind of contract to stay together for the first 20 or so years of the childs life. After that the child enters an extended adolesence which lasts anywhere from 50 to 100 years. During that time the adolescents main responsibility in life is to have fun, experiment with drugs, cause small problems within the community, "marry" for half a day or a week or a month and inorder to have sex. In addition, every 60 days a body change is allowed/required-new sex, new skin/hair color, new look-of your design and choice. Of course, if you do not want to wait the 60 days you can always "suicide"-destroy your current body-and get a new body immediately. While your current body "dies" you go to a kind of waiting/reprocessing area until your new body is designed and ready to go. This world is largely run by computer lifeforms, they are responsible for all meaningful work, public/human safety and major decisions. Yet, many people find their life pointless, there are of course drugs to help you feel better-the most popular being "ecstasy". This story is about a mostly girl who finds her life meaningless and sets about to change it. It takes her a large portion of the book to discover she is unhappy-she changes bodies often, even more than 60 days via "suicide". She experiments with different drugs and repeated short-term marriages so she can enjoy afternoons filled with sexual release. She parties hard with her circle of friends and even visits her "parents" to try and discover why she is not content. Finally she decides to "steal" a pet. She becomes attached to the pet-even recycling an "old" body because the pet is freaked out by her "new" body-which sets quite a trend among her friends. Finally she decides that what will make her happy is fostering a child. She is not old enough nor out of adolesence herself so she attempts to falsify her fostering papers and finally all of her petty crimes and pranks catch up with her and she ends being dismissed from the community. She ejected and sent to the wilderness where she will have to actually work if she expects to eat and learn to care for herself. She is supposed to be a teaching case for her friends and contemporaries, but ends up starting a revolution-rather successfully I might add. In the end she finds that when you bite the sun you only burn your mouth.
This book came reccommended to me by a good friend. The story started off kind of slow but seemed to pick up quickly after about the first 100 pages. I loved the idea of a society so safe and convenient-but totally meaningless. Most of us would love to design anybody we liked whenever we liked, live with no cost for anything you want, your sole responsibility in life to start trouble, have sex, do drugs and steal. Yet if there is no meaning in life-why would you want to live forever?
~~~~Where ever you go, There you are!