The Million

"Schroeder's worldbuilding is, as always, dazzling—and, as always, ably matched by heart-pounding adventure plots that involve likeable, imperfect people who we can root for even as we fret that they are making foolish—but understandable— choices. "

--Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

“There is a strain of less-than-utopian darkness that runs through The Million, as it does through most of Schroeder’s exuberant, inventive, playful work, which can be characterized as adventures-in-wonderlands".”

—Locus Online

On a future Earth where the maximum human population is one million, the million-and-first person can only survive by pretending to be one of the ‘auditors’ who hunt his kind.

Gavin Penn-of-Chaffee is an illegal human—a "visitor" as they’re called. He has spent his whole life hiding from the auditors—the population police—on a remote estate in the Rockies, where he’s tended to his brain-injured older brother Bernard. When their father is killed and Bernard is framed for the crime, Gavin must take on a new identity to solve the crime. But he doesn’t learn until too late that the dead youth whose identity he’s stolen was apprenticed to the auditors.

Now Gavin finds himself forced to attend the academy of the Population Police—hiding among the very people who are sworn to find his kind and eliminate them. He must maintain his deception while investigating the murder of his father. He makes an uncertain alliance with Elana Devries-of-Balashikha, a would-be swordswoman who's an unwilling pawn of her own family's ambitions.  She suspects him but is drawn into his investigation. Along the way, they discover a conspiracy that could shake the foundations of the Million.

If Gavin tells the authorities what he knows, he could save his brother—but by doing so he may let a larger crime go unpunished.

The Million explores moral dilemmas as well as themes of keeping up appearances and trying to fit in, through the figure of Gavin, an illegal person who’s forced to hide in plain sight.