Dayworld Rebel

The New Era, several thousand years in the future, seems a utopia. War, poverty, hunger and pollution are all obsolete. Overpopulation has been handled by dividing the population into seven groups, each fraction living one day a week while the others await in suspended animation. Farmer's Dayworld chronicled the life of a man whose unique abilities allowed him to assume a different identity for each day. As this sequel opens, he has been caught and is being questioned. Escaping from his Manhattan prison, he flees to the wilds of New Jersey, falling in with a rebel group hiding out in caves. Along with them, he journeys to Los Angeles and contacts a larger subversive organization bent on radical change. Although the image of a populace voluntarily entering temporary ""coffins'' is another of Farmer's striking mythic variations on civilization and its discontents, its fictional working out has the same mix of intrigue and illogic as the earlier novel. (June 24)