New Sun Rising is about a sixteen-year old girl, Kedzie Greer, who was raised in a utopian community and leaves home to make her way in a dystopian society. The year is 2199; the place, the Reunited States.
In the stories, technology coexists with a haunted world. There are witches and robots, ghosts and e-beasts. Networld, too, is haunted. Tribes of e-beasts look down on the human race and interfere when it suits them. The book is magical realism for the Internet age.
New Sun Rising started out as a novel written from a single point of view: Kedzie Greer's. However, the novel tended to devolve into another "teenager with special powers saves the world" story. I didn't like that direction, so I changed things up.
Real people live in a crowd of relatives, friends, coworkers, bosses, neighbors, and fellow citizens. Not to mention the great heaving sea that is the Internet. Not to mention the turning Earth and the Milky Way, and the so-far unfathomable deeps of the universe. After thinking about this for awhile, I decided to tell Kedzie's story mainly through the eyes of others. I wasn't trying to be fancy. Fresh, maybe.
Among other things, this means that New Sun Rising does not rocket forward. Every story has groundwork to lay and characters to introduce. There is a single plot arc, and in that sense the stories work like chapters. However, they also work independently. Story 3, "Julia and Adele," and story 8, "Is Four Enough? Is Six Too Many?" can actually be skipped (though I don't recommend it) if Kedzie's adventures are the main attraction.
The plot gets in gear in story 2, "Leaving Home." The first story, "The Town With Four Names," gives the history of Kedzie's hometown, which is 300+ years old in 2199.