Skol

Shy seventeen year old Simon has lived his whole life on a small space freighter with his father and brother. He has no reason to believe that he will ever be allowed to land on a planet, and he often wonders whether he will ever get to know a woman.

But he unexpectedly gets to visit wild uninhabited Earth, where he attends a school that until then was only for rich aristocratic boys. He gets to walk alone through the mountains down to empty decaying New York City, where he meets the few robots who are its only remaining inhabitants, and he discovers that women, both human and non-human, will play a role in his fate that he never could have imagined.

This view of shyness from the 23rd century presents it in a very different light than it is seen in today.