I liked the beginning of this book – I thought the premise was interesting and the set up was good, and I liked the very end of the book and how it was wrapped up, but I found the journey from start to finish to be a bit of a slog. To be fair, it is kind of a on-the-run thriller with fighting and car chases and shooting etc which is never something that I enjoy.
So, the interesting premise was that the main character, Logan, was the son of a brilliant geneticist, who engineered vectors to populate crop genomes with a view to ending world hunger and poverty, but accidentally caused a global famine which shattered the world’s economy and had the opposite of its intended effect by actually worsening world hunger. Logan’s mother died in a car accident (possibly suicide) and logan now works for the authority that regulates and polices now outlawed genetic research.
The following is a bit SPOILERY
Logan is involved in an explosion when following up a lead on an illegal genetics lab, and after recovering in hospital starts to notice changes in himself – he gets cleverer, in lots of ways – perfect recall, fast thinking, intuitive etc, as well as super strong and super fit and healthy and it turns out his genome has been hacked and improved in thousands of different ways.
He is locked up to be studied but is broken out of a very secure facility by what turns out to be his estranged sister who has also been genetically upgraded.
So then follows all the boring chase stuff. The interesting parts were that the person who made all this genetic upgrade stuff, wants to seed these upgrades to the whole world with the thinking being that humans are making such a mess of our planet between climate change and war etc that if only everyone was cleverer they would maybe not destroy themselves.
Logan and his sister disagree – she thinks giving the upgrade to the whole world is a good thing, even thought they realises that about 13% of people who get it will die horribly of a prion condition like mad cow disease.
Logan reasons that if his sister who has this super intelligence is willing to sacrifice so many people for ‘the greater good’ then that removes what makes humanity worth saving – our empathy and collective feeling, and he comes up with what I thought was a nice neat solution.
Sarah Wray Writer 