Books tagged with: genetic engineering

A Good Old Fashioned Future is a collection of science fiction short stories written by Bruce Sterling. Seven stories and 250 pages by Bruce Sterling. I once started on Heavy Weather, but couldn't get into it, but I can easily say that that wasn't a problem with this one. Maneki Neko Strange little...

I will be honest—I was not thrilled about the idea of thinking about this book again in order to write a review. I was so bothered by the end of this series that I felt depressed about it for a week after I finished the novel. I loved Divergent. I thought that Insurgent was a pretty strong follow-up...

Axiomatic is a collection of science fiction short stories by Greg Egan. Most science fiction fans these days would agree what when it comes to hard science fiction, Greg Egan is one of the best. In ten years he has given us a good handful of novels, all every much driven by the laws of nature, as E...

Beyond This Horizon is a classic science fiction novel by Robert A Heinlein. Another one of RAH's looks into the future with a little twist. The story is about a man named Hamilton and the society he lives in. It is set in the distant future were people still have babies together BUT their genes are...

Blood Music is a science fiction novel by Greg Bear. BM is a story about an intelligent micro-organism experiment run amok. As the organism is human hosted, I guess that you could call it a DNA based Frankenstein's fantastic voyage-story for the last quarter of the twentieth century. The story may s...

Blue Earth is a science fiction novel and the début of author Jeff Stover. The Thrones are a group of biological "mistakes", genetic experiments that have resulted in something more or less than human. They have inspired the writings of new religious texts that many now regard as sacred. Ruth Long,...

Brave new world was written over 80 years ago; back in 1932 and describes London in the year 2540 - or 632 AF as the year is described in the book. The AF stands for "After Ford", meaning the American industrialist Henry Ford who has become something of a messianic figure in Huxley's World. It's bee...

Children of the Thunder is a science fiction novel by John Brunner. John Brunner has written a really wonderful book 'THE SHEEP LOOK UP' that I should probably re-read. This book came close but not quite to the despondancy that Earth is supposed to face in the present/near future. There is developin...

City is set sometime in the future at a time when mankind's acheivements are immense with intelligent robots, genetic modifications, commonplace space travel and genetically uplifted animals. This technical progress comes at a cost, humanity itself has become tired and society has broken down into s...

I've always known that Paul McAuley can write, as far as I am concerned he's one of the finest writers in the genre right now however he's also vastly under-appreciated. I'm really hoping that the release of confluence will help in addressing this oversight - not only is it an incredibly well writte...

Darwins Radio is a science fiction novel by Greg Bear. Just the title alone should give you a good idea as to the subject of this book. Yes, Bear has returned to genetics and luckily Darwin's Radio is a lot better than Blood Music (not that hard). Christopher Dicken finds a mass grave with mutated p...

Distress is a science fiction novel by the Australian author Greg Egan. Once again Egan grabs an idea and takes it to the limit, this time to the ultimate limit. In Quarantine he tackled quantum Mechanics, this time he takes on nothing less than the Theory Of Everything (TOE). The year is 2055 and A...

Nicholas Sansbury Smith’s Extinction Edge , book two in The Extinction Cycle , is a whirl-wind of action and rapid evolution! The stakes have never been higher since the Hemorrhage virus first infected humankind. Now, the transition from modern society to a surviving-society pits Beckham and his Gho...

Falling Free is a science fiction novel by the award winning American author Lois McMaster Bujold and takes place within the Vorkosigan Saga. Taking place in the same universe as the Vorkosigan adventures, but not featuring any of our beloved characters, for the simple reason that Falling Free takes...

Oleg Kashin’s debut novel ‘Fardwor, Russia’ takes its reader on a surreal journey through the political landscape of Russia’s seedy underbelly. Drawing on his experience as an award-winning journalist and polemicist, Kashin skilfully blends fact and fiction, shining a light on some of the most sinis...

Dan Abnett and Nik Vincent have come together to tell a tale of a future that feels and sounds not like what one would envision, resembling more our distant past then our near future. Many readers will know of Dan Abnett and his prolific work with Marvel, Abaddon, Games Workshop, and his most succes...

Flow my tears, the policeman said is a science fiction novel by the legendary award winning author Philip K Dick, has been nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards and won the 1975 John W Campbell Award for the best science fiction novel of the year. Jason Taverner is a TV idol, singer and host and...

Frameshift is a science fiction novel by Robert J Sawyer. I've waited a bit before I started on this review, in the hope that my feelings for this book would somehow clarify. But the truth is that I still don't really know whether I like it or not. I'm not even sure that I can classify this book as...

Furnace: Death Sentence is the third volume in the Furnace series, a young adult science fiction series of books, written by Alexander Gordon Smith. The Furnace is a juvenile prison located one mile beneath the surface of the earth, where kids are sentenced to life imprisonment and where dying isn't...

Furnace: Solitary is a young adult science fiction novel, the second volume in the Furnace series by Alexander Gordon Smith. Furnace Prison is located a mile beneath the surface of the planet, a place where juveniles are sentenced to life imprisonment with no hope of release, a place where death is...

It's a fact that following the explosion of technology we now give away vast amounts of information freely and often unknowingly. Big companies have got smart at figuring out just how best to get such information. Many sell that data on without compunction. Fast forward to the year 2066 and big corp...

Adam Roberts is one of those rare authors who not only manage to create a rewarding, entertaining story but also does so in a way that challenges your perceptions, encourages you examine that which you take for granted and often plays on accepted norms of the genre. Jack Glass is no exception. We be...

Methuselah's Children is a science fiction novel by the author Robert A Heinlein. Another golden oldie from Heinlein. Through a selective breeding program, the Howard Foundation has managed to breed a much longer living human. Today there are about a hundred thousand people (The Howard Families) who...

At 75 years old, John Perry takes stock of his remaining life, with his wife dead and buried and a retirement of increasing dotage to look forward to he does the only sensible thing possible - he joins the army. Now known as the Colonial Defense Force (CDF) the war of the 22nd century is fought out...

I've been meaning to grab this series for quite some time — the combination of Atwood's evocative prose and a post-apocalyptic setting is a highly promising one. Oryx and Crake tells the story of an altered world through the eyes of a man once known as Jimmy. Now known as Snowman and clothed in dete...

Alex Lamb's Roboteer paints a picture of a future, that in the political climate of today, feels far too possible.  In this book, a war rages between two sides of humanity, two different and opposing ideologies and lifestyles.  One side, combining genetic and induced mutation with advanced technolog...

FBI Special Agent Jack Dawson's best friend and colleague is brutally murdered while pursuing an investigation into the genetic manipulation of food crops and Jack is convinced that a group of eco-terrorists are behind the killing, with the beautiful geneticist Naomi Perrault being the prime suspect...

Sirius by Olaf Stapledon is a science fiction novel and part of the Gollancz SF Masterworks collection. Sirius is the pinnacle of Thomas Trelone's experiments, the body of a large dog with the intelligence of a gifted human. He is raised as an equal in the Trelone household, alongside the scientist'...

Tales of Time and Space is a collection of science fiction short stories by Pat Castaldo. There are 27 short stories contained within this book, all written by Pat Castaldo. The short stories are: The Immune Man Dr Barron's Boy The Pottery method My other self the test the galactic inn for sale at o...

Terminal Earth is a collection of original short stories that all feature the end of the world in some way, edited by Michael Stewart and Neil Thomas. With 23 tales of the apocalypse, Terminal Earth offers a great deal of compelling tales from talented authors. Despite the common theme there are som...

When I first started to read this book I was anticipating a plot involving Atlanteans and genetics. This is exactly what you get. Tenfold. The story itself is fairly straightforward at a high level but the pace is a little too quick in parts. I had to re-read the first few chapters to make sure I’d...

The Augmented Agent is a collection of science fiction short stories by Jack Vance. Jack Vance:I read the intro and.....Basically it was a campaign for Vance heroes as regular fellas running around and doing incredible things to the environment they are written into with wits and brains rarely emplo...

The Book of Adam: Autobiography of the first human clone is a science fiction novel and the debut of Robert M Hopper. On February 22, 1997, the world was shocked with the announcement that a lamb named Dolly had been born, the first mammal cloned from adult cells. The reaction was largely one of out...

The Dark Side of Technology is a science fiction novel by Mark Antony Rossi. The tale of the mad scientist is even older than the Shelly novel of Frankenstein. Since the dawn of the written word man has tried to altered his appearance, environment or internal makeup in a vain attempt to gain more po...

Imagine a world where cloning was not only advanced enough to create real bodies but where the technology was inexpensive and simple enough to be viable on a large scale. Of course making copies of real people would be wrong and there would bound to be a law against such a thing but what if a loopho...

The Reality Dysfunction is the first volume in the Nights Dawn Trilogy by Peter Hamilton. In the far future, humanity has divided along a single major line. The Edenists are genetically engineered space-dwellers with telepathic affinity to their biotechnological homes and ships. Adamists are effecti...

Not to be confused with the A589 (which is the road to Morecambe) or that very depressing Cormac McCarthy novel, The Road to Hell* (now known as Out of Time) is indeed paved with good vibrations intentions, in this case that road involves a future that uses a limited form of time travel. During the...

Anthony J. Melchiorri’s The Tide (Tide Series Book One) is set in the present. It ties Japan's secret attempt to prepare its people in case of a major American assault following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mysteriously, a protein complex capable of altering the weakest of mankind...

The Venom of Vipers is a science fiction novel by KC May. A supervirus is threatening to wipe out the human race and the only hope may be a human hybrid created by scientists, treated as sub human, locked away and hated. When a brilliant young scientist learns of this secret she must not only fight...

The Windup Girl is the award winning dystopian vision by Paolo Bacigalupi. Anderson Lake is a company man, AgriGen's calorie representative in Thailand. Under cover as a factory worker he combs Bangkok's street markets in search of foodstuffs long thought to be extinct. There he meets the Windup Gir...

I must admit that one of the reasons I picked up this novel is that it has my surname on it, the other being that it is of course Philip K Dick who still rates as one of my favourite authors. Written back in 1956 The World Jones Made is one of the authors very early novels and tells the story of Flo...

The Year of the Flood is the second novel in Margaret Atwood's post-apocalyptic series and follows the viewpoints of Toby and Ren, members of a religious cult. The book tells the story of some of the events leading up to the cataclysm mentioned in the previous novel Oryx and Crake and there is a goo...

Thin Ice is a science fiction detective novel by Phill Jones. Thadeus Rede is a detective who is trying to hunt a vicious serial killer on the streets of Seattle in the year 2037. The killer appears to be targeting the powerful political New Natural Law Party (NNLP) who are strong opponents of genet...

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is a Hugo award winning post-apocalyptic tale of human cloning. For the Sumner family the recent droughts, floods, blighted crops, pandemic plagues and rising sterility all point to the demise of the human race. Their isolated farm in the Appalachian Mountains provide...

Kira Miller is a highly gifted engineer working in the field of gene therapy; she manages to enhance the function of the brain to such a degree that makes immortality a real possibility through a savant like consciousness. But what secrets could be unlocked by playing god with the human brain? Wired...

How do you shake up the familiar “war that never ends” trope? James Barclay has one answer; add alien DNA with lizards to create genetically modified dragons; then fly those dragons into the battlefield burning your enemies to a smoking crisp. If that wasn’t enough, he also adds a variety of fun and...

Paul McAuley is a vastly under-appreciated author. His books are inspiring, hypnotic and inventive. Austral is all of these and more, a book set in a plausible, climate-changed future where the planet has a new continent with a partial thawing of the Antarctic. There are still vast vistas of ice but...

Elysium Fire is the sequel to Aurora Rising (also known as The Prefect), set in Reynold's Revelation Space universe but before events of his previous novels. Like Aurora Rising, it can be read as a stand-alone novel. It's the 25th century (with no Buck Rogers in sight) and humanity has, in many ways...

I've always said that Hutchinson is an under-appreciated author. His Europe series not only being an accomplished trilogy, but also somewhat prophetic given the UK's current realtionship with the EU. Acadie is a step away from his near-future,alternative fiction series, instead set in the far-future...

I don't know how he does it, but Adrian Tchaikovsky manages to get inside the heads of different creatures and allow us to see through their eyes. Last time I read one of his books it was Spiders, this time it's Dogs, Bears, Bees and Lizards. Dogs of War imagines that we've got to grips with bio-eng...

Illustration ©Grahame Baker-Smith from The Folio Society edition of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells The work of H. G. Wells is both seminal and formative to our current interest in Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy. The collection of these two novellas in one volume is a common publication format....

In the not too distant future, your social standing is based on the "purity" of your genes and the ability to trace your family through the "national family tree" genetic database. All men are sterile and fertility drugs are only given to state-sponsored couples whose genetic match are approved. Tho...

I am not a big fan of train travel. The route I take is usually into London on a packed train. I have been made to suffer by standing all the way and having no access to the t oilets. I have considered putting this into prose form in a science fiction  thriller but  needing the loo and having sore f...

The Butterfly Effect is a device used to explore alternative  versions of our world. The simple action of a time travellers going back to the time of the dinosaurs and standing on a butterfly would alter everything that followed, ripples expanding from that one point. Robert Ferrigno  decided to exp...

The way that humans treat each other in real life is far darker and harrowing than any science fiction book that you can create, but this does not stop some authors from exploring the depths of the  human  condi tion. If we are only as good as how we treat the weakest in society, the people who inha...

When we colonise the planets will they send out the best and the brightest? I’m not so sure as many of the best and the brightest will be quite happy on Earth leading a succes sful life. Converting the likes of Mars into a  liveable   environment  will be dirty, cold and dangerous work. It is more l...

Almost everything  that we see  daily  would feel strange and alien to someone out of time. Show  an  Ancient Roman a modern carrot and they would ask why it was so large and orange.  In Caroline Hardake r ’s  Composite Cr eatures   the world has changed a lot. The sky is constantly covered with thi...

The Alien franchise can be seen as one of two things: an awesome series of Space based horror and action stories, or a textbook example of Corporate Malfeasance. The Aliens may be the most reoccurring characters, but the second is not Ripley, it is Weyland Industries. This corporation pops up in var...

The best Science Fiction will tell a story, but also build a world. I prefer my tales to hint about the wider world and what happened to land the protagonists in their current position. Take Ten Low for example, a medic who roams a dusty moon. Her only goal in life is to survive and help others that...

There is one solution that would benefit our climate massively, but it is a bitter pill to swallow. Less humans. We are the cause of pretty much all the issues that the Earth is currently having and when we are gone, it will happily float around the solar system without us. A little bit grubbier, bu...

H. G. Wells is a name to conjure with. Classic stories about time machines, invisible men, alien invasions and more. He was one of the earliest genre writers in a time when the idea of genres did not exist. He just wrote what he felt like. A modern author who has taken on this mantle is Silvia Moren...

It starts off sensibly with tweaking a DNA strand here or there to prevent a hereditary illness. Who could argue against that? However, it is not long before people realise that they can use the same tools to make sure that a child has their father’s eye colour and Mother’s hair. Why even bother pic...

Science Fiction writers love a dystopia, there are so many ways that it could all go wrong. Overpopulation is one. It not a pleasant thing to think about, but we already use too many of the world’s finite resources and as the population grows, this is going to get even worse. In The Nursery by Roark...

When the apocalypse happens, science fiction has taught us that some of us will run below and others will be left on the surface. Pick a side. Down below could be a Fallout or Wool situation, better than being on the surface, dead or a mutant. Up above could be The Time Machine or Mary Baader Kaley’...

Some things are bigger than just us. We need to think about more than the individual or even the family unit, think of the bigger picture. The Price of Rebellion by Micheal C. Bland is the second part of a trilogy all about an inventor who would do anything to protect his family, but in doing this h...

Cyberpunk has always been an interesting mash up of ideas, taking the science fiction forward ideas of technology and giving it a gritty edge. Mixing the equivalent of early 80s synth with the raw punk that preceded it in a giant science fiction blender sounds like chaos, but both have origins of ri...

The future is uncertain but as long as there are people on the planet, there will be drama. The cities could be crumbling and the seas boiling but a few people gather in the same cave for protection, and it will be mere hours before they are arguing, falling in and out of love and not getting on wit...

When the apocalypse inevitably comes do you want to know about it? Would you like the chance to peer out of the window and see the world burning, perhaps you can make a run for the high ground? Another option is to live in pure ignorance underground, competing with your fellow residents for the perc...

War, what is it good for? Not a lot, but depressingly it is a real driver of innovation. What better way to inspire the greatest minds in the country than to task them with more efficient ways to kill the enemy? Arms races happen all over the place from conventional gun and bullets to newer types of...