12 October 2013

There's Just One Word to Describe Marcus Sakey's Brilliance: "Brilliant!"

Nick Cooper – just “Cooper” to his friends – might be considered a traitor to his kind. His kind is the gifted, also known as brilliants, abnorms, twists, freaks… the small segment of humanity born with special abilities. Not X-Man powers like teleportation or pyrokinesis, though: just a little tweak to the brain that makes them much, much, much better at one thing than “normal” people. Imagine an NFL running back who can see where the defense will be in two seconds instead of where they are now; or a savant who can predict to the microsecond when any stock will rise or fall. Get the picture?

Cooper’s gift is pattern recognition. He can look at a person’s face and instinctively know what they’ll do; what they’ll say. He can even look at a person’s cell phone bill or credit card charges and figure out precisely where they’ll be tomorrow. That ability makes him invaluable to his employer; the government agency charged with fighting a “silent” war against abnorm terrorists, terrorists like John Smith. For a decade, Smith has been killing innocent civilians and, for a decade, “Equitable Services” and Cooper have been on his trail.

That’s about to change: in a desperate move, Cooper goes underground, into the giant Wyoming compound of the abnorms. His cover story? He triggered a terrorist bomb that killed over a thousand; and now his old unit is on his trail – and they’ll shoot first and ask questions later.

What Cooper learns inside that compound, however, will change his life…

08 October 2013

MaddAddam: Margaret Atwood Completes the Crake Trilogy... Maybe


Who is MaddAddam? Or, perhaps more to the point, who was MaddAddam? After all, the waterless flood (as the Crakers call it) is so “last year,” and already the kudzu has started to bury all that is left of mankind’s many wonders, not to mention its many failures.

Once the BlyssPluss plague engineered by Crake had run its course, the few survivors peeked out of the rubble of the compounds and the plebelands and began to scratch together a new life in a new world. MaddAddam picks up where The Year of the Flood left off; as a handful of former God’s Gardeners have started a post-apocalyptic commune of sorts at the cobb house in the abandoned parklands. They’ve fortified the grounds to keep liobams (lion-lamb crossbreeds) away from their flock of Mo’Hairs (sheep genetically engineered to grow human hair) and keep the piggoons (super-smart giant pigs modified to grow human body parts) out of the garden. As for the roving painballers – a soft of dehumanized killing machine – they can do little but stand guard.