When mainstream writers break the unwritten rule of literary realism (don't consider the future) and venture into science-fictional territory, the resulting novel can be brilliant (Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale) or weak (Paul Theroux's O-Zone). Literary author Craig Nova's futuristic novel Wetware does not achieve the brilliance of Atwood (or of literary SF writers like Ursula K. Le Guin or Maureen F. McHugh), but his novel is very good, and will please most readers of both mainstream and SF literature. Briggs is a biotech programmer, creating mice that say "I met you at the Seattle World's Fair" and beavers that sing a toothpaste jingle. Now he's lead designer on the project to create "creatures more like humans than the originals," engineered to do "the worst jobs, the ones that most people didn't want to do." Designing the male and female prototypes, Briggs finds himself making additions that aren't in the specs: a sense of beauty, musical talent, the ability to reproduce, the ability to love. The themes of Pygmalion and Frankenstein inform this intelligent, fascinating novel of humans with the godlike power to create new life. --Cynthia Ward
Book Description
In 2026 in an unnamed city that is darkly familiar and vividly possible, Hal Briggs is a biotech engineer. His specialty: encoding biology into digital form. In other words, manufacturing life.
Already he’d created small animals that chirped cheerfully about a product, a beaver that sang a ditty about toothpaste. He’d designed extreme-sport survival games that transported players into fantasy dimensions.
And now, the job keeping him up at all hours of the night has become his obsession—developing a coding system to produce the human body. People. Gray-skinned and brutish, designed to do the dangerous and dull jobs no one else wants. At corporate giant Galapagos Wetware, business is booming. Buyers want creatures with more finesse. They want workers who are good with handguns and who have the ability to deceive. Workers who are cunning, who thrive on terror, who are indifferent to a plea for mercy. They want workers who look more human.
The prototypes are emerging slowly in the ice-cold lab. Briggs’s code is like poetry, like perfectly structured haiku. He begins to add forbidden details—a sense of humor, mathematical brilliance, an instinct for music, a profound longing. With each detail Briggs adds, the more infatuated he becomes, until he adds the most dangerous detail of all—the ability to reproduce.
In the bowels of Galapagos Wetware, in a room filled with blue-tinted snow, Hal Briggs watches as his latest creation—he has named her Kay—blows him a kiss, while Jack, the male next to her, mouths, “Don’t worry.”
What could possibly go wrong?
Craig Nova, a master of the modern American novel, creates a thrilling tale of the ethics of desire, the metaphysics of technology, and the dangerous mystery of manufactured beauty in a future becoming more real with every passing day.
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