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Sims
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Product Description
Just a few hundred genes separate humans from chimpanzees. Imagine someone altering the chimp genome, splicing in human genes to increase the size of the cranium, reduce the amount of body hair, enable speech. What sort of creature would result?
Sims takes place in the very near future, when the science of genetics is fulfilling its vaunted potential. It's a world where genetically transmitted diseases are being eliminated. A world where dangerous or boring manual labor is gradually being transferred to "sims," genetically altered chimps who occupy a gray zone between simian and human. The chief innovator in this world is SimGen, which owns the patent on the sim genome and has begun leasing the creatures worldwide.
But SimGen is not quite what it seems. It has secrets . . . secrets beyond patents and proprietary processes . . . secrets it will go to any lengths to protect. Sims explores this brave new world as it is turned upside down and torn apart when lawyer Patrick Sullivan decides to try to unionize the sims.
Right now, as you read these words, some company somewhere in the world is toying with the chimp genome. That is not fiction, it is fact. Sims is a science thriller that will come true. One way or another.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #792520 in Books
- Published on: 2004-09-01
- Released on: 2004-08-26
- Original language: English
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 512 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
What started as a series of three inventive and exciting novellas by SF veteran Wilson has now become a single volume, complete with two new sections and a creepy, satisfying ending. In the near future, sims-chimpanzees enhanced with human DNA created by a company called SimGen-are used as cheap labor and medical guinea pigs while denied even the right to family. Patrick Sullivan, a labor lawyer, and Romy Cadman, an activist, team up to change the classification of sims from property to persons in order to improve their treatment and to bring SimGen's shady beginnings to light. In the fourth part, the search for the missing pregnant sim from the third novella, Meerm (2002), intensifies as further implications of her baby's nature emerge. The reader at last is able to follow the thoughts of Zero, the perpetually masked reclusive genius behind the effort to destroy SimGen, and, eventually, to learn his identity. Portero, the unreliable SimGen enforcer, finds his life spiraling out of control as Patrick and Romy continually gain ground with the help of newly discovered and somewhat disconcerting friends. Each section adds intrigue, portents of doom and layers to the characters-good and bad. While he neatly ties up all the loose ends in his frighteningly possible world, Wilson offers no simple answers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
SimGen is one of the most powerful corporations in the world, thanks to their monopoly on their one product, a laboratory-created species between chimpanzee and human. Created solely for slave labor, the Sims are leased like property to employers all over the world. The anti-exploitation voices have gone largely unheeded until a small group of Sims wants to unionize and the "product" finds a new ally in the form of Patrick Sullivan, an attorney specializing in labor and management issues. SimGen and its shadowy, powerful network of investors rush in to stop Sullivan, and the jousting quickly escalates into all-out war. Wilson will lose no fans with this novel and will undoubtedly gain many new ones. His latest offering is full of action and suspense that will quickly hook the reader, for elements of mystery are woven in as well. Clues and misdirection suggest a number of possibilities, but Wilson's novel is full of rewarding surprises. Gavin Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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