Wetware: A Novel - Hardcover

Nova, Craig

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 060960595X ISBN 13: 9780609605950

Publisher: Shaye Areheart Books, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

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

From the Back Cover

“A haunting, heart-stoppingly exciting, brilliantly structured novel of suspense, ideas, and subtle characterization. . . . You can’t stop reading.” –Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

“If there is a scintilla of justice in the literary universe, more readers will finally sit up and take notice of this wonderfully gifted writer.” –Dorman T. Shindler, The Denver Post

“A constant thrill, a constant surprise . . . witty, marvelous, poignant.” –Ken Tucker, The Baltimore Sun

“Dealing with issues as hot as today’s headlines, Wetware explores the essence of what it means to be human.” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“[Wetware is] the wonderfully entertaining, and powerfully composed, invention of one of our best prose artists at work on new themes."–The Chicago Tribune

“Nova is a master of integrating fantastical elements into a familiar cultural landscape. . . . Wetware’s world is a nightmare of genetic science gone awry, but Nova’s description of its mores and inhabitants is icily appealing.” —USA Today

"The world Nova envisions is . . . fascinating to visit." –The Philadelphia Inquirer

"It is profoundly difficult to put a Nova book down. . . . The characters are chillingly real and Nova's story has lasting, visceral power." –The Burlington Free Press

"[Nova is] the finest working novelist in America. . . . [Wetware has] achingly unique characters . . . and evocative dialogue." –Las Vegas Mercury

"Sympathetic, mordantly funny . . . witty and poignant. . . . A surprise." –The Oakland Tribune

"Nova walks a fine line between noir and straight-ahead fiction in his taut, moody, and piercing novels." –Booklist

"A seductive and intelligent novel about love and freedom . . . moving." –Kirkus Reviews
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Shaye Areheart Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 060960595X
• ISBN 13: 9780609605950
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352