The Changeling Plague

When millionaire Geoffrey Allen injects himself with an experimental virus that has been created to reprogram his DNA and rid his body of cystic fibrosis, the DNA of everyone around him is altered, causing strange new diseases and deformities to emerge and spread throughout the world. Original.

After Mahn's disease ravages the population, viral engineering, which created it, is prohibited by the Beijing Treaty. Money still talks, though, and wealthy cystic fibrosis patient Geoffrey Allen obtains an untested viral treatment that seems to work perfectly. Then his associates fall ill and die of strange cancers and genetic diseases they shouldn't have developed. Allen is quarantined at the Centers for Disease Control, where Lilith Watkins is pointed in the direction of a cure by Idaho, a man whose sister died of Mahn's. The medical establishment succeeds, it thinks, in controlling the new malady but fails to understand its malevolent potential. Idaho, however, comes to an unorthodox understanding of the disease, and the upshot of this is a change in the face of human nature. Cloaked in fast-paced entertainment, Mitchell's futurist medical thriller and cyberpunk meditation is at heart a very human story of the desire to become more than we are. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved