Armed Memory

In the strange days of the next century, America is caught on a cusp between social breakthrough and total breakdown. Sanity cops try to stem the chaos as a revolution in genetic engineering offers anyone the chance to change shape at will.
Tim Wandel arrives in New York City at the dawn of this weird millennium, hoping to make it as a journalist, and ends up at the center of the storm as a flack for his cousin Johnny Stevens, a biotech wizard who specializes in designer genes and who dreams of reshaping society to the beat of the long-dead rock music of Jim Morrison and the Doors.
But Johnny has made some powerful enemies. The Hammerheads are the most dangerous creatures who have ever lived, with the brilliant cunning of human criminals and the brutal savagery and insatiable hunger of killer sharks. They know that Johnny's Microde City workshop is the only force that can stop the new ecology of terror they plan to spread across the planet. As a violent wave of disorder spreads across the globe, Tim finds he holds in his hands the key to humanity's salvation or the seeds of its destruction.

The future is a dangerous place-just ask any of the half-dozen main characters in this cutting-edge adventure novel about "microded" (genetically altered) gangsters who, modified from humans into sharklike creatures, dwell in the ocean's depths and do the bidding of shadowy mafia figures. Told as a series of flashbacks and oral testimonials before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the novel divides into two parts. The first is a tale of two cousins: Johnny Stevens, who always wanted to be covered in scales and whose company has now perfected the technology that enables anyone to look like any person or creature they desire; and Timothy Wandel, who goes to work for Johnny as a PR man. They battle the microded hammerheads until triumph and tragedy consume Johnny's company. The novel's second part is far less successful, with less action and less clear-cut goals for the characters as Wandel and others continue to deal with the global hammerhead menace. Still, Young's writing creates a strong sense of excitement, his future world is familiar enough to be appealing (and distorted enough to be hip) and the mysteries he explores are intense and compelling.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Young's second novel arrives 15 years after the first and so powerfully blends imaginative cultural forecasting and gripping storytelling that it makes his return a major event. Along with runaway inflation and a restrictive Mental Health Act, the twenty-first century has brought the ultimate aid for the fashion conscious: a sophisticated genetic technique known as microding that allows physical transformation into anyone or anything, from Elvis to a centaur. But while microding's pioneer, Johnny Stevens, has quickly been getting rich, the criminal underworld has been modifying his techniques insidiously to create brigades of ruthless, sharklike creatures called hammerheads that threaten to eliminate all land-based life. Stevens can save the world by unleashing an airborne virus that will reverse the hammerheads' microding, but he does not anticipate that the most dangerous hammerheads, the warlords, may be immune. Young insightfully examines the double-edged sword of genetic engineering's future possibilities in a chilling scenario that will linger in the reader's memory for a long time. Carl Hays