The time: the not so distant future. The United States government has learned that China has a secret genetic enhancement program where they are breeding super babies and placing them in the equivalent of their Olympic sports schools, but for science, math, engineering, business, and government. The Americans come to believe that if they don’t match the Chinese, America won’t be able to compete a few decades on. The catch: The U.S. has restrictions on this very process. So they devise a clandestine workaround by creating a front company that purchases a small chain of American fertility clinics and begins impregnating young women coming for fertility treatment with genetically enhanced embryos--without ever telling these women.
GENESIS CODE, a futuristic thriller by novelist Jamie Metzl (Arcade/Skyhorse/November 4, 2014/$ 24.95 hb) is a frightening look at a new kind of superpower race—of humans. As these impregnated women start getting murdered one at a time, Rich Azadian, a philosophical, historically-burdened Armenian-American reporter for the Kansas City Star, begins the fight of his life, under growing danger, to try to figure out who is killing these women and why, and whether any others like them may still be alive.
Jamie Metzl has spent a lot of time dealing with national security issues when serving in the Clinton White House (National Security Council), State Department, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee (for Joe Biden). An author of a history of the Cambodian genocide as well as the novel The Depths of the Sea (St. Martin’s), he started thinking more deeply about the national security implication of the genetics revolution about a decade ago, and since then has written a number of articles on the topic, testified before Congress, and appeared on a range of talk shows. When he began the book four years ago, it was a thought experiment. He had little evidence China had such a program—but last year Wired ran an article on a young entrepreneur in China charging forward on just the type research that could open the door to the possibilities Metzl’s novel explores so harrowingly.