This Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada

In an interview Emily Suvada described her book This Mortal Coil in three words as Twisting, Technical and Explosive. I could not agree more. Boy! This book is fast and technical. YA with Sci-fi can be a bit overwhelming for the author’s to write because they have to keep in mind the technical aspects as well as make sure the voice of the narrator resonates as a young personality. Emily Suvada has done a phenomenal job explaining the technologies used and also maintained a voice that can be believable as a young protagonist. 

The book is set in the future America Where gene-hacking is possible and everyone has some form of biotech panel implanted at them at birth and it grows throughout their body as they grow. The advantage of this panel is that you can download an app or code to do almost everything whether its curing disease or changing your physical appearance with enhanced abilities.

The protagonist is a girl named Catarina Aggatta, who’s a daughter of world’s most brilliant gene-hacker. She is suffering from a disease called hypergenesis, which is a kind of like an allergy which prevents her from hacking her own panel and yes she’s also a gene-hacker.

So, this all has to be done because a horrific pandemic is overtaking the world, a virus that no one has a cure for. The virus attacks the host’s DNA until every cell in the person’s body explodes in a plume of red mist.

There’s also a corporation named Cartaxus which sells and distributes apps, but only to those people who have agreed to live inside a bunker made by them.

Catarina and her father like many people refused to live inside a corporate bunker so, they are living on the surface facing the virus. There’s a temporary cure for the virus which I’ll not tell you because I want you to experience the moment when you finds out.

The story unfolds from here to a very awakening, romantic and action packed journey. 

This second book This Cruel Design is already out and there’s a third book to be released soon. So, if you like Sci-fi and YA you can not go wrong with this book.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson: Book Review

So the moon blows up. Only a few people have the audacity to put that big of an event in the first sentence of a book, one of those people is Neal Stephenson. He has a way to telling the story that grips you from the very few pages. 

Seveneves is a landmark achievement in sci-fi genre. And this is not the first time for Neal Stephenson. 

When the moon blows up the humanity is on the brink of an extinction, and they must do anything to save the human race. One idea is to create a space station and bring as many diverse set-of people as they can. 

In all of this there are politics of who should go to the station and what is the criteria for choosing the people. But humanity shows the strength and unity that was required to tackle this moral dilemma. 

Seveneves is a space opera with both the premises of dystopia as well as utopia. Anyone who likes space opera will love this work of art. 

The technologies as always have been explained in very detail for which Neal Stephenson is famous for. There is also one plot twist at the end which I’ll not discuss here. You’ll have to read the book for it.