About the Book
Locus Award nominee 2013.
This stunning first novel from Nebula Award
and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist Ted Kosmatka is a
riveting tale of science cut loose from ethics. Set in an amoral future
where genetically engineered monstrosities fight each other to the
death in an Olympic event, The Games envisions a harrowing world that may arrive sooner than you think.
Silas
Williams is the brilliant geneticist in charge of preparing the U.S.
entry into the Olympic Gladiator competition, an internationally
sanctioned bloodsport with only one rule: no human DNA is permitted in
the design of the entrants. Silas lives and breathes genetics; his
designs have led the United States to the gold in every previous event.
But the other countries are catching up. Now, desperate for an edge in
the upcoming Games, Silas’s boss engages an experimental supercomputer
to design the genetic code for a gladiator that cannot be beaten.
The
result is a highly specialized killing machine, its genome never before
seen on earth. Not even Silas, with all his genius and experience, can
understand the horror he had a hand in making. And no one, he fears,
can anticipate the consequences of entrusting the act of creation to a
computer’s cold logic.
Now Silas races to understand what the
computer has wrought, aided by a beautiful xenobiologist, Vidonia Joao.
Yet as the fast-growing gladiator demonstrates preternatural strength,
speed, and — most disquietingly — intelligence, Silas and Vidonia find
their scientific curiosity giving way to a most unexpected emotion:
sheer terror.
