Book Review: Genetopia by Keith Brooke

Written in a simple, straightforward manner this story takes the reader to an Earth of the distant, distant future, where genetic engineering has permanently changed the face of the planet and every living thing beyond recognition. The remainder of unaltered humanity call themselves the True and have reverted back to a clannish existence living in isolated, scattered communities is the midst of a vast, dangerous wilderness.

The True exert control over the mutts, those who, through genetic alteration, are no longer human, and use them as a working class or slave labor. The mutt population has had loyalty to the True bred into them over countless generations. An interesting turn is that many of the True acknowledge that it was this careless use of genetics that led to the downfall of civilization.

The focus of the story is on young Flint and his sister Amber, of the Clan Treco. The members of this clan are masters of genetic manipulation, using the ancient technology of the changing vectors to bring out the most useful traits in the mutt population.

Flint and Amber's father, Tarn, is a vicious drunkard who seems to care nothing for his own children. He even makes the claim that Amber is not even his biological daughter, but the result of a tryst between Flint's mother and a mutt. When Amber goes missing during a festival in Clan Treco's town Flint suspects that his father has finally made good on his threat to sell her into slavery to another clan. Vowing to find her, he leaves his indifferent parents behind and strikes out alone into the wilderness.

In the woods the changing vectors have spread unchecked into the local flora and fauna, creating new organisms: trees that move and call to each other, fruit that, if eaten, will alter a person's genetic makeup in a matter of hours and tentacled horrors that lay in wait in deep, dark rivers. Flint is wary of all these threats as he searches for his sister but he can't possibly be prepared for everything and has several terrifying encounters in the forest.