Lawrence Lapin

Adam’s Tiger is the third of author Lawrence Lapin’s Adam chronicles. I’ve not read the earlier two, but there’s plenty of background information provided as Adam explains his past, so readers and new characters can catch up. This is a future world, where a meteor has destroyed life on earth. After five-hundred years, the human race repopulates the planet, while frozen embryos, skewed by the deliberate application of radiation, then mixed and matched by clever genetic engineering, are being used to balance nature’s tooth and claw.

For complex reasons, complexly explained, Adam wants to bring back the creatures of the past. He is a singularly long-lived survivor of the original disaster, but he doesn’t pass on his strange genes too readily, since mankind is clearly not ready for immortality. Still, Adam himself is well-armed with skills and knowledge to play god. All he needs is the right measure of influence, and after five-hundred years, he knows well how to win friends and change people’s minds.

Science, nature, society and more prove surprisingly malleable in this tale. The writing combines passages of exciting story-telling with lengthy exposition. Lessons in science and sociology abound. Romance is fast and happy. And religion is relegated to unimportance since it’s so hard to “imagine how any single being could have created the world by intelligent design.” Meanwhile Adam designs and plans, in a weighty mix of Noah’s ark and Creation, while language evolves so far and so fast that no one can “read the original Shakespeare” anymore.

There are occasional typos, and the dialog’s occasionally stilted as it tries to pack so much in. But the concept is certainly intriguing and I do like the hairy people.

Disclosure: I was given a free ecopy and I offer my honest review.… (mehr)

In the second book in the series we have gone beyond the treatment and immortality issue. As a scientist, Adam and a group of his friends prepare for the end of the world. A meteor is going to crash into the earth and only a few will survive. Adam and his friends stockpile embryos, animals, plants and other things they will need to repopulate the earth once life is destroyed by this meteor. But, like all societies, even the post-apocalyptic ones, life isn’t perfect and never goes as planned. There is fighting among them and among a group who survived in Antarctica. Once again we are face with all types of ethical and social issues. This book was actually better than the first one. If you are into this type of read then I would definitely recommend it.… (mehr)

This was a strange book, intriguing, but strange. Adam Boatwright is a geneticist. His wife is afraid she will inherit breast cancer and have to go through what her sister is going through. Adam decides to try to find a way to prevent his wife and others in the world from developing this cancer. As a geneticist he works on what he believes is a cure. The cure will keep the virus active in the body while preventing cancer. As always, there is a side effect, immortality. Adam can’t just test this on anyone so he does the unthinkable and tests it on himself. It is here we run into the normal issues that would arise. Is it ethical? Who should be allowed this treatment if the known outcome would be immortality? As I read this it played in my head like a movie. I could see future events that could become very difficult and in some cases catastrophic. If you have a race of people who all have immortality, how do you weed out the bad ones? Who has the right to play God and choose who gets to live and who doesn’t?… (mehr)