Synopsis:
With Gaia's Toys, Ore takes us on a riveting journey to a dark and brooding American future. It's a wicked, dystopic Disneyland: where gene restructuring is the norm and everyone's plugged into their computers (which is where the authorities want them); where if you don't have a job, your only option is to become a welfare drone, your head in the military cyberspace... and your memory a thing of the past; where saving endangered species in micro-eco bubbles has become a fad with intellectuals and the wealthy, but children go hungry in the streets.
And where a group of eco-terrorists have banded together to stop the creation of an insidious new genetic mutation - a weapon that the government will use to rob Americans of their last scrap of freedom.
From Booklist:
Thanks to its brilliant, macabre vision of America's not-too-distant future, Ore's new novel puts her squarely in the ranks of such leading-edge sf talent as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. The twenty-first century she imagines brings--along with bioengineered nanoviruses that keep the rich perpetually young and mandatory cyberspace brain hookups for the poor (for human brains, it turns out, are cheaper than computer brains for running menial programs)--a ruthless caste of eco-terrorists whose latest strike wipes out a score of oil refineries with a miniature nuclear bomb. One terrorist named Allison, aka Mattie Higgins, is nabbed before the explosion, interrogated with high-tech brain probes, and cleverly drafted as an undercover infiltrator for the government. Her new objective: to catch an outlaw gene-tweaker who is breeding insects capable of drugging humans into pacifism. Using three ingeniously different points of view, Ore fuses slick and absorbing storytelling with sophisticated speculative science. Carl Hays
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
