Darwin’s Children: A Novel-Fast Shipping

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Greg Bear’s Nebula Award–winning novel, Darwin’s Radio, painted a chilling portraitof humankind on the threshold of a radical leap in evolution—one that would alterour species forever. Now Bear continues his provocative tale of the human race confrontedby an uncertain future, where “survival of the fittest” takes on astonishing andcontroversial new dimensions.

Eleven years have passed sinceSHEVA, an ancient retrovirus, was discovered in human DNA—a retrovirus that causedmutations in the human genome and heralded the arrival of a new wave of geneticallyenhanced humans. Now these changed children have reached adolescence . . . and facea world that is outraged about their very existence. For these special youths, possessedof remarkable, advanced traits that mark a major turning point in human development,are also ticking time bombs harboring hosts of viruses that could exterminate the“old” human race.

Fear and hatred of the virus children have made them a persecutedunderclass, quarantined by the government in special “schools,” targeted by federallysanctioned bounty hunters, and demonized by hysterical segments of the pockets of resistance have sprung up among those opposed to treating the childrenlike dangerous diseases—and who fear the worst if the government’s draconian measuresare carried to their extreme.

Scientists Kaye Lang and Mitch Rafelson are part ofthis small but determined minority. Once at the forefront of the discovery and studyof the SHEVA outbreak, they now live as virtual exiles in the Virginia suburbs withtheir daughter, Stella—a bright, inquisitive virus child who is quickly maturing,straining to break free of the protective world her parents have built around her,and eager to seek out others of her kind.

But for all their precautions, Kaye, Mitch,and Stella have not slipped below the government’s radar. The agencies fanaticallydevoted to segregating and controlling the new-breed children monitor their everymove—watching and waiting for the opportunity to strike the next blow in their escalatingwar to preserve “humankind” at any cost.