Jennifer Rahn

Nominally "hard sf" this isn't at all, other than the biology may be feasible. Mostly it's just too ambitious taking on too many concepts and not really working enough of them together. Probably not helped by coincidently reading two prior novels one featuring galactic plague and the other edited genetics. This is a poor amalgam of both. There is no explanation for the plague and it just gets thrown in as a topic now and then.

The premise is good enough, although far from my favourite trope show more - an immoral scientist deceiving his corporate bosses and labmates. If it was just for a paper, or limited bit of research fraud then it's perfectly believable but it doesn't scale well, and the author although a practising biologist has skipped the vast number of people who are involved nowadays on even quite routine lab work.

A scientist only discovers after human trials have started that her genome editing technique is insufficiently precise and leads to increased cancer rates (note this was a genuine concern about CRISPR, now significantly reduced as an issue). She's convinced that a co-worker concealed from her the prior animal studies which would have highlighted this. Rather than sacking her, her corporation exiles her (along with the coworker) to a mining colony as part of boardroom politics. The colony is using cyanide extraction to acquire gold used in galactic network connections - one of the fundamental this is not hard SF flaws. Gold is fine, breaking speed of light constraints on galactic communication is not. Meanwhile the coworker is conspiring with some ex-human cyborgs to sell an 'improved' gold extraction process.

It all gets a bit confused, we jump from character to character for limited amounts of time, none of it makes much sense, but it does pace along just about. I found everyone to be either unsympathetic or unbelievable or both. The biology was all fairly detailed at a level probably not accessible to a casual reader, and the physics and chemistry just glossed over - balance in these areas of detail is key.

Not terrible but doesn't do enough with the couple of clever ideas it has. show less

I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads. I found it pretty confusing, but it had some interesting ideas. It was hard to focus on and felt sort of patchy, the plot kept skipping around and the characters kept getting introduced but not developed.