Clade

Read the book a few years back, but what I remember is that Mark Budz has probably created a whole new sub-genre - biopunk (coined by K. J. Anderson). Sure,– there are loads of scifi novels out there with elements of bioengineering of one sort or another, but Clade is soaking in the stuff, with a myriad of novel uses of technology/bioengineering, interesting new ideas and possibilities previously not encountered (at least by me).
It really is appropriate to compare it to the works of early William Gibson, except now concentrating on and thoroughly exploring the development and uses of bio-chemistry, -computing and -encryption, and generally -engineering.
In short - The novelty of ideas did it for me.

I enjoyed this story, although the end seemed a bit rushed, a bit confusing, and a bit annoying. I kept reading this with a sense of Déjà vu - in that I seemed to have read pieces of this story somewhere else. I'm not sure if its because the book is a derivative, pulling in a number of ideas from other authors, or if I had read this sometime, someplace, and totally forgot about it.

The characters while solid, were interesting, but not captivating. The writing solid, but I won't be reading this again.