Brain Child

David Chance is a young journalist, brought up in an orphanage. Many years later he gets a message out of the blue, and a man claims to be his father. Even more surprising is that fact that his father claims to be a superhuman. There is a mystery and a terrible secret at the heart of this story, and David has to investigate while several of the superhumans killed themselves.

Although I didn't give this story 5 stars, I really enjoyed reading this book. It's about a young orphan who became a journalist, sucked into a drama of intrigue, secrecy, murder, science and gene manipulation, psychology, and unadulterated government abuse of power. The basic premise is the long term results of a government gene manipulation project which created several groups of clones with different traits. We discover early that our young journalist is the illegitmate offspring of one of these clones. A mystery surrounds the early demise of one the groups, with a secret 'legacy' being the holy grail that our protaganist seeks. He is overmatched against the people of power and intellect he is dealing with, and winds up being successful in spite of himself and the multitude of deceptions he's immersed within. I wasn't thrilled with the way the story ended, but was gripped with the action and suspense thoughout the novel. This book is worth a read.

I'm flabbergasted that this book is out of print. Just as the superbrain clone characters in his fascinating novel died without heirs, so must have George Turner. This work is like a sequel to Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD. Set 50 years into our future, our current Genome Project makes this work totally current. A bureaucratic test tube manipulation of human brain cells produces three sets of quadruplets (Group A, B & C) each with a different and genius combination of mental qualities: one computational, one artistic/creative, and one power driven. These three sets of characters grow up to become mechanistic characters who cannot fit in with the barnyard IQs that spawned and surrounded them.Although their limited ranges of intellect liken them to idiot savants, Turner uses the clones experiences like a scalpel to reveal the current foolishness of man's real life hopes to genetically engineer mankind. Turner's intellectual spokesman, clone Arthur, sums the whole field of cloning up nicely, to paraphrase: since evolution is based on death and decay so that mutations can continue to replace ineffective life forms and adapt to climatic change, extended life spans would result in species stagnation. Man's mind must evolve slowly to fit his surroundings. The manipulation of IQ genes or muscle genes will produce only misfits. Sudden genetic changes become reproductive dead ends. To prevent its misuse, Clone Arthur chooses not to trust mankind with the knowledge of genetic topology discovered by one of the power driven C group of clones.The most creative Sci-fi device was in implanting visual/audio biochips to bio-wire the eyes and ears of the narrator, David Chance, to become a human camcorder -- imprinting the sights and sounds on a molecular layer inside of his skull which could be later played back like a tape recording. This idea gives a whole new slant to where human memory might reside. The brain may be merely a recording device and consciousness only a playback of that recording.

The previous reviewer went into a great degree of detail into both the novel and its author, so I won't bore you to tears trying to recount everything. Suffice to say, the characterizations are very vivid, and the science-fictional elements, though not very detailed, are convincing. Parts of the exposition are a little underdone -- Turner was obviously more interested in the payoff than in the setup -- and I'm curious to know more about the works of art that are so captivating that they can actually hypnotize the viewer and cause them to lose track of reality. Turner obviously skimped here to let the reader's imagination design whatever work of art it wanted, but at least a little of the nature would have been handy. Still, it's a convincing and readable novel that the average reader, even a neophyto to SF, could get through quite easily. Highly recommended if you can get your hands on a copy, and I hope it comes out of the moratorium soon so I can give copies as gifts.