Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

Oh, this was a good one.  Imaginative, reminded me a bit of the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld and the Unwind series by Neal Shusterman.  They take you into a different world and make you think.

There were six different stories interconnected.  There was the brother and sister, both dying, half their organs functioning.  In order for one to survive, they take the organs from one and implant in the other.  One teen lives, one dies.

There was the girl who had been in a bad accident, and had her legs, heart, lungs, multiple major parts redone with the new technology.  The new technology that wasn't quite accepted yet.  She was afraid to tell people how much of her was no longer the original.

A young boy was modified at birth to be smarter and it had unintended consequences.  His head was visibly larger than it should be, and his legs were shrunken and not working.  They modify him to be part dolphin.

A teenager finds out he has cancer that has spread all over his body.  His family decides to freeze him, until a time when a cure for his cancer has been found.  He wakes up in a horror story.  His body is modified with metal and he is a slave mining Platinum.  Sad, his parents loved him and wanted him to survive, not to become a slave.

There is the daughter of a zealous prophet.  The father is very outspoken against any body modification.  Then his wife and son die and he dies a 180 and he is telling people to modify as much as they want.

Then the last story people have modified themselves to have wings, or blue-skin, four legs, four arms, extra eyes, anything goes.  People have modified themselves so much that they seem to be another species.  There are reservations where they keep people original, and one day anyone with a modification is getting sick and dieing.

This was an interesting book.  How to go from using this new technology to save the lives of people, such as when they are in an accident, to going to using it to make slaves, and then going to where people aren't even really human anymore.