Ancestor
A Novel
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“The ancestors are out there…you have to believe me.”
From acclaimed author Scott Sigler—New York Times bestselling creator of Infected and Contagious—comes a tale of genetic experimentation’s worst nightmare come true.
Every five minutes, a transplant candidate dies while waiting for a heart, a liver, a kidney. Imagine a technology that could provide those life-saving transplant organs for a nominal fee ... and imagine what a company would do to get a monopoly on that technology.
On a remote island in the Canadian Arctic, PJ Colding leads a group of geneticists who have discovered this holy grail of medicine. By reverse-engineering the genomes of thousands of mammals, Colding's team has dialed back the evolutionary clock to re-create humankind’s common ancestor. The method? Illegal. The result? A computer-engineered living creature, an animal whose organs can be implanted in any person, and with no chance of transplant rejection.
There's just one problem: these ancestors are not the docile herd animals that Colding's team envisioned. Instead, Colding’s work has given birth to something big, something evil.
With these killer creatures on the prowl, Colding and the woman he loves must fight to survive — even as government agents close in to shut the project down, and the deep-pocketed company backing this research proves to have its own cold-blooded agenda.
As the creators become the prey in the ultimate battle for survival, Scott Sigler takes readers on the ultimate thrill-ride—and offers a chilling cautionary account of what can happen when hubris, greed, and madness drive scientific experimentation past the brink of reason.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Sigler's timely tale of science run amok, Genada, a renegade biotech firm, is striving to synthesize a proto-mammal similar to the prehistoric entity that all mammalian life sprang from as a source of transplantable organs that the human body won't reject. Pressured for results before the government shuts down her lab, the firm's lead medico, Liu Jian Den, introduces something unorthodox into the creature's genome. The result: oversized and ravenously hungry embryos that eat their way out of the bovine wombs incubating them. A small band of scientists wind up trapped with the creatures on a Lake Superior island, where they become the prey of predators that pose a threat to life as we know it. Sigler (Contagious) stuffs his story with an overabundance of speculative science, but the cinematic pacing keeps the action relentless and suspenseful. Its many pulpy flourishes notwithstanding, this is that rare horror B-movie of a thriller that compels reading until the final page. 10 15-city author tour.
