The Colony
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Eugenics, body horror, eros, and medical ethics collide is this “ambitious, provocative, and wildly inventive” dystopian satire (Publishers Weekly).
Anne Hatley is a sharp-witted and acerbic young teacher in need of a reprieve from the drudgery of work and a tedious relationship. She accepts an invitation to the nation’s largest research colony, where DNA pioneer James D. Watson hopes to “cure” Anne of a rare gene that affects her bone growth: She is missing a leg, and walks with a prosthesis. Though getting along fine, she’s being pressured to pioneer an experimental procedure, and be the first patient to generate a new limb. As Anne falls into a reluctant romance with a fellow colonist—the rakish possessor of the “suicide gene”—and consults a resurrected Charles Darwin and a dugong-bred mermaid, Anne must first come to terms with who she is, before she ever dares to decide who she can become.
“Part Wellsian dystopia, part medical mystery, part Hawthornian allegory, and part reality show, The Colony is a potent exploration of ethics in the Age of the Genome (Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special). It’s also a “hilarious, deeply moving, sexy, scary novel . . . about finding love, finding a home, finding family, and all the other doomed experiments we conduct in the hope in making a better human” (Brock Clarke, author of The Price of the Haircut).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ambitious, provocative, and wildly inventive, this debut novel from Texan poet Weise features sharp North Carolinian Anne Hatley, born with a genetic mutation that stunted her bone growth and left her with just one leg. In 2015, 25-year-old Anne (sporting a robotic limb) joins four others with gene deficiencies at the Colony, a Long Island research station, where for three months the five colonists will be paid to stay on site and provide stem cells for research efforts headed by geneticist Engel Deeter (whom Anne refers to as The Gee ). With her free time, Anne keeps in touch with her boyfriend back home in Durham, gets to know her fellow colonists (including a country-singing bartender with the suicide gene), and wonders over the possibility of new treatments in particular, her ambivalence over the opportunity to grow a flesh-and-bone leg. Though wry and funny, with thoughtful points about the relationship between modern-day gene therapy and 19th-century eugenics, Weise s narrator often keeps the reader at a distance, and the cleverly fragmented structure falters under the weight of its denouement.
