Frek and the Elixir

A misfit boy in the thirty-first century goes on a quest across the galaxy for an elixir to save Earth's species in this science fiction adventure.

"Imagine Frodo Baggins as a thirty-first-century human kid in a transformed Earth where bioengineering and consumerism have run amok. . . . Probably no one but Rudy Rucker could conceive of such a thing, let alone pull it off with the panache displayed in Frek and the Elixir. . . . Frek's grand adventures will leave you simultaneously enlightened, awestruck, dazed, and amused—'Ruckerized,' you might call it—by an author working at the height of his powers." —Locus

In the year 3003, the world is a biotech utopia. The tweaked plants and animals are quite wonderful, but there are only a few dozen of the old species left. Nature has been denatured by the profiteers of NuBioCom. The arbitrary, all-powerful, and mysterious Gov runs the pervasive NuBioCom and everything else on Earth.

It's up to Frek Huggins, a lad from dull, sleepy Middleville, to venture out into the galaxy to fetch an elixir to restore Earth's lost species. At least that's what a friendly alien cuttlefish tells him the elixir will do. But can you really trust aliens?

Frek is smack in the middle of a galactic struggle for humanity's freedom, accompanied by his talking dog, Wow, the down-home mutant, Gibby, and an asteroid-raised girl named Renata. The final liberation depends on freeing Frek's long-lost father with the help of a benevolent alien called the Magic Pig.

"Oh, excellent! I love books that play with physics—branes and so forth—and this is godzoon googly indeed as Frek would say, and darned exciting. . . . A splendid book." ―Diana Wynne Joneson Frek and the Elixir

"This book is Robert Heinlein's Have Spacesuit—Will Travel with the vacuum tubes replaced by wetware and all the knobs turned up to 11!" —SF Weekly