Citizen Sandy

Citizen Sandy is funny. It’s serious, and it puts us ords, ordinary humans in context. This is a piece of near future fiction. The central characters are three seventeen year olds, Sandy, Nellie, and Jane, and the action follows their first week of life after leaving school. Nellie and Jane have chimp great-great-grandmothers and Sandy was genomically engineered before birth. The three of them are research outcomes of the world’s biggest weapons development company, Uso Dex, and their existence is announced to the world by the company in the opening chapters.
President Trump, yes President Trump, acts quickly to place a million dollar bounty on their heads. The population of human hybrids is not his major problem though. He’s lost an aircraft carrier and two submarines in a skirmish in the South China Sea. The book ends with the USA losing an overnight war with China after the US military is rendered inoperative by a cyber-attack, and with Mexico invading California.
However, Citizen Sandy is a book about its characters, not world affairs. Rugby league is their sport and Nellie is something of a superstar. Sandy faces extermination one day at a time. He’s a bit of a worrier but when the time for action arrives he does the right thing. Nellie is a warrior. He reckons ords are for shooting and the sooner he gets started the better. Jane is a big picture gal, and things do not look good. The three of them make a trip to New Ziland to rescue another hybrid and his son. It’s their first time seeing ords in the wild, an ord studies field trip. She’s a strange little country is New Ziland, with Prime Minister Don Key.