by Alan Dean Foster
2010 Del Rey (Random House)

First: “Let’s riffle the dead man.” Jiminy scowled at the newly won corpse and hopped to it.
Techo neologisms on the first page: Meld, mudbud, barker, fib, flexstent
Method of selection: Look at the cover. This has to be shitty. 

Call me crazy, but this book is not shitty. I expected it to be because it appears to be cheesy sci-fi. Only now have I learned that Alan Dean Foster wrote a lot of the original Star Wars, plus The Empire Strikes Back, and the first Star Trek movie. This guy has stratospheric nerd points, and from what I can tell, he knows how to write pretty well.

Foster drops us into a scene where two futuristic thugs have killed a man and are raiding his body for artificial parts, because in the future many people, called melds, have been modified in extreme ways, some as a form of criminal punishment. But rather than present a clichéd story about normal people versus androids, the thugs themselves are also melds, one whose legs have been modified for jumping and the other who has been modified to be unusually thin. And to my surprise it’s believable and invites some critical thinking about medical ethics. I was actually interested in where the story was going, and the technical descriptions were fun instead of cumbersome. For extra fun, the setting is a post-global warming Savannah, Georgia, which is loveably specific. Even the plot synopsis on the front leaf is compelling.

Other reviews: Functional Nerds, Owlcat Mountain, Bitchy Reader, The Merry Genre Go Round Reviews

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