Beyond Extinction by John Keeble is a dystopian story about evolution.
A super race of ‘numan’ a new Terran species with 96% of human DNA is taking slowly control of the economic power on Earth, confining humans (considered as animals and treated as such) to the margins of the society. The numan’s mental abilities are superior and they multiply so quickly, while the human population’s reproduction decreases exponentially. Numans themselves are evolving, through DNA manipulation: at the beginning of the story the leadership is in the hands of numan4s, while their downgrade versions live to serve them.
Jack, the main character, goes throughout a lot of changes throughout his life, finding out a new truth about himself and life at every turn of the tide.
Ditsopyan sci-fi stories are my favourite and John Keeble in Beyond Extinction excels in its writing. I felt like I couldn’t put down the book at the first line. Like all good fiction, it starts from something quite real: the idea that we’re moving fast forward extinction. And the solution to that seems even worse than the problem. You've got to get to the last page to find out if that is true or not. The book is self-conclusive but leaves a lot of doors open for a sequel, which would be quite interesting to read. It’s not hard sci-fi, as the author misses to explain how numan's DNA manipulation works, but I appreciated it even more because of this. Sometimes technical descriptions feel like a lot of info dump and I was relieved to find none of that in this story. What I found most hard about the style, but that is only a matter of personal taste, was the use of the present tense, and that's the only reason for a four stars review.
Reviewed for Readers' Favorite
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