Change agent
"On a crowded train platform, Interpol agent Kenneth Durand feels the sting of a needle-- and his transformation begins. In 2045 Kenneth Durand leads Interpol's most effective team against genetic crime, hunting down black market labs that perform "vanity edits" on human embryos for a price. These illegal procedures augment embryos in ways that are rapidly accelerating human evolution--preying on human-trafficking victims to experiment and advance their technology. With the worlds of genetic crime and human trafficking converging, Durand and his fellow Interpol agents discover that one figure looms behind it all: Marcus Demang Wyckes, leader of a powerful and sophisticated cartel known as the Huli jing. But the Huli jing have identified Durand, too. After being forcibly dosed with a radical new change agent, Durand wakes from a coma weeks later to find he's been genetically transformed into someone else--his most wanted suspect: Wyckes. Now a fugitive, pursued through the genetic underworld by his former colleagues and the police, Durand is determined to restore his original DNA by locating the source of the mysterious--and highly valuable--change agent. But Durand hasn't anticipated just how difficult locating his enemy will be. With the technology to genetically edit the living, Wyckes and his Huli jing could be anyone and everyone--and they have plans to undermine identity itself"
Stats for nerds
9recommend
19mentions
13people
2017–2026years
47% recommend53% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Written about as sci-fi in "Change Agent" by Daniel Suarez. Which is a good book in my opinion
- re: #30 "where is my mirror life science fiction" Change Agent by Daniel Suarez
- You may -or may not, of course- enjoy Daniel Suarez's Change Agent [1]. Probably not his best but still entertaining and interesting.
- There's a bit of a callout to the handed chirality of life on Earth in Daniel Suarez' "Change Agent" https://www.amazon.com/Change-Agent-Daniel-Suarez/dp/1101984...
Like all of his books, it's a quick read that feels a bit like a movie screenplay. Fast and fun, each book of his has a well-enough-developed hook, but overall I liked Daemon and Freedom best.
- This has been done in various hard science fiction novels. One series, the name escapes me at the moment, actually has one group of engineered human warriors that are quite different mentally from normal humans but they can survive in vacuum and have some insect-like traits physically. They can just drift through vacuum and quietly attach to the hull of an enemy ship.
Then you have the Old Man's War universe where the soldiers have engineered bodies and synthetic blood that they have control over (they can explode mosquito like creatures that try to feed on them as an example).
B. V. Larson's Star Force series sees characters changed by both nano bots and specifically-grown intelligent (as a colony) vats of bacteria.
Many science fiction series involve brain backus. If I'm not mistaken Peter F. Hamilton has them in his Commonwealth Saga and the Altered Carbon books and show have it. As does the previously mentioned Old Man's War series by Scalzi.
Daniel Suarez's book (his near-future hard science fiction books are quite good) Change Agent involves lots of serious genetic engineering, including changing one's entire appearance (rather dangerously) with a virus.
I think if we can manage to stay alive long enough as a species, we will be able to at least do everything except for the nano bots and possible even those if we get some significant physics and computational breakthroughs.
As a pre-teen in the mid 1990's a friend and I wanted to turn ourselves into anthropormphic creatures not unlike the creatures in the Island of Dr. Moreau (I believe it was actually the 1996 film adaptation that gave us the idea) and figured somehow a bacteriophage could be created to alter a host at a cellular level but we figured you'd need to find a way to selectively edit genes (that now exists with CRISPR and the like), suppress the immune system to prevent death from it overreacting during the process, and control the replication rate so the body wouldn't burn up with fever or have some sort of energy issue. If a couple of bored pre-teens could think that up while playing a MUD one afternoon, someone someday is going to start really tinkering with humans at a serious scale. It's already being done by biohackers.
- If you want a good sci-fi thriller to really stoke the ol' paranoia, Change Agent is actually a pretty decent read.
https://www.amazon.com/Change-Agent-Daniel-Suarez/dp/1101984...
