The Secret of Life - Softcover

McAuley, Paul

3.35

220 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 076534193X ISBN 13: 9780765341938

Publisher: Tor Science Fiction, 2002

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

2026: Something is growing in the Pacific Ocean, a strange fungus-like organism that may threaten our entire food chain. Christened "the slick," the bizarre phenomenon is quickly the subject of intense, top-secret analysis-which rapidly reveals that it contains DNA unlike that of any other life on the planet.

Where is it from? A Chinese mission to Mars is rumored to have discovered life beneath the Martian icecap, but the Chinese aren't talking. Dr. Mariella Anders is recruited by NASA to join an urgent mission to the Red Planet to find out. Brilliant and committed to science, Mariella wants only the truth, but others' motives are less noble. Faced with corporations, activist groups, and superpowers, each with their own secret agendas, Mariella is on a perilous quest for knowledge. . .and she's about the discover the high price of truth.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Paul McAuley was born in England on St George's Day 1955. He has worked as a research biologist in various universities, including Oxford and UCLA, and for six years was a lecturer in botany at St Andrews University. The first short story he ever finished was accepted by the American magazine Worlds of If, but the magazine folded before publishing it and he took this as a hint to concentrate on an academic career instead. He started writing again during a period as a resident alien in Los Angeles, and is now a full time writer.

His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and fifth, Fairyland, won the 1995 Arthur C. Clarke and John W. Campbell Awards. His other novels include Of the Fall, Eternal Light, Red Dust, Pasquale's Angel, the three books of Confluence, Child of the River, Ancients of Days, and Shrine of Stars, The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, and the forthcoming White Devils. He has also published two collections of short stories, The King of the Hill, and The Invisible Country. A Doctor Who novella, the Eye of the Tyger, is due from Telos Books in November 2003, forty years after the author was scared behind the couch by the Daleks, and a third short story collection, Little Machines will be published by PS Publishing in 2004. He lives in North London.

From Publishers Weekly:

Having completed the Books of Confluence, his much-praised trilogy set in the distant future, Clarke and Dick awards winner McAuley (Shrine of Stars) here tries his hand at a near-future, hard-science thriller. The year is 2026, and the world is still recovering from the Firstborn Crisis, a virus that threatened humanity's continued existence until it was stopped by a team led by the brilliant biologist Dr. Mariella Anders. Now, however, a new plague has appeared a strange growth in the waters of the Pacific containing genetic material that apparently originated on Mars. With two other crack scientists, Mariella is sent to the red planet, where she soon discovers that one of her colleagues, an employee of Cytex, the genetic engineering company that's partially funding the mission, knows considerably more about what's going on than she does and has motives that are far from altruistic. Indeed, it eventually becomes clear that a number of private companies, governments and radical green organizations all want a piece of the strange Martian lifeform called the Chi. The author's main targets are corporate greed and left-wing Luddism, both of which he sees as antithetical to good science. Mariella, a misfit who, despite her fame, lives in a trailer in the Arizona desert and has a passion for both piercings and rough sex, is a thorny but believable protagonist. Although not quite the equal of his Confluence novels, McAuley's latest should appeal to fans of thoughtful hard-science fiction.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.